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| Author: Andy Green
The Pop-Tart Factor
It’s well known that Walmart keeps a massive amount of data on customer purchases. Walmart is also a leader in analyzing that data. Before Hurricane Ivan hit in 2004, intuition might have suggested that Walmart’s Florida stores should stock up on generators and bottled water. But the IT gurus crunched the numbers and discovered that…Pop-Tarts were most likely to sell out. Some of the same techniques used by Walmart have bottom-line benefits for customer-agent interactions. More >>

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| Author: Andy Green
Voice, Web, Mobile
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Entering data with most cell phone keypads is a quick path to finger cramping—iPhone and Blackberry users excluded. Speech recognition and search engine technology should therefore be the right ingredients for a potent application in the mobile world. One neat app I recently spotted sends a condensed Web page response to a voice query, eliminating long-winded IVR menus. It’s a glimpse into what’s ahead for contact center interactions. More >>

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| Author: Zack Taylor
Continuous Partial Attention, Cuil, Neurons, and L8r; Flattening an Interaction Near You
A spate of recent articles on the impact of technology on humans' ability to focus illuminates what many people have told me: they sense a profound change in the manner in which they acquire and process the increasingly amount of information readily available to them. More >>

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| Author: Gordon Loader
Presence – Getting from Cool to Useful
It’s official. Presence is “cool.”

You know this because kids use it all the time to chat with their friends and you hear the techies at the office go on endlessly about it.

You also know it’s cool because your parents think it’s all really very nice but aren’t especially sure what they’d do with it. So it must be cool.

Unlike consumers, where being “cool” is often king, companies will only adopt new technology when it is able to demonstrate real tangible business value. So, for them, it has to be “useful” too. More >>

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| Author: Andy Green
Back to Cost Displacement Basics
Easiest cost-saving measure to justify: replacing a manual process with a computerized system. Next easiest: upgrading software and hardware to increase scalability and performance. While it’s generally understood (with one notable objection!) that IT investments boost productivity, you won’t need complicated ROI models to justify remote agent software for your contact center. More >>

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| Author: Andy Green
Crowd vs. Agent
One of the underpinnings of crowdsourcing – the reason why it has triggered a thundering herd of start-ups – is the power of the crowd to take on tasks not well suited for computerization. Another fascinating aspect of crowdsourcing is that it can also beat the computer on its home turf of number crunching and data analysis. More >>

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| Author: Gordon Loader
The Power of Communications-Enabled Service
Relaxing on vacation in Spain a few months ago, I was struck by the way exceptional customer service still has the power to "Wow!" the customer. Now, this wow factor wasn't anything to do with the service provided by the hotel staff, although this was faultless, it had to do with the activities of an organisation based thousands of miles away, in a different time zone, in a different land. More >>

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| Author: Zack Taylor
Seeing the Light During the Downturn – Insights from the Big Apple
I had an opportunity to attend Forrester's Financial Services Forum last week in New York City. Looking back, there were three major topics that stood out in my mind. More >>

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| Author: Vickie McGovern
When the Economy Turns, Turn Up Customer Service
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Gasoline prices are at an all-time high. Food prices are also on the rise. In fact, we feel the impact of a stressed economy every day. For businesses, this means competing for consumers’ ever-shrinking wallets.

So what do you do? How do you keep consumers from passing on your business? Exceptional customer service is the answer. More >>

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| Author: Andy Green
Customer Service Economics
I took a peek at the US technology spending numbers for 1Q08. Not to worry, it’s ahead about 7% from last year at this time. Overall, analysts predict annual information communications technology spending will expand around 4% year-to-year, down from 2007. Not a great performance, but, as you may have heard, we are in a slowdown. More >>

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| Author: Zack Taylor
Back at Ya Andy
Andy, as an avid reader of your blog, I was very interested in your post regarding the challenges of random call arrival and random resource arrival in contact center operations. These well-known issues have been the bane of contact center managers’ existence since the first ACD was installed in 1974. Add multi-channel multi-segments and multiple sites, and you have big issues on your hands. More >>

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| Author: Andy Green
Taming Contact Center Variability,
Part 1

Most discussions on variability start from the unpleasant fact that we have to live with randomness. We want uniformity for business efficiency, but the world throws us variation.

In the contact center, variability comes into play at every step of the interaction—when customers call or make contact, what they ask for, and how effectively agents deliver services. While we can’t eliminate variation, there are ways to manage it. More >>

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| Author: Zack Taylor
Scenes from the Road: Part 1
Recent customer visits always both remind and amaze me how fast news travels and how hard sustained competitive advantage must be to create and deliver. More >>

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| Author: Andy Green
FYI: iPhone 3G
At today’s WWDC event, Apple made good on its promise. They’ve closed the deal on delivering a 3G version of iPhone with GPS. A more detailed live-post of the event can be found here. The takeaways: spiffy location-based services, continuing follow through on push-based, more enterprise apps, and a 3G chip that will support high-speed access just about anywhere in the world. More >>

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| Author: Andy Green
One more thing….location
If the rumors hold true, then the new iPhone will be sprouting a GPS antenna. Location information is already available in a crude form on the iPhone, and many other cell phones have GPS chips.

But with all the excitement surrounding iPhone 2.0, there is renewed interest in location-based applications and services. There are obvious advantages to having precise geo-coordinates in emergency, medical, and public safety oriented contact centers. But there’s another application of location data that makes sense. More >>

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| Author: Andy Green
VoIP Ascendance
Remember VoIP? It’s the fundamental technology behind many of the interesting contact center applications we’ve been writing about. An analyst report confirms a trend we all knew was happening in theory - digital connections from VoIP service providers are rapidly replacing consumer phone lines. Since 2005, cable and Internet providers added almost 15 million new subscribers. What does this mean for contact centers? More >>

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