Cloud-based Contact Center / Communications as a Service (CaaS)

A Practical Guide to Innovating with the Cloud: A corporate level view
The cloud is helping companies of all kinds find inventive new ways to conduct organizational operations and serve customers. True innovation via the cloud, however, involves integrating cloud technologies into services for business users, and building scalable processes for provisioning and support. It requires a new mindset toward IT and the business, along with the willingness to take risks.

A Practical Guide to Understanding if the Cloud is Right for Your Small Contact Center: What to consider and how to move forward
It’s an increasingly common question for contact centers of 50 agents or fewer: Is the cloud a positive alternative? The answer, of course, depends on key business and technology priorities. But it also depends on finding creative, cost-effective cloud solutions designed for the small center, from a cloud provider with a proven record of contact center functionality and innovation. Read how your small contact center can make the cloud the great competitive equalizer.

A Practical Guide to Jumpstarting Your Contact Center with Communications as a Service (CaaS)
Why are executives turning to the CaaS model for their contact center? Let’s see. Minimal startup costs and a manageable monthly cost structure, advanced applications like workforce management and outbound dialing, and the flexibility they need to create and maintain a dynamic business environment. Learn what else CaaS does, and just how easy it is to get started.

The Contact Center

A Practical Guide to Skills-based Routing
In a contact center, justifying a technology investment comes down to understanding the solution’s applicability and how it can benefit agents, customers, and the business as a whole. Skills-based routing is a technology that can lend to improved business performance by improving agent performance and the customer experience. Learn how to implement a skills-based routing solution wisely, and how to maximize it using best practices.

A Practical Guide to Infrastructure Consolidation Considerations
Lower costs and greater efficiency have long been common refrains in IT, and will continue to be. But as businesses turn to IT to launch new products and deliver services, IT leaders must provision a more versatile voice and data infrastructure to meet these objectives, at the business’s pace. Consolidating multi-point infrastructures can help, and weighing some key considerations can help ensure a cost-effective and successful consolidation roadmap. Learn what those key considerations are.

A Practical Guide to Making SMS a Valuable Media Channel for Business
When Short Message Service is referred to by any of its more recognized given names — text messaging, texting, mobile messaging, etc. — it’s readily seen as a wireless tool for social interactions and checking the weather. Yet as texting volumes threaten to surpass those of email and voice, the value of SMS in the enterprise and the contact center has become increasingly magnified.

A Practical Guide to The Effective Use of Automated Dialing in Collections
Collections agents are only successful when they’re talking to people. However, the low contact rates of manual dialing can leave agents talking to live persons less than 15 minutes every hour. Learn how an automated dialer solution and best practices can improve contact success and increase agent productivity levels to 45 to 55 minutes each hour.

A Practical Guide to Measuring and Managing Shrinkage in the Contact Center
Measuring and managing shrinkage is a core piece of the workforce management process. When properly implemented, it can assist contact center leaders in achieving service level goals and minimizing unproductive agent time. In this guide, read how to measure shrinkage, the steps to setting attainable shrinkage goals, managing with shrinkage in mind and how to leverage shrinkage in your corporate culture

A Practical Guide to Measuring Customer Satisfaction in the Contact Center
The economy, competition, survival… in most contact centers, customer satisfaction has become paramount. Read why post-call IVR surveys are an effective low-cost method for measuring your customers’ satisfaction, and how 10 best practices based on the American Customer Satisfaction Index™ (ACSI) published annually by the University of Michigan significantly improve the make-up of a survey and the reliability and usability of survey data.

Unified Communications

A Practical Guide to Migrating to VoIP: Planning and Design Considerations
The migration path for deploying a voice over IP (VoIP) solution is never the same from one organization to the next. But with things like the SIP communications standard and recommended bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS) measurements for IP networks, organizations can establish an effective baseline for their VoIP solution deployment — and for the best possible system and network performance once their solution is in place.

Business Process Automation (BPA)

A Practical Guide to Automating Key Business Processes
Business process automation can reduce the time and costs needed to perform most any manual task. It allows companies to do more with fewer resources. To be successful, BPA must start with clear business objectives, must focus on strategy as well as people and technology, and should support “quick win” goals and continuous improvement initiatives alike.