The Evolution of Call Centres #9

Welcome to The Evolution of Call Centres where I round up some of the more interesting and appealing news stories from the world of Call Centres, Cloud Computing and Hosted Contact Centres, sometimes adding a little commentary but always grouping the stories together in easy to digest snippets of information, knowledge, insight and ideas.

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking on Social Media and Community at Westbrook's Force For Good event. It was held in the amazing Royal Military Academy Sandhurst which is packed full of history and all too real reminders of the human impact of war. It was a fitting location to gather together some of the most innovative and outreaching organisation, companies and people who are all passionate about social change. The common thread that binds them together is the Salesforce cloud CRM platform.

Mingling with the delegates during the event opened my eyes to some of the amazing things people are doing to help local communities, African school children, Indian farmers and dis-advantaged youths across the UK to name but a few.

It was great to see how the Cloud based system, Salesforce, is helping these people to collaborate, centralise their data and open the data/systems to a distributed work force and volunteer community. Without the power of the Cloud many of the people I spoke to would be using local Access databases, email communications and sadly, losing the real time data analysis and collection that happens on the ground. The access to real time data was a theme that really stood out from the event, something cloud systems excel at.

Anyway, check out the Westbrook website for more on the event and the organisations involved, and a big thanks for inviting me to speak.

Creative Environments

Working in an environment where you have autonomy to make decisions yet feel safe to air ideas and concerns without disapproval is an environment I believe many people strive to work in. Here's a short article about such an environment. It does link out to a registration wall but the short article might encourage some searching on the subject.

Cold Snap

Here in the UK we seem to be entering a state of emergency about speculation that we could see early snow fall and severely cold winters. Back to the good old days, some might say. But it raises an interesting discussion point for many businesses.

Are you prepared for events like this? Could your business operate with minimal on-site staff whilst supporting remote working for the remainder?

One of the greatest aspects of working on a Cloud based system is that I can work from anywhere with it; just like our end users can. In extreme weather or other incidents that stop staff getting to the office, cloud is enabling many businesses to continue with an almost full service as well as helping to make this remote working the norm.

Many businesses don't even have an office. They employ the best people for the job, rather than the best person within X miles of the office. This kind of distributed workforce is becoming more commonplace and cloud is being heralded as the great empowerer.

Bad Service + Good Product = Bad Service

Interesting little article which looks at whether improved services and products makes a difference if your customer service is bad.

Open Systems, Oracle and Salesforce

Interesting article about Oracle entering the cloud markets, how this affects Salesforce and the new trend to open as much about your service/systems as possible.

Accents

This article about which is the best voice for on hold messages is brilliant. Male or Female? Which county? Which country? Pro or staff member? Great stuff.

Expo

NewVoiceMedia will be out in force at this years Call Centre Expo in London this Tuesday and Wednesday. Our very own Jonathan Gale will be doing a presentation on Contact Centres in the Cloud and Alex Dixon from Cruise 118 will be doing a talk on home working.

Our stand is looking awesome and we've got some very cool stuff happening on and around the stand. We'll be doing demos, talking all things cloud, evangelising hosted solutions and generally bringing a storm to the call centre industry. Why not pop over and say "Hi"?