Summary:
Internet Retailer’s Top500Guide.com® is the only source of information on the largest e-retailers in the U.S. and Canada and provides multiple years’ worth of sales, performance, product, and vendor data for the largest sites in e-retailing. Part of the Internet Retailer family of products, Top500Guide.com® offers the same authoritative and objective information that retailers have come to expect from Internet Retailer, InternetRetailer.com and the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition.
LINK: http://www.top500guide.com/
I spoke with Darius Lahoutifard today, the CEO of Altadyn. His company makes 3DXPlorer, an application that essentially lets companies deploy ‘out of the box’ virtual worlds. 3DXPlorer can be used for such things as virtual meetings, but what interested me the most is how the technology can be applied to online customer engagement. From the Altadyn/3DXPlorer website:
Web 3.0 = web3D
Web 3.0, the third generation of the Web built upon tools like the 3DXplorer platform, enables corporations to finally bridge this gap, leveraging immersive 3D to directly engage prospects and customers in a personal and entertaining environment. Rather than relying on limited tools to track anonymous web visitors, for the first time, Web 3.0 and 3DXplorer make immersive 3D available to every company. Web 3.0 extends the web to a personal, interactive environment, where individuals, both end-users and consumers and corporate representatives, can express themselves in a manner similar to the way they do in everyday life when conducting a face-to-face meeting, attending a seminar or walking into a store.
You can demo the 3DXPlorer technology for FREE at http://www.3dxplorer.com/
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FROM: http://springwise.com/weekly/2009-03-04.htm#processaway
As if phones didn’t already do enough, one of the latest mobile apps transforms iPhones and iPod Touches into portable charge card terminals. ProcessAway plugs into Authorize.net’s payment processing platform, allowing entrepreneurs to accept credit card payments anywhere they can access the internet.
After downloading the app and (separately) setting up a merchant account with Authorize.net, clients can use ProcessAway like a traditional charge card terminal: enter the amount, input the card number, expiry date and verification code, and process. There’s even a tip option for service businesses. Customers receive an email receipt for each transaction, and merchants can view transactions and process refunds on the fly. Aware that consumers might be weary of having their credit card details punched into a phone, ProcessAway stresses that’s a secure application: information is never stored in the phone and the program won’t connect to anything other than the terminal.
If it can gain trust and acceptance, ProcessAway could be particularly useful for those who need to process and authorise payments on-the-go, like on-site consultants or handymen. It’s also useful at venues that don’t have fixed terminals: antique shows, market stalls and music merchandise stands.
ProcessAway is available from Apple’s App Store for USD 19.99, and Authorize.net collects its usual transaction fees. ProcessAway isn’t the only one playing this field: Innerfence released its slightly more basic Credit Card Terminal app late last year. Although both programs are currently only available in the US, they could be a valuable tool for minipreneurs in other parts of the world.
LINK: http://springwise.com/weekly/2009-03-04.htm#processaway
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EXCERPT:
While some investors frown at the thought of no longer working with an individual banker or broker, some people in the financial-services industry say a call center isn’t necessarily an inferior solution. Having someone on the phone to entertain account queries could be better than being neglected by a personal broker.
“If well executed, clients can receive better services through call centers,” says Bing Waldert, a consultant at Boston research and consulting firm Cerulli Associates.
Still, call-center operations have had some hiccups. Brendan Intindola, a spokesman at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, says complaints of poor service have come up during periods of high market volatility and volume or when a firm experiences technical issues.
LINK: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123549387374860649.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
EXCERPT:
Economic-development agencies are beginning to realize they need to focus on contact centers to get people employed rapidly. As opposed to manufacturing, any office building with sufficient broadband can serve as a contact center location. In addition, you can get a call center up and running in a matter of months — not one-plus years.
Throughout past recessions, call centers picked up the slack and hired what amounted to millions of Americans to make and take calls. From 1990 onward, economic development agencies worldwide began to court contact centers to help them solve their job loss problems. Typically they recruited outsourcers from the TMC Top 50 Teleservices list as well as smaller, faster-growing companies
LINK: http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=002000002RYG
EXCERPT:
Managing contact center performance has never been more challenging. Not only are operations facing even more pressure to cut costs amidst a difficult economy, but are often also being asked to maintain service levels and to cross sell/upsell to retain customers and grow revenues. Many of the solutions to these needs lie in the data contact centers collect. It can be used to identify problems from customer information such as spikes in calls, find out what is going on, then report issues to prevent or limit rising costs and customer churn. It can also help improve sales and collections. The insights that can be gleaned from them can help justify existing [budgets] and possibly budget increases and investments in new solutions.
The sources of this data are in the vast amounts of reports: from ACDs to call recording, CRM 
, CTI, predictive and progress dialers, and workforce management (WFM) that contact centers receive. Yet these sources are too often rarely if ever consolidated to give that clear picture.
“You can’t understand what is going on if you’ve got 25 reports sitting on your desk,” explains Jim Davies, a research director with Gartner. “You need to have that single view so that you can then start to dig into data and look for trends, patterns, and correlations between the different applications and data streams.”
LINK: http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=00200076GWHW&page=1
EXCERPT:
SpeechCycle and Jingle Networks have announced a new partnership to help contact centers embed contextually relevant sponsored messaging within the caller experience. The companies said that this will monetize contact center interactions while also improving customer loyalty. As per this latest agreement, Jingle Networks (News – Alert) and SpeechCycle will provide interoperability between SpeechCycle’s RPA OnDemand platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and the JingleConnect audio advertising network.
LINK: http://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/analysis/articles/51459-speechcycle-jingle-networks-team-empower-contact-centers.htm
I have always been a big believer in online video. Generally speaking, I think the more we can make online shopping like shopping in a brick and morter store- the better sales results a company will see. I read today that the number of online shoppers who watched retail videos grew 40% in a single year.
Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Video Usage in E-Commerce: The Best Is Yet to Come states that some of the benefits of online video are: “a lower number of abandoned shopping carts, reduced return rates and higher sales.”
It is also interesting to note that Internet Retailer found that adding video topped online retailers’ to-do lists for 2009.
To read more about online video trends visit emarketer.com
