Intraday Management: Do You Plan to React? Or React to Your Plan?
Despite the detailed planning to ensure staff levels meet customer demand on any given day, any number of events can occur and consequently add additional obstacles for workforce managers. These unexpected events include anything from severe weather that prevents agents from commuting to work, to a product recall that drastically increases the number of customer calls for an extended period of time.

TMC Congratulates CRM Excellence Award Winners
Gartner, meanwhile, reports that there are 110 CRM applications in the Apple App Store and 47 in the Android App Store. Mobile CRM will grow 500 percent by 2014. Social CRM will reach $1 billion in worldwide sales by the end of 2012, making up 8 percent of CRM spending this year. And half of all CRM applications will be web-based by 2016.

Low-Profile Touchpoints can Deliver Big Customer Loyalty Gains
Customer support, contract negotiations, billing, on-boarding, post-sales support - these are the lunchpail customer touchpoints. They lack the glitz and glamour of sales, advertising and marketing, but they weigh just as heavily in your image.

Belgacom Combines Social Media and Workflow to Deliver Service with Character
Eva has been successfully helping customers solve problems or queries online for years. Now with social media emerging as the new method for customers to address their concerns, Belgacom was faced with the challenge of learning how to engage these customers across several social media channels, while continuing to utilize Eva as the face of its customer service program. Maintaining the same, great customer experience was paramount.

A Better Predictive Dialer/Call Center Solution: MDLsolutions Delivers on Affordability, Ease-of-Use & Support
This predictive dialer/call center solution is a Windows/software-based SIP/VoIP dialer/call center solution that runs on a SQL database, in combination with the Windows/software based 3CX IP PBX, to enable businesses to keep in contact with their clients effectively; for call centers of various sizes, or to serve as a stand-alone automated dialer. It scales easily from four to 500 agents.

Making the Move to Mobile
It is no secret that mobile is a tremendous opportunity for customer engagement. Almost every study conducted in 2012 concluded that brands want to do more with mobile. While the hype and hope is there, uncertainty lingers about exactly how to execute a mobile customer engagement strategy and what the impact of a successful campaign looks and feels like.

Two Birds with One Stone: Cloud-based Contact Centers Elevate CE, Agent Productivity
As customers now expect easy access to information and faster problem resolution via a growing number of channels, contact center leaders need an efficient way to attain technology updates and ensure the best service is given. The powerful combination of a flexible IT infrastructure with a dynamic business strategy might sound overwhelming, but it is a necessary component for companies to satisfy these demanding, unique, and increasingly mobile customers.

WebRTC Will Deliver a Seamless Customer Experience
Organizations tend to have a website group and a contact center group. But, in the future, it is very likely that many companies will move to integrate the two in an effort to deliver a better customer experience while at the same time lowering their costs. WebRTC is expected to be a linchpin in bringing all this together.

Kunnect Does Hosted Contact Center Your Way
Kunnect wants to make it easier for organizations in a variety of industries to adopt its solutions on their own terms, so it has taken steps to make its hosted contact center offer more flexible and simple to implement.

General Store Increases Revenue with Loyalty and Gift Card Solutions
We noticed the huge growth in gift card sales for retailers across the country. Upon implementation of the Epicor Gift Card solution, the Klem's management team was able to efficiently implement the move from paper gift certificates to gift cards as a way to increase revenue and provide a loyalty program to customers with in-store rewards.

Pay It Forward: Doing Good While Building Brand
Advances in transportation and communications over the years have made people and organizations - whether across a state or on the other side of the world - more easily accessible. And the recent social networking phenomenon has allowed communities of interest to come together like never before.

TMC Presents Top 50 Teleservices Providers
At the start of the second quarter of each year since 1986, TMC has delivered its Top 50 Teleservices Agency Ranking lists. In this issue, we are pleased to present the 28th edition, listing the top teleservices firms in the world.

5 Ways to Increase Lead Generation Value
Increasingly complex interconnections, an ever-growing number of players and non transparent activities have resulted in a situation where fraud and lead recycling are common practice. As lead quality decreases, lead pricing declines, resulting in an overall deterioration of the value of the lead gen space. Nevertheless, many marketers have their minds set on finding strategic and persistent methods and strategies to increase lead generation values and to re-introduce practices that benefit the lead gen industry. To achieve this, many small improvements can have tremendous positive impacts on lead gen quality.

Power Dialer: Five9 Gives Muscle to DirectBuy San Diego's Outbound Calling
DirectBuy was founded in 1971 to offer consumers a different, less expensive way to buy home products and services. Based in Merrillville, Ind., the company has 160 showrooms across the U.S. and Canada. Members pay a fee to join, which allows them to buy merchandise directly from 700 manufacturers and suppliers while avoiding the price markups typically charged by retailers. Products include home furnishings, home improvement items, outdoor furnishings, flooring, and other accessories.

Beyond Call Tracking: Call Marketing Automation Delivers the ROI
These developments have increased the importance of call marketing for advertisers. So, for businesses that talk to their customers on the phone, call tracking is now an essential capability. It allows marketers to properly attribute calls and marketing campaigns to a lead source, providing essential business intelligence.

Talking with Servion
CUSTOMER magazine recently spoke with Shankaran Nair, president of corporate strategy at Servion, about trends and developments in the customer experience arena. Here's an excerpt of that conversation.

Thinking Outside the Office: Virtual Model Opens New Opportunities for Specialized Service
Customers serving customers -- it's one of the biggest advantages of outsourcing to a company that operates within a virtual environment. While it is true that virtual call centers provide cost savings, efficiency and flexibility not found in traditional brick-and-mortar centers, it is their unique ability to align the skills of call taking contractor with the company programs they service that has convinced so many companies to adopt the outsourced virtual model.

Conquering Channel Chaos
Faced as we are with a wealth of customer communications channels, it's very easy for them to get away from us. For many of us, it's time to take a deep breath and get control of channel chaos. Here are a few tips to help you connect better with your customers across - and between -channels.

New Demands for Service Excellence Push Companies to Rethink Support
Something radical is happening. As entrepreneur Marc Andreessen says, software is eating the world. From Netflix and Hulu to home security and heating systems, from smog tests to doctor's blood tests, the globe is being invaded by an entirely wired and programmed flow of easily accessible data and online decision-making tools. As software bites off greater chunks of work and home, there's a corresponding hunger for tech support. Proliferating programs and cloud-connected devices cry out for the helping hand of IT help desks and customer contact centers. Employees and customers expect and depend on companies to make their software, programs and apps work and keep working

TMC Announces MVP Quality Award Winners
CUSTOMER magazine and TMC proudly present the MVP Quality Awards. Though the technology they have at their disposal continues to evolve, these outsourcers represent the best of their community, leveraging the latest trends to set new standards for service excellence, customer care and support, without leaving behind their proven dedication to excellence in human interaction.

Utilizing Intelligent Call Routing for High-Interest Level Consumers
Direct response callers are different from most call-in consumers. They have a high level of interest in the product based on what they've seen, read or heard - certainly enough to compel them to pick up the phone. But, unlike traditional phone product orders, a direct response sale is not a given. While some people may arrive in your call center ready to buy, most require additional information and some sales finesse before they decide to seal the deal.

Fonolo Helps Credit Union's Mobile App Offer Enhanced Call Center Experience
Mobile apps have become must-have components for companies in the financial space. Most large and mid-size banks already have very full-featured mobile apps. But, sadly, many of them drop the ball when it comes to connecting with a live agent. Their Contact Us page does nothing more than display a phone number. This forces a customer who needs to speak to an agent to start over. What if that customer was about to apply for a loan? Chances are, he'll put his phone back in his pocket and that revenue opportunity is gone. That risk can be remedied by having a smarter connection to the call center.

Mapping the Customer Journey: Are Marketers Taking the Wrong Approach?
In the last couple of years, mapping the customer journey has become a priority for many marketers. With marketing automation technologies, new communication channels and social media, customer interactions have multiplied tenfold. Unfortunately, as many marketers attempt to map the customer's journey from beginning to end, the process has become everything but linear.

Use Outbound to Start Conversations With Your Customers
According to research sources, outbound customer service implementations are growing by leaps and bounds. From outbound calls for prescription refills to flight update notifications via text to Twitter and Facebook outage updates, outbound can be a valuable tool no matter what your industry. And outbound doesn't just help companies avoid costs, it can help them grow revenue. In the case of pharmacies, customers usually wait several days before refilling prescriptions. But calling customers one to two days before the expected renewal helps pharmacies recapture lost revenues.

Bringing the Alfresco Brand to the World
As companies go global, they are faced with new content challenges. How should a brand interact with foreign audiences who are using their services, or want to, but don't speak English? Companies have tried to address the challenge by using technology that can help manage their global presence as they expand into foreign markets.

Measuring Mobile Customer Experience Satisfaction: ABC Case Study Offers a View into How it Can Be Done
Delivering a high-quality customer experience is more important than ever. With the rise of the Internet and now with a surge in mobile users, it's easier and less costly than ever for customers to switch brands. In the past, consumers needed to travel to purchase alternatives - creating inconvenience loyalty, but now they can change brands with a few mouse clicks or finger taps.

How to Manage the Risks to Your Business and Customers After Hackers Attack
Damages caused by hacking attacks are not only technical headaches, but they can also cause tension between the company and its customers. This tension can be especially acute in cases where the hacked company offers a hosted service to its customers, and that service's functions are at risk. Hackers understand how damaging their threats can be and the importance that firms will place on meeting customer needs above nearly all other concerns. Despite the risks, companies can employ several best practices to become a less inviting target to hackers and to minimize the damages after a threat.

CGS Focuses on Customer Solutions, Growth
CGS President and CEO Phil Friedman came to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union by way of Italy in 1976. Along the way he experienced a wonderful thing called pizza, and he cooked up an idea to bring the food to the American public. What he didn't know was that pizza already had arrived on U.S. shores years earlier.

Serving Up Solutions: Real-Time Information Enables Guidance for Agent Improvement and More
But regardless of who is handling a customer interaction when a customer expresses the desire to drop your service or product, you want ensure that representative has all the tools they need to make the best attempt at keeping the customer from jumping ship.

'Help Desk' Services For Mobile UC Customer Support
Consumers really want to do things by themselves as much as possible. This was reflected in a recent market study by Frost & Sullivan analysts, showing that "65 percent of consumers are now demanding self-service options around the clock." That should not be a big surprise, because who really wants to wait to talk to someone first before looking at information or performing a business transaction. It also drove consumers to buy their own home PCs to access web portals and exploit e-mail communications with people and online self-service applications.

InfoSys Addresses New Customer Services Challenges with AssistEdge
Outsourcing and consulting giant Infosys recently took the wraps off a new solution called AssistEdge, which aims to improve the overall customer experience by addressing contact center agent productivity and integrating service-related activities across all channels.

AudioCodes Puts Together One Voice for Lync
The AudioCodes One Voice for Lync puts all of the company's voice-based UC hardware, as well as professional services and support, under one umbrella, explains Alan Percy, director of market development.

The Social Media Divide: Contact Centers Need to Stake their Claim on the Social Frontier
Sure, marketing folks are communicating their messages on social media - and may be listening and learning from Facebook, Twitter and other social media to better understand what consumers like and don't like. But because marketing departments typically take ownership of social media, customer service operations like contact centers often have little if any role in the social media play.

So You Can Access Your Organization's Social Media Data - Now What?
Businesses rely significantly on social media to support sales, marketing and customer support goals. An organization's social channels allow it to reach customers instantly, understand customer needs, gauge brand sentiment, see how it compares competitively and much more. Many business professionals are gaining greater access to their company's social data but are not quite sure what to do with it. If you are among them, implementing social CRM processes can help you organize, analyze and act upon social data to achieve revenue-generating benefits.

Yours, Mine and Ours: Leveraging the Social Graph for Target Marketing
Facebook earlier this year announced that it now allows individual users the ability to do social search on Open Graph information. Open Graph is all the information Facebook collects on the people who use its social networking site; that can include personal information like a name or an e-mail, and/or the user interests, with whom a person is connected, brands he or she "likes", and even pictures posted.

CUSTOMER Recognizes Product of the Year Award Winners
In the past, it was enough simply to have a call center to take orders and answer customer inquiries, a telemarketing effort to reach out to prospects by phone, and some folks available to read and respond to customer letters .

Resolutions for 2013
Although I'm not one to make personal New Year's resolutions, I've found that beginning the year with some goals in mind for my professional life often helps focus my efforts and priorities. Here are my top customer-focused priorities for 2013. Pick one or all - each of them can truly make a difference in your customers' experiences and help build loyal relationships.

What Marriage and Outsourcing Have in Common
Like a marriage, outsourcing relationships involve two parties working together to build a successful and sustainable partnership, starting with a solid foundation. In 2011, the U.S. $60-billion global outsourcing market witnessed the highest level of outsourcing transaction activity in North America and the U.K. since 2007.

Hurricane Sandy's Reminder about Business Continuity
Contact centers are in the business of communicating, so we must also be in the business of communicating during a crisis like Hurricane Sandy. To help you prepare, we suggest the following steps for creating an effective disaster contingency plan for your contact center.

Report Shines New Light on Key Factors Affecting Customer Management
Recently, my company, Dimension Data, a global IT service and solution provider, released its 15th annual Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report, entitled, "Transforming Customer Management." Providing insightful information from our clients, peers and industry colleagues, the 2012 report summarizes the survey results of 637 companies from 72 countries - including over 100 respondents from North America.

How the Tablet is Shifting Online Shopping Behavior
The rapid adoption of the smartphone from 2007 onward has caused a new set of challenges to retailers, which as a result had to optimize their websites for the exponentially growing number of people trying to access their sites from devices with much smaller screen sizes. Just as they got to grips with the trial and error of how to create a mobile website their customers actually found easy to use and can potentially purchase from, Steve Jobs launched the iPad, which instantly captured the hearts and minds of the public and caused a new challenge for online retailers.

The Changing Face of Customer Service
Five years ago, 51 percent of respondents named landline telephone customer support as their most preferred channel. That number has declined to 19 percent today. What has risen up as preferred channels in the last five years? You can probably guess: e-mail and websites.

A Breakthrough in Call Recording: RecordingMagic Advances Affordability, Manageability and Scalability
If you're looking for an exceptionally cost-effective call recording solution for a large, multi-location enterprise, a medium-sized call center, a small home office or something in between, stop looking. VirtualLogger LLC combines the power of the cloud with plug computing to deliver scalable, full-featured call recording at an unprecedented price point.

How to Make Your Business More Efficient, Profitable via Address Data Cleansing and LBS
Customer contact databases are both one of the biggest boons and one the biggest headaches for customer service and marketing managers at organizations around the world. These databases are invaluable tools for capturing, making available and storing data for call center, order entry, shipping and logistics, and other key business applications.

On-Hold Messaging Delivery for the Digital Telephony Age
The colossal Cisco Unified CallManager phone system manual doesn't allot much space for on-hold messaging. It is simply one feature in a massive universe from the Cisco perspective. Yet on-hold messaging is a significant piece of the puzzle for businesses that use the application as a marketing component. The On Hold Messaging Association quotes sources stating that 70 percent of callers get put on hold.

How to Realize the Benefits of Trigger-Based Marketing
Whether you're a mom-and-pop shop on the corner, or an international retail conglomerate, the old saying holds true: "People do business with the people they know, like and trust." Success is contingent on building relationships with your customers.

Smarter Video: The Intersection of Customer Experience, Big Data and Personalization
A brand's knowledge of individual customer preferences is critical for nurturing long-term relationships. This ensures an optimal customer experience, which is becoming a strategic imperative for companies to differentiate themselves and maximize acquisition, retention and growth.

Benefitting from Call Recording and Screen Capture, and Avoiding Added PCI Compliance Requirements in the Process
Contact centers know the value of call and screen capture recordings. They use recordings so contact center agents and their managers can review them for training, improved efficiency, resolving customer issues and documenting legal compliance.

Salesforce Service Cloud Helps Businesses Transform the Customer Experience
Customer service used to be all about phone conversations and face-to-face interactions, but today many people prefer to communicate with the companies with which they do business via social media, mobile communications, or whatever mode or device is the most convenient at a given time.

Desk.com Helps Small Teams and Growing Businesses Deliver on the Promise of Social Customer Service
A social revolution is at hand. But it's probably not what you're thinking. What we're looking at here is an uprising in social media usage. And it's affecting how customers talk about and want to interact with businesses.

The Value of First Impressions: How Brand Ambassadors Enhance Customer Relationships with One Phone Call
Most companies know the key to long-term growth is generating repeat business. Repeat customers mean greater brand loyalty, higher referrals and a steady stream of sales. Adding a new customer also costs considerably more than retaining an existing one.

New Opportunities in Mobile Marketing
Using SMS to deliver mobile campaigns limits marketers to a 160 character maximum allowed per message. All marketers that use text messaging with their customers know how difficult it is to create an effective campaign to engage consumers when using such a limited plain text.

Customer Services Needs Multi-Persona Mobile Apps
It's getting very obvious that it is consumer BYOD that is driving all kinds of customer service activities to UC-enabled, mobile, self-service applications accessible in public or private clouds. Whether the mobile application servers are located on premises or on a cloud service is also becoming a business option The bottom line is that mobile apps are shifting the emphasis of UC ROI away from just internal collaboration benefits to include servicing all mobile end users (customers, employees), who can now be more accessible to automated business applications and to flexible, multi-modal communications with people (person-to-person).

New Study Addresses CRM in the Smartphone Age
The results of a benchmark study conducted by The Adcom Group for Virtual Hold Technology are in. They shed light on mobile app use and the need to improve the ease of transition from self-service in mobile apps to live human help.

10 Things Your Customers Hate About Doing Business with You (And what you can do about them)
In the course of over 20 years working in contact centers and customer experience, I've done my share of focus groups and usability tests. And when I'm at a cocktail party as I was last night and people find out what I do, they're always ready to tell me about a recent bad experience or their customer service pet peeves. Here's what I've been hearing.

Speaking My Language: TransPerfect Bridges the Communications Gap with Interpreter Services
A non-descript office park in Tempe, Ariz., houses the 150-seat contact center run by a company called TransPerfect. An IKEA sits across the street, but, beyond that, there's not a lot of international flare to speak of in the area. However, inside the walls of TransPerfect are interpreters who may be communicating in any of more than 170 languages.

How to Optimize Customer Support for the Holiday Season
The holiday season is upon us. While it's a joyous time for most of us, it's also the busiest time for online stores, which are expecting the biggest shopping season in the year. If you run an online store that sells gifts, food, decoration materials or any other holiday items, make sure to prepare your customer support for the inevitable flurry of extra shoppers. Customer service can make a huge difference to stressed-out holiday shoppers, so it pays to keep a few tips in mind.

Leveraging Technology for Remote Agents
The economic pressures of the last few years have forced businesses to focus on cost reduction, often ahead of everything else. At the same time, customers have continued to demand "more and faster," meaning added channels, freedom from IVRs, and increased self-service calls to action, given the premium placed on time-to-service.

Tips on How to Make E-Mail Promotions More Personalized & Successful
More companies are beginning to send out targeted offers, but a lot of these efforts would probably be a lot more successful if the promotions were better timed and packaged for consumption on smartphones.

Personalized Service 2.0: Businesses Try to Bring the Customer Experience Full Circle
Delivering a personalized experience is a widely circulated concept these days. Everybody is talking about how businesses can and should leverage big data and otherwise cater to customers and prospects to build brand loyalty and expand average revenue per user. But while conventional wisdom indicates that organizations that provide such experiences stand to benefit handsomely, it can be difficult to figure out just exactly how to go about all this.

Transforming a Measurement Program into a Meaningful Program: 8 Great 'Next Steps'
Post call IVR surveying and customer feedback management has been making its way into the customer experience process now for a few years. At latest count, roughly 6.5 percent of all contact centers globally have adopted the technology. And while an industry-wide ROI benchmark has yet to be established, it's safe to say a majority of centers that have implemented post call survey practices thus far have benefitted by way of customer satisfaction improvement.

Using Speech Analytics to Drive a Better Customer Experience
Speech analytics is a complex, sophisticated and frequently pricey application that purports to offer great results in terms of contact center performance and a better customer experience. And recent research shows speech analytics is gaining traction in contact centers. According to DMG Consulting, the market has grown to over 3,000 implementations in 2011 from a base of approximately 25 in 2004. So what problems are organizations tackling with speech analytics?

Latin America: A New Land of Opportunity for Outsourcing
When most people think about outsourcing, the two prominent locations that come to mind are India and the Philippines. India's BPO sector continues to grow at an astounding rate, with more than 2.77 million employed in the country overall, only to be outdone by the new leader in outsourcing: The Philippines. However, experts have been looking toward Latin America as the new land of opportunity. Countries such as Nicaragua Panama, Colombia and Brazil are positioned as the future venue for BPO. With the combined factors of proximity and cultural affinity to the United States, there doesn't appear to be a better location for BPO practices.

Cloud vs. CPE-based Contact Centers: How to Decide which is the Best Match for You
Having technology provided and managed by a third-party away from a customer's premises is not a new idea, with service bureau and application service providers being around for many years. That cloud-based contact center solutions are now hot is down to a mixture of factors, including the recession's negative effect on capital investment, the increasing functionality of hosted applications, and the proven success and general acceptance of cloud-based solutions, particularly those in the CRM sphere. Additionally, the stranglehold that incumbent customer premises equipment telephony providers had on the industry has been loosened by the advent of IP and more open systems, with the net result being a greater choice of solution providers.

Transforming Customer Care via Big Data
Big data, put simply, refers to datasets that are so large and diverse that traditional data management and analytics tools are incapable of handling them. Big data can be either structured or unstructured, which is important because only about 10 percent of all enterprise data is structured and formatted to cleanly fit into databases and logical organization schema.

How to Engage Your Generation Y Call Center Agents
For anyone tasked with managing a call center, recruiting the right talent is among the primary goals. When the center experiences attrition, management faces the high costs of finding, hiring and training replacement agents. And, as it takes time for new workers to fully orient themselves to the job and the work environment, the call center may not provide the desired level of service to customers, which can impact business results.

How to Retain Customers with Real-Time Engagement
Customer churn is by no means unique to the telecommunications industry. But unlike other industries, success in the telecommunications business is nearly defined by it. In fact, the churn rate is the focal point for most quarterly reviews and reports. What is also particular to this industry is that a greater percentage of customers switch to other providers due to dissatisfaction with customer service - not price, packages or offerings.

Communications Service Providers Target Businesses with Big Data Analytics
Telephone and cable TV companies have long been in the business of moving information. Now many of these network operators are bringing to market solutions to help marketing folks at the businesses they serve more effectively leverage information to reach and upsell customers.

It's Time to Accept Responsibility for Your IVR
Most companies are focusing on adding channels to their customer support, such as live chat, social media and smartphone apps, while simultaneously adding features to enhance their contact centers, such as click-to-call or allowing premium status callers direct access to a live agent (as we've seen with the Chase Sapphire Preferred credit card).

TMC's CUSTOMER Magazine Announces Winners of the 2012 TMC Social Business Award
The TMC Social Business Award honors vendors that have demonstrated innovation, unique capabilities, and significant contributions toward enabling and improving social channel interactions.

Media Call Center Delivers Expansive Functionality at an Affordable Price
Selecting a restaurant based on past preferences, an advertisement, or a well-known brand can work out just fine. But acting on a recommendation from someone you know and trust can be your entree into a new and wonderful experience. Word of mouth is also a pretty great way to find new solutions for your business.

Is Knowledge Management the Next Frontier in Customer Support?
Too often, people think of KM only as technology that manages data, information and electronic files, sometimes referred to as data warehousing. But it's really a managed process to harness, develop and make available a sustainable base of knowledge that's used across the organization - and with your customers. It becomes a living, breathing asset.

Taking the Pain Out of Change: Five Tests to Ensure Contact Center Performance
Optimum contact center performance is essential for satisfying the needs of today's always-on customers, but it can be difficult to maintain in the face of constant change. Unfortunately, these changes - whether they include the introduction of a new service or an upgrade to existing technologies - must be made in highly complex, multi-vendor environments where network issues are extremely difficult to detect and diagnose.

The Most Popular CRM Customization Equals Deeper Integration
Customer relationship management is one of the most important investments a business can make in today's unpredictable environment. According to a study conducted by Gartner Research, chief information officers ranked CRM in their top 10 technology priorities for 2012, a major jump from its ranking in 2011. With rules and regulations becoming stricter, and the economy remaining rocky, companies must differentiate themselves by the way they manage their customer and prospect experiences.

Mobile Applications Shift to Function Over Fun
Early applications for mobile novices did not yet grasp the transformative power of mobile technologies and how quickly users would adopt and demand more advanced solutions. In the early stages, many developers participated in a gold rush of applications, where the newness of the entire app realm allowed developers to earn substantial sums quickly. The real-world usefulness of the app was not always important; the fact that it existed and was able to excite enough users was enough. Early applications included simple games, rudimentary to-do lists, and alarm clock applications that were mainly novelties designed to attract only short-term users.

How to Make Your Website Truly Useful and Valuable
We've all been there. You're on a website browsing and maybe hoping to buy a product or service, and you leave before finalizing a transaction either because you didn't find what you were looking for or because you couldn't figure out how to buy the thing.

Marketing Mojo: New Tools Help Businesses Better Identify & Connect with Prospects, Customers
The shotgun approach to customer targeting is so passe. Businesses today increasingly want to use tools and technologies that enable them to identify and focus as much as possible on their particular interest groups, and to cater to their unique needs. Among the tools and services that are enabling companies to do that are lifecycle maps, mobile messaging, on-demand mobile ad buying and analytics solutions, and new CRM offerings.

CUSTOMER Introduces TMC Labs Innovation Awards - Part 2
This year marks the thirteenth installment of the prestigious TMC Labs Innovation Awards, for which TMC Labs analyzes dozens of applications to find the most unique and innovative products.

Excelling at Mobile Customer Service
Smartphones and mobile applications have given consumers a whole new way to interact with businesses. Call it newfound freedom and convenience. For businesses themselves, the mobile approach provides a way to serve customers better and - if done correctly - to form stronger, more lasting relationships. But that's the problem. Many businesses are still struggling to determine how best to use tools such as mobile apps to their advantage.

Nothing Personal, But It Isn't About You
Don Brown and Interactive Intelligence's Quest to Turn Customer Service into a Competitive Weapon

Seven Strategies to Protect Customer Identities in a Work-at-Home Environment
It is no secret that landing a job in today's tough economic times is difficult. People often must commute many miles because their local community has limited opportunities.

Real-Time Personalization Helps Optimize Customer Experience
Our public schools are designed to educate the masses. Every classroom is filled with students who each learn at their own pace - some catch on quickly, others need a little more time, but most tend to fall somewhere in the middle. Teachers generally pace their lessons to meet the needs of the middle group of students so the entire class can move forward as efficiently as possible.

Cloud-Based IVR Gives Customers a Voice
Ever press zero or say "operator" rather than enduring the maze of menu choices when calling your bank or airline? Every time a customer escapes an interactive voice response system, that organization's bottom line takes a hit. At a mid-size bank, for example, even 1 percent of additional callers that bail out of IVR can raise customer care costs by $2-3 million.

Dos and Don'ts for Social Customer Service
So your contact center has taken the plunge into social media - congratulations! A few months ago, I outlined guidelines for social service, including strategy, policies, operations and metrics. All these things make the difference between just throwing people at social service and having an effective and professional social service team. But what are some key dos and don'ts for day-to-day customer social service?

Proximity Marketing is Transforming the Customer Experience
As technology capabilities have advanced and permeated more and more facets of our lives, the line between digital and physical experiences has blurred. So has the border between physical and digital marketing channels. How will this affect the customer experience?

M2M Data, Mobile, Speech Technologies Help Agero Keep Customer Service on Track
This article originally appeared in the Sept. issue of CUSTOMER magazine. Agero is a company with three lines of business: roadside assistance, claims management services for auto insurance carriers, and connected vehicle services for automobile manufacturers.

The Contact Center is Here to Stay
While the explosion and diversity of customer service channels have changed our approach to customer care over the past decade, the recent NICE Consumer Channel Preference Survey reveals that while consumers do exercise a wide range of channels, our industry sees them turning to, on average, almost six different channels for contacting service providers.

The Intersection of Enterprise Social and Automation
Enterprise social, combined with new approaches to knowledge management and collaboration, are poised to change the shape of customer care for years to come.

Four Innovations in the Multi-Billion Dollar Market of Customer Support
If there's one thing everyone can agree on it's that call centers are no fun. No fun for consumers and no fun for agents that have to deal with angry people all day and night.

Cloud-Based Contact Center: Does it Make Sense for Your Business?
There's no question the cloud gives contact centers and businesses a viable option for communications. Yet in deciding between the cloud and a premises-based solution, some businesses are still unsure which option is best for them. Here are some of the questions being asked by contact center decision makers, with answers from two communications industry authorities.

The Importance of a Unified Multi-channel Contact Center
Customers have become far more demanding in this new real-time, always-connected world. They expect fast results. They want access to information and assistance when and how it's most convenient for them. And they're not afraid to use social media to make their voices heard.

Melissa Data Verifies that Customer Information Works to Your Advantage
There's a lot of talk these days about the value organizations can reap from business analytics. But if that data isn't accurate, it doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

Angel Helps Organizations Improve their Customer Experience
Organizations that want to expand and elevate their customer experience are embracing multichannel solutions that frequently integrate mobile into the mix. Leveraging analytics to better understand and deliver to customers is also a growing trend in this space. Businesses seeking solutions on these fronts can find a forward-thinking and proven partner in Angel.

How to Achieve a Greater ROI in a Challenging Economic Market
During these tough economic times, it's not enough for a direct marketing partner to just answer the calls or send mass mailings; it takes creativity to generate ROI. Today, more than ever it's critical for a company to partner with a company that has the ability to use Business Intelligence and technology when managing customer retention, acquisition and customer service programs to generate a greater ROI for your marketing dollar.

Elevating Customer Care via the Cloud
This article originally appeared in the Sept. issue of CUSTOMER magazine. CUSTOMER magazine recently spoke with Marty Beard, president and CEO at LiveOps, about how cloud-enabled innovation and the social and mobile revolutions are transforming LiveOps.

CUSTOMER Announces Winners of the TMC Labs Innovation Awards
This year marks the 13th installment of the prestigious TMC Labs Innovation Awards, for which TMC Labs analyzes dozens of applicants to find the most innovative products. Optimization of business processes and improving customer service are core goals of every business, but especially contact centers, which are constantly looking to increase agent productivity, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction.

The New CUSTOMER:Multi-channel, Mobile & Social Converge to Redefine Business
The wealth of online content, the popularity of the smartphone, and the widespread use and unpredictable possibilities of social media have turned marketing, sales and support upside down - or, perhaps more accurately, downside up.

Omnicom Group Has Returned 28.7% Since SmarTrend Recommendation (OMC)

SmarTrend Watching for Potential Rebound in Shares of salesforce.com After 1.19% Loss

Watch for salesforce.com to Potentially Rebound After Falling 1.19% Yesterday

TrackResults nearing two million page views per month

8x8, Inc. Announces Financial Results for Fourth Quarter and Full-Year Fiscal 2013