Top Analysts

Covering theContact Center Industry

Sponsored by:Call-Back Solutions for the Call Center

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“ Just by following the blogs and tweets from these highly regarded contact center analysts, you’ll get tremendous insight into the latest best practices, stats and trends!

Shai BergerCo-Founder & CEO, Fonolo

@shaiberger

Congratulations to the 16 who were selected!1. Jon Arnold2. Bruce Belfiore3. Keith Dawson4. Donna Fluss5. Sandra Gustavsen6. Ian Jacobs7. Nancy Jamison8. Irwin Lazar9. Kate Leggett10.Michael Maoz11.Sheila McGee-Smith12.Dave Michels13.Dan Miller14.Blair Pleasant15.Art Schoeller16.Paul Stockford

* Listed in alphabetical order

Jon Arnold

“ ... building a customer-centric culture is not just about the contact center; it extends to everyone in the organization. Agents may represent the front door of CX for contact center engagement…

Independent Industry AnalystFocus: UC, Call Center, SIP, & VoIPWeb: www.jarnoldassociates.com

@arnoldjon

Bruce Belfiore

“ You can only manage what you measure and you need to measure regularly or you aren’t really managing. Many managers are missing major insights into their operations (and foregoing major savings) by not figuring out and following the proper metrics for their centers.

CEO, BenchmarkPortalFocus: Contact Center BenchmarkingWeb: http://www.benchmarkportal.com/

@BenchmarkPortal

Keith Dawson

“ … the dark pool of customer interactions … is the tip of the iceberg. Understanding how customers are engaging requires a great deal more data gathering, analysis, and coordination between service, sales, and marketing departments.

Principal Analyst, 451 ResearchFocus: Customer Experience, Customer Service, Call Center Web: 451Research.com

@keithdawson

@fonolo

Top 10 Customer Service Trends for

2017Download Your Copy

Donna Fluss

“ Customer service has to start at the top, but it has to involve ongoing conversations with customer-facing staff. Too often, contact center executives say ‘we did this for our reps because we know what they need,’ but in reality, they don’t.

CEO, DMG Consulting LLCFocus: Contact Center, Back-Office, AnalyticsWeb: http://www.dmgconsult.com/

@DMGConsultLLC

Sandra Gustavsen

“ There are obvious budgetary advantages to selecting a cloud solution – reduced capital expenses, fewer IT personnel and predictable per-user monthly fees, to name a few. But, there are also strategic advantages in terms of scale, consistency across a network and the ease of adding future innovations that are particularly appealing to organizations with multiple, geographically-dispersed offices and remotely-located employees such as contact center agents and supervisors.

Industry Analyst, Technology WriterFocus: IP Phone Systems, Cloud & Unified Communications Web: http://www.gbusinessvoip.com/

@smgustavsen

Ian Jacobs

“ We use Web self-service, and we use voice self-service; we use virtual agents, and we use peer-to-peer support in customer communities. To be fair, we continue to be more satisfied with the experience of speaking to contact center agents than we are with self-service, yet we continue to move toward agentless interactions.

Prinicpal Analyst, Forrester ResearchFocus: Customer Experience TechnologiesWeb: https://www.forrester.com/Ian-Jacobs

@iangjacobs

Nancy Jamison

“ Customers are dictating the transformation of contact centers and companies are responding by stepping up from a multi-channel approach to omni-channel engagement, which is vital to seamlessly interact with customers from channel to channel without loss of interoperability or history.

Principal Analyst, Frost & SullivanFocus: Contact Center, Speech Tech, & Social MediaWeb: www.frost.com

@nancyjami

say “just ONE unpleasant contact

center experience is likely to make me take

my business elsewhere.”

76%

Irwin Lazar

“ Unified communication leaders that proactively plan for growing use of APIs and CPaaS in 2017 will also find themselves better positioned to support digital transformation plans. UC leaders that proactively plan for growing use of APIs and CPaaS in 2017 will also find themselves better positioned to support digital transformation plans.

VP and Service Director, Nemertes ResearchFocus: Unified Communications & Contact Center Web: www.nemertes.com/analysts/irwin-lazar

@imlazar

Kate Leggett

“ Customers hold the power in their relationships with businesses. Today, it's not enough for businesses to deliver products. Customers expect them to deliver outcomes and success. To do this, businesses must understand who the customer is, what their pain points are in achieving their business goals, and must help them choose the right products to meet their goals. The relationship does not stop there. Businesses must ensure that a new customer is properly onboarded, and is realizing ongoing value from their purchase.

VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester ResearchFocus: Customer Service: Trends, Research, & TechnologyWeb: forrester.com/kate_leggett

@kateleggett

Michael Maoz

“ “You can reinvent your mobile strategy any time, because the applications that you had one, two, or three years ago are gone anyway. It’s like the mobile phone… just like you threw away your clunky Nokia, then went to the BlackBerry, then went to your iPhone or Samsung, you can throw out mobile applications, start over, iterate: it’s all good.”

VP and Analyst, GartnerFocus: Cloud Apps, Social Media, & MobilityWeb: blogs.gartner.com/michael_maoz/

@mimaoz

Sheila McGee-Smith

“ More than ever before, customer experience is part of every department in a business; it is no longer part of an isolated silo. Building the bridge to marketing, IT and web applications is difficult but absolutely required. The one tip I have for every customer experience professional is to find the Internet of Things (IoT) project that is happening in your business…that will impact customer experience…and get involved with it.

President and Principal Analyst, McGee-Smith AnalyticsFocus: Contact Center & Enterprise CommunicationsWeb: www.mcgeesmith.com

@mcgeesmith

63% of customers prefer getting acall-back to waiting on hold.

Dave Michels

“ A key value to workstream messaging is indeed unified communications, or perhaps more precisely, unified conversations. Messaging is newly preferred, but existing modalities are not going away. The solutions that don’t support voice today will likely do so in the future one way or another, so it’s worth adding telephony into the evaluation criteria.

President, TalkingPointzFocus: Cloud Services, SMB Voice, & Unified Communications Web: http://www.talkingpointz.com

@davemichels

Dan Miller

“ Companies that are thinking about biometrics for authentication are well counseled to think about how they refresh their stored information, and inform their customers periodically that they’re using their voiceprints, just to keep everything transparent, above board and useful.

Lead Analyst & Founder, Opus ResearchFocus: Conversational Commerce & Voice BiometricsWeb: OpusResearch.net

@dnm54

Blair Pleasant

“ To best serve their multi-location customers, carriers and service providers using old IVR platforms with thousands of ports that are coming to end of life need to move to new cloud solutions that offer scalability, elasticity, and reliability…Architecture matters, so whether you’re a carrier, service provider, or multi-location business, be sure to find the best architecture to meet your needs, and the right platform that can be used to create the best IVR applications and call handling capabilities to result in the business outcomes desired.

Principal Analyst, CommfusionFocus: Call Center, Unified Communications, & CollaborationWeb: www.commfusion.com

@blairplez

Art Schoeller

“ [UC deployments] fail because users can ignore you and you lose the benefits … You have to establish and [invest] in a change-management program.

Principal Analyst, Forrester ResearchFocus: Unified Communications & Call Center TechnologyWeb: Forrester.com

@forrester

Paul Stockford

“ By investing in appropriate workforce enhancement solutions and keeping a finger on the pulse of agent sentiment, contact center executives have the opportunity to effectively address a problem that has plagued the industry since the beginning. In 2017, workforce issues will need to be considered equally with customer service issues. It’s time to focus on optimizing both the agent experience and the customer experience.

Chief Analyst, Saddletree ResearchFocus: Contact Center, CRM, & Social MediaWeb: www.saddletreeresearch.com

@paulstockford

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