The greatest single cost in a contact center is the cost of personnel. As a result it has become important to maximize agent productivity and accountability. This is done through programs commonly referred to as Workforce Management and Quality Monitoring. Workforce Management allows contact center managers to schedule and monitor agent’s real time to ensure […]

These complementary technologies afford callers the ability to get their information quicker and can preclude the frustrations of having to reenter information or repeat their request more than once during a call. As an example, when you call your bank and request information either by speaking to an agent or using a touch tone phone […]

Speech recognition, the ability of a computer to understand human speech, started about 3 0 years ago and initially only had the ability to recognize the digits 0 through 9 and “yes” or “no”. Since this preceded  the wide spread use of touch tone phones, this early speech recognition technology allowed callers with rotary dial […]

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is the technology callers love to hate. This “talking” computer technology had its beginnings at Brookhaven Labs on Long Island, N.Y. in the mid sixties under government grants. It took input from telephone touch tones (Dual Tone Multi Frequency – DTMF)), emulating an operator’s terminal keystrokes as input, to access computer […]

When you contact your bank, mortgage company, or the customer service organization of that product you bought but are having difficulty with, is it a pleasant experience? Being a salesman the past 40 years, the last 20 selling technology in the contact center space, I thought I would summarize some of the evolution of this […]