Elizabeth Herrell Quotations

Companies need to start with the existing customer experience on their systems and build back the tools, technologies, and processes that will help them communicate better with their customers. Technology can only support a process that works. If the process is broken, technology cannot solve the problem.

It's the business or marketing unit that wants intelligence on the customers. There are still a lot of contact centers that are not integrated with the business unit. It's still considered an expense.

If companies work with outsourcers to build a structure that requires accent neutralization, cultural affinity, and a company product background -- if it makes the investment in their people -- then the performance could be good. But if they are merely going to a lowest-cost location, to an area that has already been mined for agents with English proficiency, then their customer service will falter.

Airlines have done this well for a long time. If I only want to know gate information, I can go in and say, 'Flight at 10:45' and get the info without even needing to know the flight number.

They want a common platform, but I'm not sure all the applications on that platform will be theirs.

SIP is going to force these vendors to stop being so proprietary.

Unified messaging is really an old architecture. It has been around since the mid-'90s. There is a shift happening, because Microsoft is getting into the business. Still, you can't really say that things will change overnight.

Initially, the contact center was considered a service organization and was asked to do that as efficiently as possible. Quality monitoring as a contact center application is still very much involved in the initial goal of improving customer-facing processes. But importantly, it now has higher value for deriving customer intelligence.

Having customers get caught up in a tangle of commands and layers and never getting to an agent has been a constant source of frustration for years. But don't shoot the technology.