Overview

Passion, Technology, and Insurance: A Formula for Growth. Really!

Posted on 28 February 2011 by

Passion, Technology, and Insurance: A Formula for Growth. Really!

 

Passion.  It’s the color in our day, the wind on our face, the music in our ears. It breeds creativity, energy, excitement, and success. But how does it fit into the insurance industry?

Businesses have been dealing with a struggling economy, flat or negative growth, high unemployment, low interest rates, and reluctance by consumers to make major purchases and investments. No news there. Insurance companies have been struggling with all of this, and have recognized the above [...]

Category: Industry Trends and news, Insurance Technology | Leave a comment

Cloudy With A Strong Chance of Green

Posted on 27 February 2011 by

2011 is already meeting up to the various industry analysts’ forecasts: it sure is getting cloudy.  That is evident with the amount of new architectures that I am designing for my prospective customers.    From an architecture design perspective, I always believed that hosted solutions evolved directly from the datacenter-centric architectures which we systems engineers have been designing since early 2005.   I always operated under the assumption that from a potential customer viewpoint, the primary reason why some customers are moving to Communications as a Software Service (CAAS) is due to the typical benefits they derived such [...]

Category: Best Practices, Business Process Automation, Contact Center, Enterprise IP Telephony, Industry Trends and news, Tech-speak | One comment

The Benefits of Cloud-based Communications for the Call Center: Reducing Up-Front Costs is Just the Beginning

Posted on 25 February 2011 by

Guest Blog by Matt Krautstrunk, Editorial Coordinator, Resource Nation.

The many benefits of cloud computing have led to a groundswell of interest in moving communications to the cloud. Increasingly, call centers are taking advantage of cloud-based communications and the benefits are clear.

Although the most obvious benefit of cloud-based communications is a reduction in up-front capital expenditures, call centers operating in the cloud are now realizing major benefits associated with faster roll-out of sophisticated features.

For instance, call centers operating in the cloud can deploy “screen-pop” applications in a matter of days rather than months. In this example alone, [...]

Category: Contact Center, Industry Trends and news | One comment

Contact Centers Today – Support for Social Media is practically nonexistent

Posted on 17 February 2011 by

I’ve been preparing for an upcoming presentation regarding Social Media in the Contact Center. As part of my presentation, I need to present on some of our customers who are using Social Media not for marketing purposes, but for customer service.

What has been my general finding?

Not many contact centers are actively supporting their customers via the channel of Social Media. Contrary to the staggering numbers, contact centers just aren’t digging into it as rapidly as you might think.

Almost 640 million users of Facebook (SocialBakers) Over 90 million tweets a day Over 156 million blog sites [...]

Category: Best Practices, Contact Center, Industry Trends and news | One comment

Bet it all on cloud or premise? Why should I have to!?

Posted on 15 February 2011 by

Have you ever put all your chips on red or black at the end of an evening of gambling? Last week at dinner a friend shared that her husband won over $20,000 doing just that. That happens to everyone, right? Not! Having worked on a consulting project in Vegas for over a year, I can tell you this is indeed the exception. The flights coming into and out of Vegas tell it all… Planes filled with raucous anticipatory celebration transpose into somber ships of what-ifs and what-the-heck-did-I-just-dos…

Companies are being asked to place similar risky bets on contact center [...]

Category: Best Practices, Contact Center, Industry Trends and news | Leave a comment

Social Media and Business Processes

Posted on 11 February 2011 by

There seems to be some controversy over what constitutes “Social BPM”. Let me say that I agree with Forrester’s assessment that social BPM is a methodology for bringing diverse voices to the discussion of how to improve processes, as described in "Is Social BPM a Methodology, a Technology, or Just a Lot of Hype?" Social BPM can serve as a means of documenting those voices – a historical snapshot that can prove valuable in later years. Or at least, after the current staff has moved on, help answer the question “What were they thinking when they designed this?”

There are [...]

Category: Best Practices, Business Process Automation, Contact Center | One comment

Business As Usual…Blizzard And All.

Posted on 4 February 2011 by

This past week, we had an “epic” storm in the mid-west with snow up to two feet in some areas and two inches of ice here in Indianapolis.  Luckily, I work for a really cool company and we can work remotely when needed so “the storm” didn’t stop any of my normal work.  The ability to work remotely saved many companies during this past week.  And yet, with all the benefits of it, many people are still not comfortable with employees, much less contact center agents, working remotely.

The pros of working remotely are huge.  Lower real estate costs [...]

Category: Best Practices, Contact Center | Leave a comment