Our yearly roundup of the top analysts in the industry keeps call center professionals like you informed on the best influencers to follow.

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

2. “Just by following the blogs and tweets from these highly regarded
contact center analysts, you’ll get tremendous insight into the latest
best practices, stats and trends!
Shai Berger
Co-Founder & CEO, Fonolo

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

4. Jon Arnold
“... building a customer-centric culture is not just about the contact
center; it extends to everyone in the organization. Agents may
represent the front door of CX for contact center engagement…
Independent Industry Analyst
Focus: UC, Call Center, SIP, & VoIP
Web: www.jarnoldassociates.com

5. Bruce Belfiore
“You can only manage what you measure and you need to measure
regularly or you aren’t really managing. Many managers are
missing major insights into their operations (and foregoing major
savings) by not figuring out and following the proper metrics for
their centers.
CEO, BenchmarkPortal
Focus: Contact Center Benchmarking
Web: http://www.benchmarkportal.com/

6. 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, 451 Research
Focus: Customer Experience, Customer Service, Call Center
Web: 451Research.com

7. Top 10 Customer
Service Trends for 2017
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8. 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/

9. 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/

10. Ian Jacobs
“We use Web self-service, and we use voice self-service; we use
virtual agents, and we use peer-to-peer support in customer
communities. To be fair, we continue to be more satisfied with the
experience of speaking to contact center agents than we are with
self-service, yet we continue to move toward agentless
interactions.
Prinicpal Analyst, Forrester Research
Focus: Customer Experience Technologies
Web: https://www.forrester.com/Ian-Jacobs

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

12. say “just ONE unpleasant
contact center experience
is likely to make me take
my business elsewhere.”
76%

13. Irwin Lazar
“
Unified communication leaders that proactively plan for growing
use of APIs and CPaaS in 2017 will also find themselves better
positioned to support digital transformation plans. UC leaders that
proactively plan for growing use of APIs and CPaaS in 2017 will
also find themselves better positioned to support digital
transformation plans.
VP and Service Director, Nemertes Research
Focus: Unified Communications & Contact Center
Web: www.nemertes.com/analysts/irwin-lazar

14. Kate Leggett
“Customers hold the power in their relationships with businesses.
Today, it's not enough for businesses to deliver products.
Customers expect them to deliver outcomes and success. To do
this, businesses must understand who the customer is, what their
pain points are in achieving their business goals, and must help
them choose the right products to meet their goals. The
relationship does not stop there. Businesses must ensure that a
new customer is properly onboarded, and is realizing ongoing
value from their purchase.
VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Focus: Customer Service: Trends, Research, & Technology
Web: forrester.com/kate_leggett

15. Michael Maoz
““You can reinvent your mobile strategy any time, because the
applications that you had one, two, or three years ago are gone
anyway. It’s like the mobile phone… just like you threw away your
clunky Nokia, then went to the BlackBerry, then went to
your iPhone or Samsung, you can throw out mobile applications,
start over, iterate: it’s all good.”
VP and Analyst, Gartner
Focus: Cloud Apps, Social Media, & Mobility
Web: blogs.gartner.com/michael_maoz/

16. Sheila McGee-Smith
“More than ever before, customer experience is part of every
department in a business; it is no longer part of an isolated silo.
Building the bridge to marketing, IT and web applications is difficult
but absolutely required. The one tip I have for every customer
experience professional is to find the Internet of Things (IoT)
project that is happening in your business…that will impact
customer experience…and get involved with it.
President and Principal Analyst, McGee-Smith Analytics
Focus: Contact Center & Enterprise Communications
Web: www.mcgeesmith.com

17. 63% of customers
prefer getting a
call-back
to waiting
on hold.

18. Dave Michels
“A key value to workstream messaging is indeed unified
communications, or perhaps more precisely, unified conversations.
Messaging is newly preferred, but existing modalities are not going
away. The solutions that don’t support voice today will likely do so
in the future one way or another, so it’s worth adding telephony into
the evaluation criteria.
President, TalkingPointz
Focus: Cloud Services, SMB Voice, & Unified Communications
Web: http://www.talkingpointz.com

19. Dan Miller
“Companies that are thinking about biometrics for authentication are
well counseled to think about how they refresh their stored
information, and inform their customers periodically that they’re
using their voiceprints, just to keep everything transparent, above
board and useful.
Lead Analyst & Founder, Opus Research
Focus: Conversational Commerce & Voice Biometrics
Web: OpusResearch.net

20. Blair Pleasant
“To best serve their multi-location customers, carriers and service
providers using old IVR platforms with thousands of ports that are
coming to end of life need to move to new cloud solutions that offer
scalability, elasticity, and reliability…Architecture matters, so
whether you’re a carrier, service provider, or multi-location
business, be sure to find the best architecture to meet your needs,
and the right platform that can be used to create the best IVR
applications and call handling capabilities to result in the business
outcomes desired.
Principal Analyst, Commfusion
Focus: Call Center, Unified Communications, & Collaboration
Web: www.commfusion.com

21. 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

22. Paul Stockford
“By investing in appropriate workforce enhancement solutions and
keeping a finger on the pulse of agent sentiment, contact center
executives have the opportunity to effectively address a problem
that has plagued the industry since the beginning. In 2017,
workforce issues will need to be considered equally with customer
service issues. It’s time to focus on optimizing both the agent
experience and the customer experience.
Chief Analyst, Saddletree Research
Focus: Contact Center, CRM, & Social Media
Web: www.saddletreeresearch.com

23. A real-life phone interview
Call-Back Solutions
for the Call Center

24. Replace hold-time with a call-back
on all channels.
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25. 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%.”
Watch the video: Read the case study: