A pre-eminent financial services firm provides products for customers around the world. Dedicated to serving clients’ financial needs‚ the firm is committed to delivering the best customer experience possible. Its commitment doesn’t stop with clients‚ but extends to improving the lives of individuals in communities around the world. A Business Challenge The customer was interested in implementing a web services-based self-service platform to bring together web services and IP telephony in all of...

The Company A worldwide technology company operating in more than 170 countries is focused on helping people apply technology in meaningful ways to their businesses, personal lives and communities. With R&D investments of almost a billion US dollars, the company is able to offer a complete technology product portfolio to the market. The ultimate goal of this market leader is to offer products, services and solutions that are high tech, low cost and deliver the best customer experience. The c...

“IQ Services really made it easy. I learned all sorts of things about my routing tables that really caught me by surprise" It was essential for a major player in the mobile & computing devices industry to know for certain its three contact centers could handle full calling volumes during an upcoming shopping season. The company turned to IQ Services for an answer to the question “How can we be sure our self-service and contact center solutions will really work when we need them?” 7000+ Ports...

A premium insurance financing company based in the United States decided to upgrade their interactive voice response (IVR) platforms in call centers located in Philadelphia, PA, and Irvine, CA. Their project team leader was given responsibility for ensuring all new and existing contact center components worked together at go-live. The team leader knew the only way to accomplish this was to test each system’s ability to handle real telephone calls that “behaved” just like real callers. The compan...

Anyone who uses a phone has experienced IVR by now. It's the "Interactive Voice Response" system that many companies have implemented to handle incoming customer calls. I've found it's been helpful and efficient most of the time, but IVR seems to be the subject of jokes and scorn by many. Why all the animosity? IVR gets a bad rap and I know why: bad design and implementation. Let's look at some common problems and solutions. Having to press 1 for this and press 2 for that seems to really irritat...

Contact center and communications solutions offer companies a significant opportunity to control costs and improve customer satisfaction if implemented and maintained appropriately. If the solutions are not implemented and maintained properly, the opportunities become risks and eventually customers are negatively impacted. With StressTest™ performance and load testing, you can validate the performance of your end-to-end contact center and communications solutions to assure the best possible expe...

City of Ottawa 3-1-1 Contact Centre Site Tour Thursday March 27, 2014 at 110 Laurier Avenue West The City of Ottawa 311 Client Services Centre was the proud recipient of the 2013 ORCCA Contact Centre of the Year Award. This award honors the contact centre with less than 100 employees which has enhanced the image of the call contact centre profession by setting and achieving the highest standards of excellence for customers, employees and the community. The City of Ottawa 311 Client Services Cent...

Many people believe they are best served by real people, not by voice robots. That’s the rationale behind GetHuman.com. But the economics and utility of self-service as an alternative to live agent interactions are so compelling that self-service solutions are here to stay. Providing multiple touchpoints is a huge technology investment. Technology is great, but you can’t just diligently manage the implementation process and then assume all is well with the customer service experience. Because no...

In today’s connected world of smartphones, social media, text messaging, and Web browsing, customers have never been more vocal – and ears have never been more willing to listen. Contact centers thus may feel lost in the sea of new digital customer touchpoints and interaction avenues. Staying ahead of these trends is critical to successful customer service, and technology plays a large part in catering to these evolving needs. There are several solutions out there for businesses to leverage, eac...

Almost every contact center leader analyzes the rich data coming from their Avaya Aura system in order to improve the effectiveness of their agents, better determine trends, accurately schedule their workforce, lower costs and drive additional revenues. A good deal of the information used is based on historical data from previous intervals (ex. day/month/year) for planning purposes, and in terms of their ability to predict things like agent shrinkage and call volumes. However, that data doesn’t ...

Currently in the contact center industry, the big buzz is around anything and everything cloud. Trade shows and industry conferences are packed with sessions and panels focused on organizations moving their communications and data to the cloud. Companies in every industry are moving all or part of their infrastructure to cloud solutions, but not everyone is moving to a public cloud model. Some organizations are looking toward a private cloud as the next evolution in their communications infrastr...

In the August 2013 edition of Contact Center Pipeline, Brian Hinton writes, “while IT might hold the keys to technology delivery and support, the contact center must use technology wisely to achieve business goals.” At first, this seems to be a simple enough statement; however, it is really quite loaded once you start to break it down. First, you have the relationship between IT and the contact center itself. As Hinton explains, it can be easy for IT and contact center managers to reach a stalem...

Capacity analysis for your multi-tiered applications Now, more than ever, IT shops need to deliver on the promise of business innovation and an exceptional end-user experience. The race to deliver this experience to customers is a never-ending marathon of who can be the first out of the gate while meeting the ever-demanding expectations of today’s “I want it now” user.  And, not making it any easier is that fact that today’s business services have evolved into very complex environments. In ...

The June 2013 issue of Contact Center Pipeline included “Underutilized Metrics,” an article written by Jay Minnucci. Minnucci highlights three metrics that could be used with more frequency and effectiveness to provide a more comprehensive understanding of contact center performance: Contacts per customer – While the expectations for this metric will vary across industry, understanding the contacts per customer within your center and industry can help you answer questions about your customer bas...

This one hour presentation from CMIQ brings together 4 panelists to help you understand the pitfalls of implementing new technology today. When implementing technology we are constantly asked to do more with less, while maintaining or drive better customer experience, and increase or improve our return on investment. The first challenge in implementing new technology is to get funding, especially when the center can be considered a cost center. We then have to pick the right technology, either a...

Ottawa Regional Contact Centre Association We’re planning an extra special event this year for our 10th Anniversary! We’ll be celebrating in style at the new Ottawa Convention Centre on September 12th. Call for Nominations The Ottawa Regional Contact Centre Awards will publicly recognize Contact Centre Agents, Support Associates, Managers and Contact Centres who consistently deliver quality service to their internal and external customers. A candidate nominated for a Contact Centre Award for Exc...

HeartBeat™ Availability and Performance Monitoring for Voice Communications Solutions Contact center and communications solutions offer companies a significant opportunity to control costs and improve customer satisfaction if maintained properly. If solution performance is not maintained after implementation, the opportunity becomes a risk and eventually customers are negatively impacted. With HeartBeat™ availability and performance monitoring, you validate the performance of your end-to-end con...

Proper forecasting and accurate scheduling are critical to the success of your contact center. But accurate scheduling, by design, doesn’t leave much room for error and puts most contact centers dangerously close to the edge in terms of being over-staffed or under-staffed. Given the random nature of the arrival of contacts, being ‘right-staffed’ can be a fleeting concept. More often than not, you will have too many or too little agents available to address current demand. Add in the normal daily...

Superstorm Sandy roared into our lives following more than a week’s worth of warnings. Warnings are great and give you time to prepare, cross your fingers, and fret about your contingency plans. But why fret about your contingency plans? You can be sure they work. And don’t you owe it to yourself to be confident? Think about it - If a key system component or an entire site fails, your contingency plans have to work. Period. Because if the plans fail, your entire solution may completely malfuncti...

The latest rumors in the tech blogosphere are buzzing that a new iPhone may be coming out as soon as this summer. This leaves many recent purchasers of the current version feeling that they may have just paid full price for soon-to-be out of date technology. Will the new version be worth upgrading, or will it just be an old penny shined up to look new? Nowhere is this plight truer than for the technology buyer in the contact center, where purchases or upgrades are driven by the quest for better ...