This past week, TMC (News - Alert) had a good article by Mandira Srivastava about how recently the contact center has gained popularity among companies as a preferred channel to communicate with their customers.

Now the results of the 2011 Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report are out. The report is done by Dimension Data (News - Alert), a $4.7 billion global IT services and solutions provider. It is based on the data collected from 546 contact centers across 66 countries in 2010, covering Africa and the Middle East, the Americas, the United Kingdom and Europe, Asia-Pacific, Australia and New Zealand.

Andrew McNair, head of global benchmarking for Dimension Data, said, “Interactions through new channels like social media and SMS messaging are increasingly being used as a differentiator for organizations that recognize the contact center is the heart of the business. Consumers are coming to expect the ability to interact and engage through multiple communication channels and if done right, this effort can most certainly result in operational efficiencies and improved business ROI.”

Also this week Shamila Janakiraman wrote that Telrex (News - Alert), provider of the CallRex suite of IP call recording and contact center optimization products, announced the release of version 4.1 of the CallRex Call Recording software.

This new version satisfies the specifications of the newly added granular security options that allow customers to create a call recording environment that is Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) compliant, said Telrex, an Enghouse (News - Alert) Systems company.

In a release Bruce Sherman, Telrex product manager, said, “Enabling customers to secure call recordings and the sensitive customer data within the recording files was a central focus in our CallRex version 4.1 development efforts.”

TMC had a piece this week about how iCore Networks, an operator of a wide commercial Voice over Private Internet (VoPI) network, announced that its VoPI service has helped McKissack and McKissack improve its performance greatly.

The client, an architecture, engineering and construction management firm in Washington D.C., was able to enhance business performance and manage major construction projects by enabling optimum communications between traveling team members, said iCore officials in a release.

“Our focus is to continue to provide cloud based features for our clients to utilize through our VoPI solution in order to improve their business performance,” said Stephen Canton, iCore’s chairman and CEO.

“McKissack & McKissack is an organization with an exemplary reputation and which is the ideal example of an enterprise that tremendously benefits from VoPI technology given their work environment and the increased interest and usage of Unified Communications in order to deliver the results and responsiveness their customers are accustomed to and uphold their mission,” added Canton.

And this week Jamie Epstein wrote that this year at Interactions 2011, which is an annual global user forum hosted by Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) that was held from May 24-26, loanDepot.com won the coveted Interactive Intelligence Innovation award.

TMCnet had the chance to speak with Mark Hansen, senior software architect for loanDepot.com at the event.

The company has been an Interactive Intelligence customer since they opened over 25 years ago, and uses various products offered by Interactive Intelligence, including the company’s dialer software and its standard server CIC. Hansen said, “From that, we integrated some custom software in order to do our job a little better.”

This year there was an increase in competition for the prestigious Interactive Intelligence Innovation award as four or five other companies were competing. Hansen remembers, “As Interactive was giving descriptions about all of the companies, everyone had really innovative ideas and I was a little nervous because the competition was pretty fierce.”

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