Managing Contact Centers Through the COVID-19 Pandemic This is DMG’s second column on the COVID-19 pandemic. The first one is available here. DMG is not providing medical or legal advice; all medical questions should be referred to your doctor and legal issues addressed to your lawyers. Here is the link to the US CDC site [...]
2020 Contact Center Investment Priorities DMG’s annual survey of contact center investment priorities for the year has confirmed the anecdotal data we’ve been hearing from companies. 2020 is looking to be an outstanding year for contact center investments. As it’s difficult to get enterprise executives and managers to participate in any kind of a survey, [...]
DR/BC Plans to Mitigate the Impact of Pandemics on Contact Centers As the Coronavirus and the heightened risk of a pandemic fills the news headlines, service organizations must be prepared to keep operating if their region is stricken. Many companies have disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) plans to address the ability to operate [...]
Vision 2020 We enter the new decade with great momentum in technological innovation. Start-ups and large enterprises are investing billions in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation-based initiatives that are going to change the way we live our lives and conduct business over the next 10 – 20 years. Technologies that have been talked about for [...]
2019 Was a Fantastic Year for Service It’s December, a time when we look at the year in review to see what has changed in the world of service and summarize the major drivers of progress. (Our January 2020 column will discuss the leading drivers of change for 2020, the first year of the new [...]
A Channel is a Channel Headlines shout the power and benefits of the newest “servicing” channels – one day it is social media and the next it is chat. In fact, no single channel is more important than another. What matters is that customers, prospects, partners, and everyone else receives a response in their channel [...]
Making RPA Positive for Employees Robotic process automation (RPA) is a logical approach for companies to take in order to improve productivity and quality. The three primary categories of RPA solutions are: Attended – the ability to “sit side-by-side” with an agent or employee at their desktop application and assist them with their tasks, such [...]
Digital Transformation Initiatives for Contact Centers In contact centers, digital transformation is often thought to mean converting from a multi-channel environment to omni-channel engagement, but it is so much more. While adding digital channels is a step in the right direction and a necessity for contact centers of all sizes, it is just the beginning [...]
Call Tracking: Where Phone Calls Enhance Digital Marketing and Service This year we decided to cover a niche IT sector, call tracking, which is growing in importance due to the digital transformation occurring in organizations worldwide. Call tracking is currently attracting a great deal of interest because of its ability to deliver significant improvements in [...]
The Advantages of Analytics-Enabled Quality Management For most of the past 40 years, contact centers have performed quality management (QM) the same way. Calls are identified for evaluation from recordings, and then a QM specialist listens, assesses and completes a monitoring form for each of them. While traditional QM applications have been enhanced over the [...]
Making Sense out of the RPA Market The robotic process automation (RPA) market is growing rapidly, and new uses are being identified throughout enterprises continually. Hundreds of vendors around the world have entered the RPA segment, coming from many existing IT sectors such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), contact center infrastructure, [...]
WFM Solutions Adapt to Changing Needs No contact center technology has undergone as significant a paradigm shift as the WFM sector. Its fundamental purpose and function remains the same, but the process is vastly different. The new generation of WFM solutions gives agents unprecedented visibility into and control over their schedules. But contact centers are [...]
Essential Role of Contact Centers in Digital Transformations I’ve got a bone to pick with enterprise technology decision-makers. We’re in the period of digital transformation, but surprisingly, contact centers are sometimes left out of these initiatives. Eventually, someone reasonable comes along and points out the necessity of including the primary customer-facing department in the digital [...]
Innovation Enhances the Cloud-Based Contact Center Infrastructure Market The past year was excellent for the cloud-based contact center infrastructure (CBCCI) market. DMG had projected that the market would grow by 22% in 2017, and the actual growth rate was 25.4%. The vast majority of the sales were to existing contact centers whose management made the [...]
AI, Automation and Analytics Drive Vast Improvements in Contact Centers The WFO market has come a long way since DMG Consulting began covering this sector 15 years ago. The service economy has undergone many changes, all of which benefit from real-time contact centers, the subject of the book The Real-Time Contact Center, published by Donna [...]
Welcome to 2019! 2019 is looking to be a year filled with great innovation and practical applications for contact centers. Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation will be the driving forces behind much of the innovation and transformation that is anticipated during the year. It’s a year in which the number of contact center seats worldwide [...]
Cloud-Based ACDs and Dialers Come of Age Cloud-based contact center infrastructure (CBCCI) vendors have spent most of the last 20 years playing functional catch-up to the leading on-premise vendors. But this is no longer the case. DMG just completed our annual research on the CBCCI sector (see the Abstract for our most recent report on [...]
It's Time to Replace Traditional QA Contact center quality assurance (QA, also known as quality management (QM)), has been around for over 40 years. The concept and practice of QA is great – using actual agent conversations or written communications to evaluate agents’ performance and provide timely and actionable feedback. The idea has always been [...]
What's New with Workforce Management? 2018 is the most exciting year in decades for the WFM market, with developments in innovation, interest and investment. Vendors are delivering innovation in the form of better user interfaces (UIs) that offer a much-improved experience without sacrificing function. These interfaces are delivering enhanced tools that engage agents and give [...]
The Next Act: The AI-Enabled Contact Center In 2005, 13 years ago, I published the book The Real-Time Contact Center. My goal in sharing the concepts in this book was to provide a technical and operational framework for anyone who uses this “delivery and service” vehicle for customer assistance or sales. The idea behind the [...]
Applications that Improve the Customer Journey Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technology coupled with consumer preference for digital channels, is driving interest in and adoption of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) and a related technology, robotic process automation (RPA). Voice biometrics is another high-tech solution that is going mainstream; a leading bank’s recent ad campaign [...]
The Uberization of Workforce Management In 2015 DMG introduced the concept of adaptive real-time forecasting and scheduling to the market to help companies begin the process of rethinking their contact center staffing challenges. We called this concept the “uberization” of workforce management, as it was conceived with the intent of balancing the “power” between companies [...]
Demystifying GDPR The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in the European Union (EU) on May 25, 2018. Following adoption of this legislation by the Council of the EU and the European Parliament in 2016, companies were given a two-year period to prepare for compliance with this far-reaching privacy and security regulation. What [...]
Will Convergence of Clicks and Bricks be the Death of the Contact Center? We hear everywhere that online shopping is going to eliminate the need for shopping centers, department stores and retail chains, along with their contact centers. It’s well known that the volume of online shopping is growing rapidly, at the same time as [...]
