TMCnet's Asterisk Week in Review

Here’s to 2011, hoping it was a good year for you, and that 2012 will be better. And that the Mayans were wrong.

Here’s a roundup of some news items from the past week that might be of interest to those in the Asterisk community.

In a recent report, Datapipe (News - Alert), a global hosted services provider, revealed that 2012 will likely bring new changes to the cloud technology industry as more organizations deploy varying cloud solutions. While security will continue to be one of next year's biggest priorities, several changes will also occur.

For example, cloud technologies will become more mainstream and the need to label services as cloud-based will likely begin to diminish. Instead, everything will likely be labeled "as-a-service," regardless of whether the solution is software-, infrastructure or unified communications-based, Datapipe noted.

"Last year, we witnessed a growing number of applications -- from enterprise back-office systems, to mobile and social gaming -- begin to use the scale and resilience that cloud technology offers," said Datapipe vice president of cloud strategy Ed Laczynski.

Also, the customer service and contact center workforce is constantly on the lookout for technological innovations that can improve business operations and efficiency.

Still, these organizations are not immune to economic hardships and are often forced to do more with less, leading certain trends in the industry to emerge, DMG Consulting founder Donna Fluss wrote in a recent blog post.

One of these trends is the introduction of new analytics that are designed to help contact center agents gather information that can help them -- along with other sections of the business -- improve customer engagement. Some of these high-quality solutions include text analytics, speech analytics, cross-channel analytics and performance management services, Fluss asserted.

Many companies are debating whether acquiring new customers is as important as retaining loyal ones, even though keeping clients is one of the most commonly reported challenges among organizations.

However, businesses can perform simple tasks in the contact center in order to improve customer satisfaction, Loyalty 360 (News - Alert) reported.

Today, interactions are the basis of all loyalty programs, often requiring the contact center to take the lead on customer engagement efforts. In fact, research has proven that clients who have a satisfying experience with a contact center agent are more likely to buy additional products and services from the company in the future, Loyalty 360 noted.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.