7 Tips for Building the Contact Center of the Future. As consumers rapidly embrace the web and mobile devices for fast answers to questions, is the contact center finally on its way out?

When your website does a poor job of resolving customer service issues, the escalation costs that ensue are truly astounding. Our latest report, based on published data from Forrester Research, gives you an eye opening look into these runaway costs and how you can stop them.

Aberdeen Group’s recent research on Next-Generation Customer Experience Management highlights the recent trend in the customer-company relations and the challenges companies face with their customer experience management (CEM) efforts across multiple channels. The results of this research will be included in this soon-to-be-released whitepaper.

Some of the findings and insights that will be included in the upcoming whitepaper are:

• The primary reasons companies struggle in adopting a data-driven approach to manage their customer interactions
• How companies are adaptating to the new dynamics of the "customer era."
• The performance gains Best-in-Class organizations realize as a result of their ability to convert data into actionable insights

WebRTC has been the biggest topic of conversation in the telecommunications industry for a couple of years now. Not surprisingly everyone is trying to figure out what it means to them and where it can be used to improve user experiences and extend the use of the value creation capabilities that exist in todays Service Networks. This paper offers a perspective on how WebRTC will evolve to interwork with and extend Service Networks today.

The contact center is becoming increasingly complex. The days of simple telephony interactions are long gone. Managers struggle to contain costs while handling multi-channel communications with customers and prospects who expect speedy resolution and instant gratification. Traditional live agents alone just can’t meet the demands of today’s contact center. Fortunately, advances in artificial intelligence are offering an ideal solution to this escalating issue. Virtual call agents can deliver the speed and precision of an automated technology, along with the good manners and problem-solving capabilities of a human agent. The valuable time of human agents can be reserved for the more challenging, complicated issues while virtual call agents deal with the more straightforward, repetitive queries. This approach not only cuts costs drastically, but is also proven to enhance customer satisfaction and boost employee morale.

Download this white paper, authored by chief analyst Dick Bucci from Pelorus Associates, to learn about:

• The top benefits and many inbound and outbound uses of virtual call agents
• How virtual call agents help significantly reduce costs while improving customer satisfaction
• How virtual call agents help ensure PCI-DSS and HIPAA compliance
• An ROI comparison of virtual call agents vs. other self-service and contact center technologies

If you’re looking to improve customer lifetime value the best place to start is with your agent experience and productivity. Most organizations are stuck in the old paradigm of contact center technology where best of breed systems force agents to toggle back and forth between multiple windows resulting in frustration for the agent and a poor experience for the customer.

The connection between agent experience and customer experience and its bottom-line impact has been inferred over the years, but a new study conducted by LiveOps and Dr. Natalie Petouhoff’s Customer Experience Research Group looked more closely at this impact on both operational costs and revenue generation in the contact center. Click here to download this compelling whitepaper and learn how technology affects agent happiness and productivity and can result in increased subscriber revenues and better customer lifetime value.

The evolution of customer communications from telephony to multichannel interactions, including IM and chat, SMS, email, and social media, have created a new era in the relationship between businesses and customers, once which is based upon each customer’s preferred communications modality. This evolution of the call center into a multichannel Customer Engagement Center necessitates a shift in not only engagement strategy to meet customers on the engagement medium of choice, but also an assessment of their communications technologies and CRM software, which must both be able to manage this new customer service model. This Gartner report analyzes the current CEC vendor landscape and the degree to which the market has responded to the social-mobile customer.

Workforce management applications are critical for contact centers. These solutions are the only way to ensure that a contact center has the right level of resources with appropriate skills to handle all inbound and outbound transactions within a pre-defined service level. Workforce management is historically the most disliked application in contact centers because most of these solutions are complicated and very difficult to use with features that are so complex that they can only be used by quantitatively-oriented and technically trained WFM analysts.

However, vendors are finally listening to their customers and starting to deliver enhanced WFM solutions. These new-generation WFM solutions do many of the same things as older versions, but in less than half the time and with a great deal less training and effort. And, like all Web 2.0 applications, the system logic is embedded in the user interface, making these solutions much easier to use and maintain. Download this white paper and learn how workforce management is changing.

Atlantic Tele-Network’s subsidiaries range from a CLEC in New England through to Guyanese PTT, GT&T, each with their own networks, operations and P&L. The company’s policy is to maintain autonomy within its subsidiaries while centralizing where appropriate at a group level. So Atlantic decided to consolidate its national and international voice traffic routing and management to realize synergies across its subsidiaries. The reasons Atlantic chose DIGITALK’s SBC VoIP Peering to meet its needs and the benefits it has achieved from the solution are presented in this case study.

"As an innovative and progressive Tier 1 communications enabler based in the Channel Islands, JT Global was not afraid to consider new and innovative options to expand its wholesale service. While the option for a Cloud solution raised many questions for an operator with 130 years’ experience providing world-class products and solutions, it quickly became apparent that the ability to exploit new market opportunities rapidly, reliably and without disruption to the business was crucial. In this case study, the advantages of the DIGITALK Carrier Cloud to JT's business are outlined demonstrating the value that a Cloud solution can bring to leading wholesale termination providers."