Top Analysts Covering the Contact Center Industry for 2016

Top Analysts

Covering theContact Center Industry

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“ The call center industry is blessed with a large and engaged analyst community. Just by following their blogs and tweets, you’ll get tremendous insight into the latest best practices, stats and trends!

Shai BergerCo-Founder & CEO, Fonolo

@shaiberger

Congratulations to the 20 who were selected!1. Jon Arnold2. Bruce Belfiore3. Aphrodite Brinsmead4. Keith Dawson5. Lisa Durant6. Donna Fluss7. Paul Greenberg8. Sandra Gustavsen9. Ian Jacobs10.Nancy Jamison11.Irwin Lazar12.Kate Leggett13.Michael Maoz14.Sheila McGee-Smith15.Dave Michels16.Dan Miller17.Blair Pleasant18.Art Rosenberg19.Art Schoeller20.Paul Stockford

* Listed in alphabetical order

Jon Arnold

“ What customers really want is to communicate on their terms and come away feeling that the agent is on the same page. When agents have a full complement of UC tools to work with, they can put customers at ease right away, regardless of how they are getting in touch.

Independent Industry AnalystFocus: UC, Call Center, SIP, & VoIPWeb: JonArnold-analyst.blogspot.ca

@arnoldjon

Bruce Belfiore

“ There are literally thousands of contact centers that are on (or over) the cusp of needing advanced workforce management systems. Continuing to spreadsheet your workforce needs as your center grows and becomes more complex may seem like a thrifty thing to do – but it isn’t. Some of the best returns on investment (ROIs) from contact center investments come from installing appropriate WFM systems.

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

@BenchmarkPortal

Aphrodite Brinsmead

“ The cloud as a deployment model has matured …Although contact centers face barriers with complexity, security of customer data, legacy investments and strict technology budgets, these concerns are gradually being pushed aside as providers focus on delivering reliable, scalable cloud contact center technologies.

Principal Analyst, Customer Engagement, OvumFocus: Customer Interactions, Technology, & Contact CenterWeb: Ovum.com

@diteb

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, Customer Engagement, Ovum Focus: Contact Center Technologies & Customer ExperienceWeb: Ovum.com

@keithdawson

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Lisa Durant

“ With 52% of companies using IP Automatic Call Distributors (ACDs) and another 38% using mixed IP/TDM ACD platforms, it’s safe to say that IP ACDs are becoming commonplace.

Research Analyst, Nemertes ResearchFocus: Contact Center & Unified CommunicationsWeb: http://www.nemertes.com/analysts/lisa-durant

@LisaEDurant

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

Paul Greenberg

“ Customer's voices, amplified by social media, now trump even the cleverest of marketing. Combine that with a massive surge towards subscription and freemium models, increasing saturation of digital marketing channels, increased competition and decreasing customer loyalty, and you have the recipe for an era where users, not brands, wield unprecedented power.

President, The 56 Group, CRM and SCRM AuthorFocus: CRM, Social CRM, & Customer ServiceWeb: http://the56group.typepad.com/

@pgreenbe

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

“ Although the contact center was born and raised in the telephony world, it looks to be spending its dotage trying to handle consumers’ growing preferences for communication channels such as web chat, SMS, social media, email, and eventually video. For contact center pros, these digital channels present a particularly thorny problem because… marketing and strategy teams have staked their claim to ‘owning’ many of these emerging channels, despite the fact that customer service requests come in via these channels in ever-increasing volumes.

Senior Analyst, ForresterFocus: 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 and SullivanFocus: Contact Center, Speech Tech, & Social MediaWeb: www.frost.com

@nancyjami

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Irwin Lazar

“ Today we communicate with our merchants via a variety of means – Facebook, Twitter, chat, maybe even video, in addition to voice… Harmonization between these isolated customer engagement … as new platforms continue to emerge ….including Moxie, Oracle’s Right Now, and Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud compet[ing] with the more traditional CRM vendors including Aspect, Avaya, Cisco, and Genesys.

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

@imlazar

Kate Leggett

“ In 2015, we found that web and mobile self-service interactions exceeded interactions over live-assist channels, which are increasingly used by customers as escalation paths to answer harder questions whose answers they can’t find online. In 2016, customer service organizations will make self-service easier for customers to use by shoring up its foundations and solidifying their knowledge-management strategy.

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

@kateleggett

Michael Maoz

“ The Customer Engagement Center is another way of saying a Customer Service and Support software suite. We had called it the CRM Customer Service Contact Center MQ for nearly 15 years, but then in 2012 our client requests were starting to move away from phone, chat, email and search and over to questions about the future of support across mobile devices, within peer-to-peer networks, on social media channels, via sensors in a world of IoT

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

@mimaoz

Sheila McGee-Smith

“ Creating a better customer experience is not just about providing context to an agent--heck, a screen-pop can do that. Better customer experience is about understanding what is going on with the customer and having a rules engine that can trigger different ways to resolve the customer concern.

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

@mcgeesmith

@fonolo

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Dave Michels

“ Modern communications are much less about features, and much more about flexibility. Applications are, of course, still critically important, but they should be evaluated from a toolbox perspective because what you think you need today almost certainly is not what you will need tomorrow.

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

@davemichels

Dan Miller

“ Customers equate ‘service quality’ with quick resolution of their problems by a live agent. If they are put on hold, confronted with confusing options or delivered to an individual who is not up-to-speed with their requirements, they think less of your company and its brand.

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

@dnm54

Blair Pleasant

“ Social channels are by their nature public, and interactions over social media can be viewed by anyone and everyone. A poor customer service experience can be viewed by hundreds, or thousands of people. Finding the right agents with the right skills to interact with customers in this public forum is essential. Where possible, social customer care interactions should be handled by specialized social customer agents who are specially trained and skilled for social media.

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

@blairplez

Art Rosenberg

“ As much as business communications are still in a state of transition from legacy, location-based telephony just between people to new, mobile, multimodal interactions between people and self-service online apps, there is a need to accommodate both old and new forms of accessing live assistance. The key to customer satisfaction is not necessarily just to reduce the actual wait time, but also to let the customer do other things before it is time to interact with a live person, commonly known as “virtual queuing” with callbacks.

Principal Analyst, The Unified-ViewFocus: Call Center, Voicemail, & Unified CommunicationsWeb: http://www.ucstrategies.com/

@artrosenberg

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

“ Omnichannel customer engagement means the customer’s entire journey is tracked across channels in order to create a consistent, optimized experience... The net result is a comprehensive view of the customer journey from end-to-end…Given the evolution of customer preferences and expectations…omnichannel is no longer a contact center option, it’s a necessity.

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

@paulstockford

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