The contact center industry is blessed with a large and engaged community. Keep up with trends and best practices by following these top 20 analysts!

1. Top Analysts
Covering the
Contact Center
Industry
Sponsored by:
Call-Back Solutions for the Call Center
Learn More at www.fonolo.com

2. “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 Berger
Co-Founder & CEO, Fonolo

3. Congratulations to the 20
who were selected!
1. Jon Arnold
2. Bruce Belfiore
3. Aphrodite Brinsmead
4. Keith Dawson
5. Lisa Durant
6. Donna Fluss
7. Paul Greenberg
8. Sandra Gustavsen
9. Ian Jacobs
10. Nancy Jamison
11. Irwin Lazar
12. Kate Leggett
13. Michael Maoz
14. Sheila McGee-Smith
15. Dave Michels
16. Dan Miller
17. Blair Pleasant
18. Art Rosenberg
19. Art Schoeller
20. Paul Stockford
* Listed in alphabetical order

4. 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 Analyst
Focus: UC, Call Center, SIP, & VoIP
Web: JonArnold-analyst.blogspot.ca

5. 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, BenchmarkPortal
Focus: Contact Center Benchmarking
Web: http://www.benchmarkportal.com/

6. 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, Ovum
Focus: Customer Interactions, Technology, & Contact Center
Web: Ovum.com

7. 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 Experience
Web: Ovum.com

8. Replace hold-time with a call-back
on all channels.
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Call-Back Solutions for the Call Center

9. 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 Research
Focus: Contact Center & Unified Communications
Web: http://www.nemertes.com/analysts/lisa-durant

10. 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 LLC
Focus: Contact Center, Back-Office, Analytics
Web: http://www.dmgconsult.com/

11. 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 Author
Focus: CRM, Social CRM, & Customer Service
Web: http://the56group.typepad.com/

12. 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 Writer
Focus: IP Phone Systems, Cloud & Unified Communications
Web: http://www.gbusinessvoip.com/

13. 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, Forrester
Focus: Customer Experience Technologies
Web: https://www.forrester.com/Ian-Jacobs

14. 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 Sullivan
Focus: Contact Center, Speech Tech, & Social Media
Web: www.frost.com

15. Ring! A happy caller is
connected.
Customer dials in,
hears option to “Press
1 for a call-back.”
Customer relaxes while
Fonolo waits on hold.
Fonolo’s cloud-based solution easily hooks into your existing call center
infrastructure, with minimal impact to your business processes.
Adding Call-Backs the Easy Way

16. 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 Research
Focus: Unified Communications & Contact Center
Web: www.nemertes.com/analysts/irwin-lazar

17. 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 Research
Focus: Customer Service: Trends, Research, & Technology
Web: forrester.com/kate_leggett

18. 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, Gartner
Focus: Cloud Apps, Social Media, & Mobility
Web: blogs.gartner.com/michael_maoz/

19. 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 Analytics
Focus: Contact Center & Enterprise Communications
Web: www.mcgeesmith.com

20. Top 9 Call Center
Trends for 2016
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21. 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, TalkingPointz
Focus: Cloud Services, SMB Voice, & Unified Communications
Web: http://www.talkingpointz.com

22. 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 Research
Focus: Conversational Commerce & Voice Biometrics
Web: OpusResearch.net

23. 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, Commfusion
Focus: Call Center, Unified Communications, & Collaboration
Web: www.commfusion.com

24. 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-View
Focus: Call Center, Voicemail, & Unified Communications
Web: http://www.ucstrategies.com/

25. 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 Research
Focus: Unified Communications & Call Center Technology
Web: Forrester.com

26. 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 Research
Focus: Contact Center, CRM, & Social Media
Web: www.saddletreeresearch.com

27. Fonolo Success Story
“We were able to deploy Fonolo in just
15 days…we saw an immediate
impact on our abandonment rate…
on our busiest days it was
down 33%.”
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