Blogs

The Cloud has gained acceptance as a solid, reliable platform: for some things at least. There’s still resistance, especially when it comes to running critical business applications in the Cloud. That resistance hits on many points: security, performance and availability being among the critical ones. Maybe the most critical concern, though, is that the functionality itself...

Running WFM in the Cloud makes many things simpler for call centers. Here are just a few of the ways it does that. No Hardware First is the gear. There is none. You don’t have to worry about the load on your existing computing systems, you don’t have to worry about processor upgrades, increasing disk...

Today, the Cloud has matured, and the shape it’s finally taken is not exactly the same as the early hype. In this respect it’s not unlike how the web evolved. Remember the Big Phrase for the early, wide-eyed-wonder days of the web: “the level playing field”? It looked like that didn’t it? Everyone could put...

Rich and useful reporting is a must for a Workforce Management solution. The key phrase is “rich and useful.” Every WFM vendor provides some kind of reporting module, but they’re not all created equal—not all of them are either rich or useful. One of the reasons for weak reporting modules is the raw economics of...

[caption id="attachment_5818" align="alignleft" width="200"] Michael Gregorio, Director, Product Development[/caption] Contact Center Pipeline recently published a great article in their October issue about Quality Monitoring. The piece provides advice and best practices for a customer-centric quality monitoring approach, and Contact Center Pipeline solicited input from customer contact technology experts, including USAN's director of product management Michael Gregorio....

With the first half of 2015 well behind us, we wanted to share our top 5 omni-channel focused blog posts. Omni-Channel vs. Multi-Channel - the Distinction is Clear Search for “Omni-Channel vs. multichannel” and there are a lot of explanations as to what the difference is between them. Some are spot on; others are dense...

It’s been a few years now since the Cloud first appeared (not counting the Internet itself which is the largest public Cloud there is). Today, many businesses are in the Cloud, running some or all of their backend and frontend technologies that way. Call centers have been slow to make the move. Call center managers...

When it comes time to make the omnichannel a core element of a business strategy—which includes integrating both customer-facing and backend channels—a familiar obstacle can arise. There’s a balancing act involved between the business process management team and IT that can sometimes cause the omnichannel initiative to lose its footing. This wouldn’t be the first...

IVR Managed Services keeps your IVR infrastructure up and running, safe and secure, day in and day out... so you don’t have to. But Managed Services in general—and as it applies specifically to IVR—isn’t always well-understood. There are questions about what’s involved with IVR services in the first place. Questions about the economics of Managed...

It’s time to turn to the Pareto Principle (aka the 80/20 rule). In the case of WFM, it works like this: 80% of the users of a WFM solution only use 20% of its capabilities. Often, companies we talk to about Teleopti WFM ask us if our system does this or that that their system...

We’re involved right now in a very comprehensive advisory engagement, helping a global Fortune 20 company plan their omnichannel transition. It’s a great learning experience, for them and for us as well. I thought I’d share some of the insights we’ve taken away so far in a series of posts. First up: the internal sell....

If you’re thinking IVR, chances are you’re thinking of first-time installation, replacing what you have, or maximizing the return on your existing system. We’ve put together an eBook to help with all three. It’s called Press or Say Success: An IVR Buyer’s Guide for the 21st Century. It’s a no hype, no promo, no nonsense...

Brian Burke is a Gartner analyst with a focus on gamification. Back at the beginning of 2014 he wrote a short blog post that I reread the other day. I can’t say I agree with everything in it, but there’s one point that he makes that is I think vital. Gamification is not useful for...

I’ve shared a little bit in recent posts about what we uncovered, two years ago, in the ICMI survey we sponsored called Extreme Engagement in the Multichannel Contact Center. Recently American Express released a new study titled 2014 Global Customer Service Barometer. I was really surprised by how much of the results of our own...

When it comes to tranforming the call center into an omnichannel contact center, there are several basic questions everyone must answer: How do you get there? What are the first steps? Where do you focus your resources? How do you measure it? As the director of product management at USAN, I was asked to review this topic...

I’ve been looking at more recent surveys that explore the same issues of omnichannel value and adoption that we explored in our 2013 study, Extreme Engagement in the Multichannel Contact Center. There’s one piece of very bad news . . . that is also very good news. I’ve talked before about how omni-channel is not...

Freedom of speech means many things. When it comes to your IVR, it means the freedom for your customers to leave behind the telephone touchpad and speak to the system in your own words and your own language. It’s moved beyond nice to have—today it’s become an imperative for companies who want to keep up...

A workforce management solution provides the tools to help you make your agents’ home and work lives blend together better. It’s too difficult for you to do manually, or with a spreadsheet, or even with simple basic WFM functionality. But it’s a breeze, and yields quick and measurable results, for a WFM. Let’s look at...

I mentioned in an earlier post a report we sponsored with ICMI entitled "Extreme Engagement in the Multi-Channel Contact Center". If you haven’t seen the post, or want to download the 30-page research study, you can do that here. Today I want to share one of the conclusions I came to as I revisited it...

Most business owners consider IVR a necessary evil and unrecoupable expense. But this is truly a short-sighted view when one considers the possibility of generating revenue from their interactive voice system. With the right technology and approach, your customer self-service systems can become revenue generation tools that can bring demonstrable ROI. Download this white paper...