Report claims Avaya on path to implosion

by Eugene Liu December 12, 2011

A few days ago I stumbled upon a report on Jeff Hawkes’ (of Sonic Management Group) blog about a near-taboo topic in telecom: the health of Avaya, and whether the business is spiraling toward implosion. Surprisingly, I haven’t seen or heard much discussion in the telecom blogosphere and tweetverse about this report, which is a [...]

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European cloud now available from inContact

by Eugene Liu December 8, 2011

Frohe Wiehnachten from inContact — the company announced the availability of its European cloud! Not an easy feat considering the agreement was made with Siemens Enterprise Communications just half a year ago. According to the company’s 10-Q filing, it had to borrow $2.5 million in October 2011 to finance the European cloud buildout (Siemens guaranteed [...]

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SAP buys SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion

by Eugene Liu December 3, 2011

I’m with Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch on this — yawn (gotta love her choice of permalink too): I think this means that it provides enterprise software for human resources, but you can never be too sure withthese incredibly dull companies. I am too bored to Google it. In fact, I am literally bored to tears writing [...]

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LucyPhone enables virtual queuing with just SMS

by Eugene Liu December 1, 2011

People who hate being on hold when dealing with a company’s customer service love LucyPhone. The Oristian brothers created the virtual queuing solution to address the frustration from consumers dealing with IVRs and ACDs. Armed with the LucyPhone app on their Androids or iPhones, consumers can have the ever-patient Lucy stay in queue while they [...]

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Microsoft Tellme talks itself into embarrassment against Siri

by Eugene Liu November 29, 2011

The Xbox 360 is great. And with Kinect it’s phenomenal. But for Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie to dismiss Apple Siri and brag about Tellme in Windows smartphones? Utter embarrassment, especially coming from an executive who’s supposed to be the technology visionary of the company. (Heck, we all know Ballmer isn’t the guy.) [...]

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Microsoft Lync coming to multiple mobile platforms soon?

by Eugene Liu November 28, 2011

Microsoft’s Office Communicator evolved into Lync and has gained traction in competing against other UC products. Considering that Microsoft is a software company and not a communications firm, it’s quite an impressive feat. Lync was one of the most anticipated UC products at Enterprise Connect 2011, and the keynote presentation was one of the most [...]

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Customer service Thanksgiving

by Eugene Liu November 23, 2011

What developments in customer service are you thankful for? Is it a technology, a process, a methodology, or even a person? Here are some things I’m thankful for: Speech recognition – Helps in those situations where you’re driving and need to find out your account balance, flight itinerary, or simply when you feel lonely and [...]

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Verizon picks inContact to offer ‘Virtual Contact Center’ services

by Eugene Liu November 18, 2011

Yesterday Verizon and inContact announced a deal for Verizon to offer “Virtual Contact Center” services based on inContact’s cloud platform. To me it’s an interesting partnership for the following reasons: inContact has not shown up much on industry analysts’ radars. It gets mentioned in many analyst research reports, but primary because it has partnerships with [...]

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Hacking Siri into bits (and bytes)

by Eugene Liu November 15, 2011

Besides the significant hardware upgrades, the other selling point of the Apple iPhone 4S is Siri, the speech-enabled assistant that can help you schedule appointments, set reminders, read and compose SMS, and many other tasks. The technology is essentially a massive (considering how many iPhone 4S users are there in the U.S.) cloud-based speech recognition [...]

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Proactive, pre-emptive customer service

by Eugene Liu November 11, 2011

Most companies establish contact centers to handle all those inbound customer service requests, whether it’s calls, emails, or otherwise. But when tons of money and effort is being spent on the design and implementation of a world-class contact center, are there discussions on how to proactively pre-emptive an inbound interaction? In other words, pushing service [...]

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