Heard & Overheard

"You can have terabytes of data, but if it [stinks], what good is it? Companies have to get back to the process of keeping that data clean." -- Sheryl Kingstone, CRM program manager, The Yankee Group "If a customer has a bad experience with a CSR, or their needs are not being met, they will tell an average of thirteen people about the bad experience. And about one-third of the population will tell about twenty-eight people...you do not want people to be badmouthing your organization." -- Dianne Durkin, president, Loyalty Factor "We really see Voice over IP today as the transport rather than the enabler, but I think what Voice over IP is allowing contact centers to do is to provide the flexibility for agents to be deployed anywhere, as opposed to PSTN, which is very restrictive in terms of a physical site with agents located at that specific location." -- Karen Hardy, director of product marketing, Aspect Communications "The customer experience or contact center functionality will not materially change. The real revolution will come when businesses realize the strategic importance of the contact center and the customer interaction data to the enterprise." -- Shlomo Shamir, Ph.D., president and CEO, NICE Systems "The implementation, migration, and integration projects required to move to a pure VoIP infrastructure are daunting, especially in call centers where service availability requires 99.99 percent up-time, and where customer service metrics are always under surveillance. The magnitude of these projects will dictate a phasing out of existing investments, so that even contact centers that have already made the decision to move to VoIP infrastructure will not yet realize the full impact for several years' time. -- Joanie Rufo, director of strategic marketing, Amdocs