Winners and Losers – October 2011

Our mail bag was full this month of ‘good news’ stories.

Here we tell you about Novacroft, Prolog, Red Box Recorders, Eclipse Marketing, Nexidia & Teleopti, Aastra, Data8, PH Media, InVision Software and a finally, a Magic Quadrant ’round up’.

The Royal British Legion appoints Eclipse for contact centre support

Eclipse Marketing has been appointed to provide a support line for its recently launched charity single in aid of the 2011 Poppy Appeal.

The charity single encourages people in the UK and across the world to phone in and sing the chorus to Abi Phillip’s upcoming release ‘Coming Home’.  All the voices are then combined to create a unique chorus line on Abi’s single.

Comments Lee Booth on behalf of The Royal British Legion: “We’re really proud of the campaign but of course fully understand that we need an external support line to ensure our contributors are able to speak to someone if any issues arise. Eclipse has stepped in to assist and have provided an excellent resource to complement this campaign.”

Penny Hutton, Strategy and Planning Director, Eclipse Marketing, said: “The Royal British Legion does such brilliant work and it is an honour for us to be part of this campaign. We’re happy to offer our support in any way that we can and ensure that this project is as successful as it can be.”

Prolog entered a team of nine for the Cancer Research UK Shine London 2011 Half Marathon

One of the team members, Sam McBride, who has worked for the Prolog for over 16 years in Sudbury, and who battled with breast cancer at the age of 34, commented: “I began to fund-raise for breast cancer charities in 2007 and took part in the 26-mile Moonwalk through London in 2008. So far, I have raised over £3,000 for charity and look forward to raising more with my fellow team mates from Prolog”.  To add an element of excitement to their 26-mile challenge, the team members, including Commercial Director Ian Dignum, dressed up in 80s Neon Rave.

Novacroft wins contact centre contracts with Northern Rail and Assertis

Novacroft is providing contact centre services and customer relations support to customers purchasing Northern Rail tickets online. Novacroft’s Card Management System (CMS), InNovator, is being used to log calls. The contact centre services provided by Novacroft are supporting Northern Rail’s launch of online retailing of tickets (a first for Northern Rail), whilst Northern Rail’s ticket purchasing website is using the Assertis front end.

Red Box Recorders named in Sunday Times Top 100

Iain Worthington

Red Box Recorders has been awarded a place in the 11th annual Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100 league table, which ranks one hundred of Britain’s privately owned technology, media and telecoms (TMT) companies with the fastest- growing sales over the last three years.

It is the first time that Red Box’s success has been recognised in the league tables and it is the only digital voice recording, storage and retrieval company to appear this year.

Iain Worthington, co-founder and CEO at Red Box, said: “Red Box Recorders is a refreshing challenger brand that is confronting industry norms and traditional boundaries in the digital recording sector to deliver straightforward, flexible, reliable and affordable voice recording solutions. It is our belief that within the digital recording marketplace, too many solutions are too complex and costly for most businesses. Much of our success is down to our approach of being clear, down-to-earth and practical, which translates directly into the technology solutions that we offer. As a result, we have developed a simple, smarter approach to delivering realistically priced solutions to meet the precise needs of customers.”

Nexidia and Teleopti partner to offer “best of breed” contact centre agent performance management

Nexidia’s performance-measuring applications enhance Teleopti’s skills-based contact centre agent forecasting and scheduling, while Teleopti’s schedule adherence metrics drive greater performance management with Nexidia Evaluate.

“By combining Nexidia’s sophisticated speech analytics capabilities with Teleopti’s workforce management solutions, our clients discover the necessary information needed to improve interactions between agents and customers,” said Magnus Geverts, president, Teleopti Inc. “As customer satisfaction increases, businesses will in turn experience a better return on investment.”

“Legacy quality monitoring and workforce scheduling systems are too proprietary and static for businesses that must be nimble,” said Jon Ezrine, Nexidia’s senior vice president and chief operating officer. “Contact centres need the agility and open access that best-of-breed solutions can provide in order to quickly unlock the information contained in customer interactions, so they can drive agent performance improvements and ensure a greater customer experience.”

Data8 director cycles coast to coast

Richard Hartland

Richard Hartland, technical director at data8, is hoping to raise over £1,000 for Anthony Nolan by cycling, off road, from Whitehaven to Tynemouth. Anthony Nolan runs the UK’s largest and most successful stem cell register. They use it to save lives by matching donors to people who desperately need a lifesaving stem cell or bone marrow transplant.

Hartland said, “Having not even owned a bike since I was a child, I have convinced myself that I will be able to manage the ride from Whitehaven on the west coast of England to Sunderland on the east, and to make it interesting it is nearly all off road”.

He continued, “At just 8 weeks old my nephew Josh was diagnosed with a life-threatening and extremely rare disease called HLH. Through Anthony Nolan a search was made for a donor with matching tissue type and a worldwide search found a perfect match in Germany. Josh had his transplant at 5 months old. He overcame many hurdles in his first year of life and is now a very energetic and gorgeous 6-year-old boy”.

John Lewis selects InVision Software

InVision Software was selected by John Lewis to implement a demand-oriented workforce management (WFM) software for scheduling the 800 agents at its newly established two main contact centres.

The responsibility for handling incoming customer calls was moved from the John Lewis stores to two new contact centres in Scotland (Hamilton) and Didsbury near Manchester in June 2010.

“An excellent service as well as high customer satisfaction is essential for our day-to-day-business. Therefore, the satisfaction and motivation of our employees is very important to us as well”, explains Michael Bullard, Resource Planning Manager at John Lewis. “With the help of the workforce management system InVision Enterprise WFM, we are able to provide the required service quality by optimising the scheduling of our agents, considering their working time and holiday requests at the same time.”

PH Media group and Rita Simons in front of the BT Tower

PH Media raises awareness of hearing loss

PH Media Group has been raising money for people who are deaf and hard of hearing by scaling the steps to the top of London’s iconic BT Tower.

Staff from the company’s Manchester head office and regional London office climbed the tower’s 842 steps in aid of their chosen charity, Action on Hearing Loss, taking around 10 minutes to climb 581ft up the tower’s fire escape.

Ryan Smith, Regional Director for PH Media Group, said, “The climb has been a real challenge for the team but we’ve had great fun doing it and we’re delighted we’ve been able to raise funds for our favourite charity. How could we refuse when the opportunity arose; a company that produces telephone on-hold messages climbing the BT Tower?”

Aastra is finalist in Comms National Awards

Aastra is nominated in the Telephony System of the Year category for the Aastra 400 series of IP Communication Servers.

Commenting on the finalist status, Colin Mann, Marketing Manager for Aastra UK and Ireland, said, “We are delighted to be chosen as finalists in the prestigious Comms National Awards. The new Aastra 400 Series of IP Communication Servers is Aastra’s main offering for the SMB market, providing secure IP communications and has enjoyed huge success with our channel partners and their customers since launch earlier this year. We look forward to the awards presentation with optimism that the judges will also recognise the excellence of the Aastra 400 series.”

Magic Quadrant News

A number of companies have been mentioned in the news this week for position in the Magic Quadrant.

These include

• Alcatel-Lucent positioned in the Leaders quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony
• RightNow is recognised as a Leader in 2011 Magic Quadrant for CRM Web Customer Service
• eGain positioned in the Leaders quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for CRM Web Customer Service
• Presence Technology is positioned in the Visionaries quadrant of CRM Web Customer Service Magic Quadrant
• Moxie Software positioned in the Leaders quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for CRM Web Customer Service
• Eptica positioned in Leading Analyst Firm’s Magic Quadrant for CRM Web Customer Service

12 Oct 2011 - Filed under Call Centre News

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