Avaya plays catch-up

A pair of recent announcements by communications company Avaya indicates yet another play to expand its footprint in the midmarket, according to destinationCRM.

Avaya has acquired Agile Software, a New Zealand-based company which developed Avaya's midmarket solution under the brand name Avaya Contact Centre Express and it is releasing Contact Centre Express 4, its voice and video telephony software.

Industry pundits say the latest initiatives will help the company play catch-up.

New research from Datamonitor has revealed that the successful use of social media by contact centre agents are still several years away, according to destinationCRM.

The research shows that like the marketing side of the business, the customer service side of the house is also beginning to delve into social networking, but that there are also many barriers still to overcome before its use there is the norm rather than the exception.

Ian Jacobs, senior analyst for customer interaction technologies at Datamonitor and author of the study, says while there are some famous cases highlighting the use of social media for service, he wanted to determine if there was a role for formal contact centres in these new channels.

Open source CRM solutions provider, SugarCRM, is opening a new corporate headquarters in Munich, Germany as well as the expansion of its global training programme in Europe, reports TMCnet.

After realising the growing commercial demand for their open source CRM offerings in the continent, the company decided to open a new headquarters that would help it to meet the demands of customers.

“While demand in Europe for our modern and flexible CRM platform has been steadily growing over the last several years, the recessionary economy has only increased activity and adoption,” says Liz Smith, vice-president of sales, SugarCRM EMEA.