I wasn't supposed to read about inContact...but I did anyway

I recently received a brochure, which I initially assumed was an invitation to some training seminar. I began reading it..and then saw that the brochure was "Exclusively for Contact Center Managers."

I continued reading anyway, even though I don't manage a contact center. But it's good to see what is happening in other industries.

I soon discovered that this was not a seminar advertisement, but an advertisement to use the customer contact services of the company inContact. And despite the unique nature of the customer contact industry, the story is one that we've seen elsewhere - companies with silos of different information that don't work toegher, resulting in poor deliveries to potential customers.

From my years attending Oracle OpenWorld, I knew Oracle's solution to this - get all or part of THE STACK. Oracle's standard-compliant software all works together, and if you insist on keeping your own software, Oracle pieces can work with your pieces also.

It turns out the pitch to call centers is similar, although inContact adds another wrinkle by using a word even more potent than STACK - inContact uses the word CLOUD.

Now you know and I know that the cloud, in and of itself, cannot cure cancer, feed hungry children, or improve your call center performance. In fact, while perusing through the brochure, the only feature that was specific to the cloud was scalability to meet peak demand.

The brochure was meant to pique the interest of your average call center manager, but since I'm not a call center manager, I couldn't really complete the offered assessment. Instead, I went to inContact's web site and looked at the company's list of solutions that it offers. And inContact has a host (heh) of solutions:

Blended Predictive Dialer
Use the best calling method to reach out to your customers.

Contact Center Infrastructure
Reduce costs and improve customer interactions.

CRM Integrated Contact Center Solutions
Personalize customer interactions with CRM data.

Disaster Recovery
Get 99.99% guaranteed availability and disaster protection.

ECHO Customer Satisfaction Feedback Survey
Drive loyalty and insight via the voice of your customer.

Interactive Voice Response Solutions
Give callers a flexible customized self-service experience.

Multi-Channel ACD
Quickly match customers to agents who can best help them.

Network Connectivity
Contact center software and telecom from one provider.

Personal Connection™ Outbound Solution
With Personal Connection, your customers will never hear a delay again

Quality Monitoring
Gain insight into your processes and customer interactions.

Reporting & Analytics
Get critical information for making business decisions.

Supervisor On-The-Go™ Mobile Application
Supervisor On-The-Go™ is a mobile application that untethers managers

Workforce Management
Align staffing with the work needs of your contact center.

Workforce Optimization Software
Improve everything that impacts the customer experience.

What does this mean? I tried to find a review of inContact software, but all of the "reviews" that I found seemed to list all of the good things about inContact, but none of the bad things. (In inContact's defense, it's quite possible that no one is performing independent reviews of ANY customer contact solutions.)

Oh well. On average, people seem to enjoy working there...