Mike Burke – Former Director Product Marketing, Test Solutions

Would You Trust an Untested System?Would you board an airplane that had never actually gone on a test flight? Where the decision to put the plane into service was based solely on how it feels to sit in the passenger seat and whether or not the engine turns on when we flip the switch? A rational person would not put their trust in a plane that hadn't been fuelled up, loaded with the appropriate weight, flown for the intended distance and landed...

Technology is supposed to make our lives better, not take control of our lives and make us miserable. To stay in control of the situation, you must think and plan ahead of time, which includes planning failure into the process. That means going through a testing procedure not assuming that it's going to pass, but instead assuming that it will fail. Planning to fail results in a schedule that accommodates issue identification, remediation and...

Depending on the industry, contact centers experience peak loads during certain key times of the year. For instance, in the U.S. we have an open enrollment period associated with insurance changes, typically the latter months of the year into January. During this time, insurance industry contact centers handle 10 to 20 times their average traffic on a given day.  Look at an interesting case study of one company's journey through Black Friday. In...

When changes to your organization's website, IVR and other customer impacting communication technologies are made you would think comprehensive testing goes without saying. Yet time and time again we see contact center testing get cut from the rollout plan.

In this latest podcast we discuss the impact WebRTC will have on the way we communicate and the capability it provides organizations to deliver an improved customer experience through the contact center.

There are a multitude of different ways to interact with a brand today. It could be social media, email, smartphone app, web, or talking to a call center agent by telephone. When you've got so many different channels in place, it's really important the information from each of those interactions is consolidated and made available in a reliable manner. That's where omnichannel communication comes in. But get it wrong ... and it can go very wrong.

When it comes to optimizing the customer experience, it's important to strike a proper balance between technology and human interaction. It all begins with gaining an understanding of why a customer might want to reach out to your brand to have an interaction. There is no better example than the one recently presented at a healthcare contact center event I attended.

The rush of holiday season is just around the corner - with Thanksgiving looming large in the US - companies are bracing themselves for the deluge of traffic in the lead up to the end of the year and the busiest shopping period on the planet.

It could be reasonably argued every organizations wants, or tries, to provide an optimal customer experience. As the saying goes - your competitor is only a mouse click away. A direct result of the ever increasing focus on customer experience has been the development of a number of metrics to determine just how well a company is performing.

Voice recognition is a technology that has made a big impact to our lives over the past few decades. What was once fanciful star-gazing - like the voice activated machines in the popular Hanna-Barbera sit-com the Jetsons - today, voice recognition is found in devices all around us. From your smartphone to your car radio - it is an ever evolving technology.

WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communications) is a capability built into modern desktop browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or Microsoft Edge (Windows 10's new browser). It brings access to fantastic features that easily let consumers set up voice, data, and video interactions with companies at the click of a button. Smartphone users are also able to take advantage of WebRTC right from within downloadable apps.

There have recently been high profile companies receiving media coverage after delivering poor customer experience as a result of a 'cloud outage'. In fact, it may seem like we're seeing more and more cloud outages leading to some organizations questioning whether the cloud really is stable enough to trust with your key customer interactions. I can assure you it is. What we're actually witnessing is a record number of end users being affected...

A series of recent cloud service outages has impacted people across the globe. In this latest podcast we talk about the underlying causes, why there seems to be a greater number of outages, despite reassurance the cloud is sage, and what your organization can do to mitigate the risk.

Think about what happens when a skyscraper is about to be built. The construction crew obviously wouldn't begin by making the observation deck. Building a new contact center is a lot like the construction of a new building. It all starts with a plan, along with a solid foundation.

Contact centers are often made from best-in-class components. Many contact center implementations have elements that come from as many as 18 to 20 different vendors. Each one of those discrete elements—whether it's the CTI routing and hunting package, the speech recognition technology, or the interactive voice system—is built to perform at peak levels by its vendor. In a sense, the process of building a contact center is similar to building your...