Tom Mangan

Commerce requires people to communicate with each other. A contact center keeps everybody talking – especially customers, salespeople, and support staff.
Without a contact center, customer communications are disorganized and inefficient. With a contact center, messaging is centralized and optimized, making sales and support more productive and your customer interactions more pleasing.

An API-centered modernization frees IT leaders to take an incremental, step-by-step approach. This strategy helps agencies improve productivity, break down silos
and accelerate the development of innovative new public services. Best of all, government IT leaders no longer have to wait years to implement technology that’s out of date the day it goes live.

But how can an agency best use an API-centered approach to ensure a smart, measured modernization initiative? One option is to implement an API integration platform to centralize, automate and streamline API operations.

Traditional security controls like firewalls, intrusion detection and endpoint management secure the castle’s perimeter. But sophisticated attackers keep crafting digital drawbridges and getting inside anyway.
A zero trust approach considers intrusions inevitable. It locks every door inside the castle, requiring every user, device and transaction to be authorized. In the old paradigm, anybody inside the castle was trusted to avoid places where they didn’t belong. This ends under zero trust.

Call it the Year of the Bot. This year’s artificial intelligence (AI) survey from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), IBM and the Center for Digital Government (CDG) reveals broad gains in AI adoption since our first report in 2019 — especially in chatbots and digital assistants — in combination with robotic process automation (RPA).

This whitepaper explores why real-time, accurate endpoint visibility stands at the center of ensuring digital access for students, constituents, public employees and more. By understanding the evolving threat environment and the real-time visibility technologies that can them adapt, public agencies and organizations can embark on a journey to a mature — and secure — future of digital government and education.

Stores still matter. TJX is living proof.
TJX, the parent company of T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods, is the world’s biggest off-price retail chain. Financial and industry analysts have fretted that TJX has been perhaps insufficiently digital in the age of e-commerce. But the company is reporting a strong rebound in sales and performance in 2021 after taking a hit when COVID-19 forced temporary closures of its brick-and-mortar locations in 2020. Moreover, recent research reported in the Wall Street Journal vindicates TJX’s store-centered approach.

The grocery business wouldn’t get far without plastics, refrigerators, and semi-trucks. Alas, these anchors of our food supply also produce waste and pollution that contribute to environmental damage and climate change.
Based in Michigan, Meijer operates more than 250 supercenters and grocery stores in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Wisconsin. The chain is offering clues on how the industry can shrink its environmental footprint.

Regional grocery powerhouse Giant Eagle is making the down payment on a cashless future for its customers. Recent innovations include cashier-free transactions at select locations and deals with PayPal and Venmo enabling customers to pay for their goods via their mobile devices.

NAPA Auto Parts knows the value of keeping its eyes on the road. Unless you’re shopping for motor oil or windshield wiper blades at one of the chain’s nearly 6,000 stores, you won’t hear a lot of hype about NAPA or its parent.
But a quick visit to NAPAOnline.com reveals a company hitting on all cylinders digitally: Curbside pickup. Check. Same-day delivery of in-stock parts. Check. Free one-day delivery on more than 160,000 parts. Check. Buying guides walk you through changing the oil, replacing a broken belt, and diagnosing glitches in anti-lock braking systems.

CVS is at a crossroads. Buying Aetna in 2019 made CVS Health a diversified healthcare conglomerate delivering health insurance and prescription coverage to millions of people.
But the ground beneath its feet is shifting. The rising popularity of generic pharmaceuticals is pinching the profitability of its prescription drug business. Online competition is forcing the company to reinvent its brick-and-mortar operations.

COVID-19 required retailers to adopt new communications tactics in tight time frames. The imperative to protect employees and customers left no other choice. Two years later, the Omicron variant of the virus presents a fresh wave of store communications challenges.
How should retailers respond to the latest twists and turns of the pandemic? This ebook from Zipline, developers of market-leading retail communications solutions, reflects on the retail response to the pandemic and recommends best practices for improving store communications today and staying ahead of the curve in the years to come

Most small-business owners realize that contact center technologies offer a better way to engage with their customers via voice, text, video, and other channels.
Small-but-growing businesses need call-center tools that help them win against the competition and embrace the flexible working arrangements of the future. Fortunately, they no longer have to bear the cost and complexity of a conventional call center. Everything they need is available right now in the cloud.

Contact center technology is designed for better customer service — and this benefits both the customer reaching out and the team receiving the call.
Of course, you want your contact center solution to be easy to install and economical to operate. It’s got to have plenty of options that can be fine-tuned to your specific business niche.
But nothing matters more than giving your contact center team the best tools to deliver a seamless customer experience.

More employees want to work from home. More customers want what you’re selling. Either way, you need a better way to communicate with customers, vendors, and staff.

Hosted VoIP phone service is the choice of businesses that need a fast, flexible, and economical communications tool. But what exactly is VoIP? And why is it the right choice for small and mid-size businesses (SMBs)? Let’s dive into why businesses buy VoIP services.

If you’re researching contact center solutions, you’ll probably see references to inbound and outbound contact centers.

What’s the difference between inbound and outbound, and why does it matter? In a nutshell, you need to know what each kind does to see the full potential of modern, cloud-based contact center solutions.

How do inbound and outbound contact centers differ?

Let’s start with the basics. An inbound contact center receives phone calls, texts, chats, and social media messages.