We have all seen the analyst studies showing the huge growth of non-voice channels. But statistics can be read a number of ways: a channel with 5% usage that grows to 10% usage has an amazing 100% growth rate; but it still only 10% of usage.

Surveys show that voice still accounts for over 50% of customers’ interaction with the customer engagement organization. Add in self-service and proactive outbound, and the voice percentage remains a healthy part of your interaction payload.

So now, let’s look at customer satisfaction with the voice channel. Customers want to get things done fast and easy. They want your customer service to be reachable, responsive, and relevant and to recognize who they are and want they need. But most customer service organization fall short of this simple goal.

Let’s face it – we are all disappointed with the customer experiences we encounter in our daily life. 

But I am here to... read more >

I just returned from Genesys’ annual Sales Kickoff event and I am totally stoked about our mission for 2012 and beyond --- Saving the world from bad customer service.

How do we plan to do that? By helping you deliver conversations that matter with your customers.

Conversations that Matter

We all remember the early days of call centers. Although they solved some problems, what they really did was deliver superficial conversations where you managed calls and queues. You didn’t have any real knowledge of the customer so you ended up asking lots of questions to simply start the conversation.

If you strive to better understand your customer, then you have probably moved to the phase of casual conversation. With casual engagement you have a limited understanding of who the customer is; you might know their name and their account number. And you can engage in a few different channels. But the engagement is still very disjoint... read more >

Is your customer engagement operation challenged by rapidly changing technology and rapidly emerging communication channels? How do you, a business manager, ensure that technical barriers to providing innovation in the customer engagement process are removed or reduced? With your focus on achieving SLAs, who has time to figure out IT development projects that enable you to deliver better engagement experience for your customers and your agents?

The demand continues to grow for well-integrated solutions and strategies that “stitch together” disparate customer and business data sources and applications in order to drive contact center efficiency, increase client satisfaction, and accelerate business innovation.  Contact centers need to do more with less while still meeting service levels and eliminating customer frustration.

Did you know an open platform built on industry standards enables contact centers to exploit this opportunity?

... read more >

We want to welcome you to our next journey – changing the conversation.

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is jumping into the blogosphere this week with the introduction of our new blog site. Watch this space for ongoing discussions about the solutions and products we deliver to the market -- from contact center solutions that engage, optimize and align customer relationships to engage your customers --  to communications solutions that enable, collaborate, and streamline enterprise communications to create collaborative conversations --  to networking solutions that deliver, secure and manage networks to optimize performance dynamically.

I am introducing a new blog series authored by my esteemed colleagues in the Genesys Product Marketing team. These blogs will present a series of intriguing topics related to changing the conversation with your customers. No matter what your market or industry, technology and social norms are rapidly changing the ... read more >