Mark C. Anderson
Trusted IT Advisor

Industry Newsletters

    

Gain a Competitive Advantage with
Next Generation Contact Center Technology

Doug Fink, VP, Collaboration Technology Practice

In today's fast-paced world, call center technology can change on a dime, potentially leaving yesterday's solutions and equipment in the dust. At the same time, many businesses continue to look for ways to reduce costs, streamline efforts and gain competitive customer interaction advantages. Finding the right blend to maintain cutting-edge technology, while also minimizing expenses can be challenging. Insight Contact Center Solutions has the proven expertise that can take your business to the next level.

Yesterday's call centers were truly just that – a room full of people with telephones, fielding calls from customers. Today, these same customers are looking for real-time interaction in the quickest, most convenient channel available, whether it's via telephone, Web, chat, email, self service or social media. Call centers have evolved into the next generation contact centers, offering a variety of options and solutions.

By implementing a centralized intelligent contact management platform, your business has the potential to gain a competitive advantage in the market place. This will allow for enterprise level reporting, centralized administration, and support and maintenance contracts.

Insight's team of contact center experts can conduct an assessment to determine the following for your business:

  • Executive solution requirements and expectations
  • Contact center mission and vision
  • Call center applications and functionality
  • Technical solution requirements and expectations
  • Existing use of features and applications

What Insight's Contact Center Solutions can do for you:

  • Provide a comprehensive view of your contact center business strategy, requirements and infrastructure
  • Assess the value of new technologies and your customer service strategy
  • Demonstrate how businesses are monitoring trends and customer behavior from social networking sites
  • Identify gaps between current capabilities and your customer service objectives
  • Identify challenges with implementing a contact center environment
  • Design and deploy an integrated solution that will support your business plan and objectives
  • Provide implementation support and user training on administrative tasks
 

Optimizing Interactions
in the Contact Center

Enhance Client Reach and Loyalty with a "Unified" Contact Center
By Doug Fink, Vice President, Unified Communications


After so much bad news these last few months, we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. And businesses are preparing to take advantage of new opportunities by adding staff in their call centers.

An alternative approach to simply adding headcount is to reassess your contact center infrastructure at a strategic level. Consider these two questions. How are you handling customer interactions today? Are you leveraging the latest IP-based services?

If not, an obsolete call center may be costing you opportunities to extend customer reach and improve customer loyalty. You may want to consider a unified contact center model to improve information delivery and maximize agent efficiency.


Benefits of the Unified Contact Center

The Cisco Unified Contact Center aims to present customers with the desired information, from the most appropriate resource, via the preferred channel, in a timely and accurate fashion. And the IP nature of today's contact center allows for interactions to be routed to virtually any location based on any number of criteria and be reported on for the duration of the interaction.

There are three major benefits of this model.

  • Customer Reach: Customer interaction is all about giving customers fast access to the most appropriate resource. Today, customers want to choose the method of interaction, whether it's self-service, voice, web chat, email or social media. Intelligent routing engines match customers with internal resources over the proper channel.

  • Customer Loyalty: You want to do more than match customers with the right resource. You also want to provide internal resources with all the customer information they require to address customer needs in a timely, personalized and accurate manner. So the flow of information becomes critical to enhanced customer satisfaction.

  • Cost Efficiency and Scalability: Decentralization enables you to route interactions to resources without geographic restriction. This enhances resource pool effectiveness by scaling experts with special expertise or language skills. And once the infrastructure is in place, virtualized contact centers are easy to scale as you acquire companies or expand into new lines of business.

Projecting ROI through Impact Analysis

We're all hopeful that this recession is nearing an end, but we understand that budgets are still tight. That's why every Insight contact center engagement begins with a business impact analysis that determines the true ROI of contact center implementations.

Insight's business discovery process enables us to determine bottom line drivers and map a financial impact assessment around a unified contact center implementation. More often than not, clients learn through this process that they can't afford not to invest. The sooner they do it, the sooner they can drive revenue in their business.

Our approach helped a propane retailer improve resource productivity, reduce liability and enhance customer satisfaction across 1,200 retail outlets. Another client, a regional sanitation company, saved $150,000 by implementing a single interactive voice response application.

Before you add headcount, let's work together to determine how unified contact center will impact your business. Click below to learn more about our Unified Communications Solutions or to contact an Insight specialist.


Save time and money with office 365

Launching in 2011, Microsoft® Office 365 will bring together cloud versions of your most trusted communications and collaboration products, with the latest version of the Office Desktop Suite. Office 365 is designed to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes, helping save time and money to free up valuable resources.

Office 365 Includes:

  • Microsoft Office – The world's leading productivity tool on the desktop (Office Professional Plus) and on the Web (Office Web Apps), now seamlessly connected and delivered with cloud services - for the best productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser.
  • Exchange Online – Cloud-based email, calendar and contacts with the most current antivirus and anti-spam solutions. Includes the ability to get email on virtually any mobile phone and options for voice mail, unified messaging and archiving.
  • SharePoint Online – Cloud-based service for creating sites to connect colleagues, partners and customers. Includes enterprise social networking and customization options.
  • Lync Online – Cloud-based instant messaging, presence and online meeting experiences with screen sharing and voice and video conferencing.

Not only will Microsoft Office 365 replace Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS), but Microsoft will also be making some changes to the Enterprise Agreement (EA). Insight can help you prepare for this.

Signing an updated EA amendment (as part of your new/renewing/mid-term (True-Up) EA sales motions), enables you to switch desktops from on-premise Office to Office 365 after General Availability, whenever you are ready. In addition, you can still purchase BPOS as that will switch over to Office 365 when available.

How this Affects Your Enterprise Agreement

If you signed your EA before November 1, 2010, you are eligible for an amendment that will grant you access to the Office 365 when it is released in 2011. This allows you to add Office 365 when you are ready, but does not lock you into any specific purchases. This new amendment will prepare you to make the transition to the cloud at your own pace and provide flexibility to allow users to move back and forth between online and on-premise solutions. For more information on how Office 365 can help your business, please contact your Insight sales representative at 1.800.INSIGHT or email us at cloud@insight.com.

 

Symantec Backup Exec Simplifies Backup Management within VMware Environments

Symantec recently announced a new management plug-in for VMware vCenter™ Server available to Backup Exec 2010 customers, allowing them to reduce the complexity of managing backups in VMware-virtualized environments. Scheduled to be available by early next year, the new plug-in for VMware vCenter Server provides a comprehensive view of virtual machines and exposes granular details of virtual machine backups – all from within the VMware vCenter Server console or the VMware vSphere™ Client.

The Backup Exec Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter Server works with the core Backup Exec virtualization features to provide a consolidated protection status view of all virtual machines within the VMware vCenter Server or VMware vSphere Client. Customers can view:

  • The last run of backup and next scheduled backup
  • The type of backup (full, incremental, differential) and backup policy
  • Specific information on the backup job logs
  • Potential risky policies such as unprotected virtual machines

The All New Adobe Acrobat X – Now Available

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Get more done—easier, faster, and better—Make every work day more productive. Create, distribute and manage fillable forms using intuitive tools, such as automatic form field recognition. Automate multistep tasks and permanently remove sensitive information so you can share documents with confidence.

Work together more effectively—Work better with coworkers, customers, partners and suppliers, inside and outside your organization. Use Acrobat X to easily manage shared reviews and aggregate team feedback. And enable anyone with free Adobe Reader® software to join the review process—all with the reliability and control you expect from Acrobat.

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