News Features

Pegasystems continues to expand its Pega 7 platform with the launch of Pega Field Service CRM, an app for field service agents; it provides on-the-go CRM functionality to professionals who deliver service on site and unifies customer service across the customer journey, from initial call to service delivery.
Posted February 12, 2016

Avaya today launched a pair of multichannel unified communications and contact center hybrid cloud solutions targeted for the midmarket. Called Avaya Midmarket Cloud, the solutions are Powered by Avaya IP Office and OnAvaya-Google Cloud Platform.
Posted February 09, 2016

For the second quarter in a row, L.L. Bean reigns supreme on Stella Service's benchmark report of retailers' customer service performance. Stella Service evaluated retailers by looking at a number of service areas, including the speed with which customer service issues are handled, the efficiency of returns and exchanges, and the amount of missed opportunities for customer engagement. Most notable were L.L. Bean's prompt responses to both phone and email requests, according to the report.
Posted February 05, 2016

Salesforce.com yesterday introduced the next generation of its Customer Success Platform, Salesforce Lightning, and previewed its product strategy for the first half of the year. Included in those plans is an upgrade to Service Cloud Lightning, the company's unified customer service platform and ecosystem.
Posted February 03, 2016

Earlier this week, former Amazon employee Eric Springer shared his recent experience with Amazon customer service, revealing that the e-commerce giant unknowingly gave away his identity to hackers on three occasions. Springer was alerted to the situation after receiving an email confirming a recent interaction with customer service via Web chat that he did not actually have.
Posted January 29, 2016

iQventures, a provider of call center and call intelligence technologies, has joined IBM Watson's ecosystem, where it will leverage Watson's cognitive computing capabilities to bolster its SpeechiQ platform with speech and sentiment analytics.
Posted January 28, 2016

Wise.io, a provider of machine learning applications to help enterprises provide better customer experiences, today launched Wise Auto Response, an intelligent auto reply functionality for customer support organizations. Using machine learning to understand the intent of incoming tickets and determine the best available response, Wise Auto Response automatically selects and applies the appropriate reply to address customer issues without involving agents.
Posted January 27, 2016

With messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and WeChat staking a claim to how consumers communicate on mobile devices, brands are working to get in on the action. Mobile support is becoming a must-have for customer service, but in-app support and service via the mobile Web just aren't cutting it. Joshua March, CEO at Conversocial, sat down with Smart Customer Service to discuss the evolution of social support and how Sprint is tackling the growing demands of the space.
Posted January 22, 2016

Lionbridge Technologies has broadened its GeoFluent real-time translation technology to include new omnichannel customer care features for contact centers. With these new features, customers can deliver real-time multilingual interactions across all communication channels, from virtual and agent-assisted chat to email, in-call voice, social, SMS, forums, knowledge bases, help desks, and ticketing.
Posted January 19, 2016

Customer experience management solution provider InMoment has teamed up with predictive analytics vendor RapidMiner to deliver a more sophisticated Voice of the Customer solution that not only provides insight on what customers are doing at different phases of the customer journey, but also why they're taking certain actions.
Posted January 15, 2016

Businesses are substantially more satisfied with their electricity providers this year, reaching an eight-year high, despite having to call their service providers twice as often and having their issues resolved significantly less often then residential customers, according to the latest J.D. Power 2016 Electric Utility Business Customer Satisfaction Study.
Posted January 13, 2016

NICE Systems is acquiring speech software company Nexidia, which specializes in advanced speech and interaction analytics, for $135 million. Nexidia's analytics products are backed by patents for phonetic indexing and search capabilities, features that will integrate with NICE's existing services to provide enhanced analytics-based solutions.
Posted January 11, 2016

Accelerize and its digital marketing software division CAKE yesterday announced a partnership and technology integration with DialogTech, a provider of end-to-end call attribution and conversion platforms for marketing and customer service.
Posted January 08, 2016

The solution brings real-time customer information and 100 percent call recording to Microsoft's communications system. (Featured on DestinationCRM.com.)
Posted January 04, 2016

Emergency preparedness solutions company Rave Mobile Safety has seen particular success with its Smart911 national safety service. The platform aims to assist 9-1-1 dispatchers in their decisions and cut response times. The service has seen statewide implementation in Arkansas, Delaware, and several other states.
Posted December 29, 2015

Genesys, a provider of omnichannel customer experience and contact center solutions, has acquired SpeechStorm, a provider of self-service applications for mobile, Web, and interactive voice response (IVR) channels. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Posted December 22, 2015

The nonprofit association Jobs4America recorded 22,265 new positions in the U.S. contact center industry in the third quarter of 2015. After subtracting the 5,678 jobs that were cut due to force reductions and closures, the firm recorded a net total of 16,587 new jobs created between July 1 and September 30.
Posted December 22, 2015

Customers who received replies from airlines through Twitter were not only happier with their experiences but also were more willing to pay more for their next tickets and to recommend that airline to others, according to research from Twitter and Applied Marketing Science.
Posted December 18, 2015

Revenue for the North American contact center solutions market indicates a growing preference for hosted services, but while companies are investing in the cloud, they are still relying on on-premises tools, which suggests there is ample room for growth among vendors, Frost & Sullivan finds.
Posted December 16, 2015

Marchex, a mobile advertising analytics company, today launched a major security enhancement to Marchex Call Analytics that enables companies to automatically redact credit card numbers from recorded phone calls in real time.
Posted December 15, 2015

Pages has long been a powerful resource for marketers maintaining a Facebook brand presence, but the social network is launching new capabilities to enhance the platform's customer service features. With better engagement tracking and an emphasis on faster response times, Facebook is enabling brands to deliver an improved social customer service experience in real time.
Posted December 11, 2015

Zendesk today released Advanced Voice, an enhanced version of its phone support offering, embedded directly into its cloud-based contact center software. With it, companies can set up Zendesk phone support in minutes without purchasing extra equipment and can make or take calls from the same multichannel environment in which they manage all other support channels.
Posted December 10, 2015

Thanks to social media, customer reviews, and other tools that give consumers the power to shape brand dialogues, companies have had to improve how they deliver service. Increasingly, expectations for customer service are extending beyond traditional call center and support experiences to include in-store support, delivery, and product consultation. According to a recent report from Constellation Research, five trends are shifting power to retail consumers. These trends have key implications for brands.
Posted December 04, 2015

Marlin Equity Partners, a global investment firm, has acquired LiveOps Cloud Platform, a provider of cloud-based contact center technology. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Posted December 01, 2015

Social customer service provider Sentiment is teaming up with systems integration company IP Integration to help inject social solutions into existing contact centers. As contact center providers rush to offer social tools, Sentiment and IP Integration are working to ensure that social solutions are no longer considered an afterthought.
Posted November 20, 2015

Avaya and Plantronics have started a co-development initiative to simplify communications in contact center and unified communications environments. The first initiative under this expanded relationship is focused on ensuring compatibility and tight integration between Plantronics headsets and Avaya's Chrome-based contact center apps, including Avaya Agent for Chrome and Customer Engagement OnAvaya-Google Cloud Platform.
Posted November 18, 2015

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday right around the corner, companies expect more transactions to occur through mobile devices. Last year, mobile commerce accounted for 22.56 percent of online sales in November and December, and 27.91 percent of Black Friday sales, according to the 2014 IBM Experience One U.S. Retail Online Holiday Shopping Recap Report. This year, the number will likely surpass 30 percent, and as mobile secures its position as a key channel for online retail, retailers should consider stepping up their mobile customer support.
Posted November 13, 2015

Just two weeks after its annual OpenWorld user conference in San Francisco, Oracle has announced further enhancements to its cloud product set. Today, the company introduced Oracle Knowledge Advanced Cloud, a solution that helps facilitate customer service interactions by granting customers and contact center agents improved access to instructional materials.(Featured on DestinationCRM.com.)
Posted November 11, 2015

TouchCommerce, a provider of omnichannel customer engagement solutions, today launched TouchSocial, which enables companies to embed shortlinks into social media posts so that customers can initiate personalized live chat sessions with product or customer service specialists.
Posted November 10, 2015

Support ticket volume has increased in 63 percent of all support organizations, according to a new report by HDI, a membership association and certification body for the technical support industry. This is largely due to an increase in the number of new applications, systems, equipment, infrastructures, and devices that customers are using and a growth in the number of customers at many companies.
Posted November 06, 2015

To the surprise of many, the company that all-but demolished the brick-and-mortar book business debuted its first brick-and-mortar book store earlier this week. With the opening of Amazon Books in Seattle, the e-commerce behemoth is redefining the in-store experience, and it's all about personalized service. On the surface, the store is a condensed, limited version of the online business; digging deeper into its shelves, however, reveals a much more nuanced business model.
Posted November 06, 2015

Enghouse Interactive, a developer of contact center software, yesterday unveiled the latest versions of its five key business communications and customer interaction technologies, integegrating all of them into a unified product suite. These releases include new version of Enghouse Interactive's Contact Center: Enterprise (CCE); Communications Center (EICC); Contact Center: Service Provider (CCSP); Communications Portal (CP); and Quality Management Suite (QMS).
Posted November 05, 2015

At its G-Force summit in Miami this week, Genesys debuted AppFoundry, an app marketplace where developers can design, innovate, and collaborate on customer service solutions. With wide-reaching integrations for on-premise and software-as-a-service solutions spanning from CRM and database applications to sales and e-commerce tools, the marketplace promises to extend Genesys's offerings while maintaining the vendor's commitment to the customer service space.
Posted October 30, 2015

Metrics are the lifeblood of every contact center's performance, yet many of them aren't measuring the right performance indicators, the ICMI determined in a recent study. The findings, announced at the ICMI Contact Center Conference earlier this week, revealed that as contact centers evolve to be increasingly multichannel hubs, companies are struggling to maintain consistency across channels and customer touch points.
Posted October 23, 2015

The company is expanding its technology into the B2B space.
Posted October 15, 2015

Opus Research's Intelligent Assistants Conference highlights the growth of virtual assistants in customer apps.
Posted October 14, 2015

The brand now offers workshops and presentations on customer service for non-competing companies.
Posted October 09, 2015

Satisfaction Prediction uses machine learning to identify which customer interactions are at risk of turning bad in real time.
Posted October 07, 2015

Author Marsha Collier hosts discussions about the latest trends in customer support and experience.
Posted October 02, 2015

Zappix now allows companies to provide visual IVR mobile smartphone solutions for iPhone, Android, and the Web in multiple languages. (Featured on DestinationCRM.com.)
Posted September 28, 2015

A Q&A with Aircall founder Olivier Pailhes, whose solution enables the mobile customer service agent.
Posted September 25, 2015

The two software giants plan to deliver even deeper integrations in 2016. (Featured on DestinationCRM.com.)
Posted September 18, 2015

Apps that provide support are becoming essential across industries.
Posted September 18, 2015

New capabilities include resolution management, geotagging for Instagram support, and CROWDS communities.
Posted September 11, 2015

TouchCommerce now enables in-app mobile chat and many other integrations.
Posted September 10, 2015

A personality match promises a better customer service experience.
Posted September 04, 2015

A new user interface and app aim to smooth customer service operations. (Featured on DestinationCRM.com.)
Posted September 02, 2015

Global hotel chains are experimenting with customer support via text messaging
Posted August 28, 2015

Company debuts customer support videos for its Beats by Dre products.
Posted August 21, 2015

Adding channels and technologies shouldn't be done in silos, speakers say.
Posted August 20, 2015
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