The Scotland-based SwordCiboodle surrendered its unusual corporate name this week after being acquired by Kana, a Sunnyvale, Calif., provider of customer service solutions. The company will move forward with only “Kana Software” in the masthead.

The Kana brand name “is stronger and more mature in key markets,” according to Mitch Lieberman, the vice president of market strategy for SwordCiboodle.

“That said, Ciboodle will be missed by some. There is no middle ground, though, people loved it or hated it and the ‘Sword’ in front made it tougher to say,” Lieberman wrote in an email.

SwordCiboodle started in 1986 with a softer name. Whereas Sword and Scotland conjured visions of battle, initially the company was known as Graham Technology (think crackers.)

When the Sword Group bought Graham Technology in 2008, the company first switched to “Ciboodle,” recognizing the name of its flagship customer interaction platform. Later it added the weapon, with “SwordCiboodle” reflecting its corporate parentage.

Lieberman said KANA and Ciboodle are a good fit, both centering on customer service solutions for the enterprise.

“Ciboodle has built a reputation providing contact center, agent desktop, business process management and case management solutions,” Lieberman wrote. “KANA has built a reputation providing email response management, knowledge management, Web self-service and chat, and more recently social listening.”

Everyone at Ciboodle and Kana looks forward to the days ahead, Lieberman wrote, particularly one minor advantage to the deal.

“I will not miss the ‘No, Key-boodle, not See-boodle’ conversations, though.”

More than 1,100 call center agents have gathered at the annual ACCE conference and expo to review trends, learn new tricks and share ideas on how to deal with the never-ending task of helping customers.

On Monday, the opening day, former ICMI President Brad Cleveland led a workshop overviewing basic strategies to make contact centers effective. Cleveland’s session focused on contact centers, and not call centers, for a simple reason. More than half of the 60 people at the session identified themselves as contact center employees. With social media and email, they’re not just answering telephone calls.

But no matter the means of contact, Cleveland reminded the audience they work for time-driven organizations that can’t keep customers waiting.

Customers have by now established patterns, or set times, with which they reach out to contact centers, Cleveland said. An efficient center should break down to the half hour when the most and best agents should be available.

No agent has a 100%-occupancy time, Cleveland noted. Calls come in randomly, he said, and companies need to accept that and prepare for it.

Veteran agents picking plum hours can help morale, but that doesn’t mean new hires should work peak calling hours late in the evening, Cleveland suggested. He also urged the audience to handle customer interactions as they arrive and not to delay communication.

Cleveland also warned those not yet handling social media to get ready. “Social media will begin to work (its) way into your environment. Be prepared and start following the patterns you follow now for calls,” he said.

“It’s a crazy level of dialogue. People are using all kinds of language…You’ve got to meet them with quiet and confident service. There’s no alternative.”

Janea Janke is attending the conference in only her third month managing a 100-employee contact center in South Jordan, Utah.

Her company, MonaVie, sees very little social media contacts; mostly the organization gets calls, and all at random times. She hopes to learn some call center basics, such as what to track and how to coach.

When Janke returns home, she’ll have an opportunity to use some new knowledge. As she attended the conference, MonaVie was installing a new call copy system that will record agents calls and screen interactions from start to finish.

In this 20-minute podcast (with music), Greg shares some of his songs as well as insight he’s learned in his many years of covering the contact center and customer service markets.  

He talks about:

• Why the contact center is ripe for parody
• Insights from his new book
• The emergence and importance of at-home agents and
• How customers need to be a part of agent training

 Greg’s forthcoming book is entitled: FULL CONTACT: Contact Center Practices and Strategies that Make an Impact. Greg also sings and writes contact center commentary at his blog, Off Center.

I spoke with the president of DMG Consulting last week about her recent report, which identifies two new markets in contact center technology — customer experience analytics (CEA) and desktop analytics (DA). Fluss predicts the number of CEA implementations to approach 1,000 by the end of 2011. She expects the number of DA seats to exceed 1.5 million during the same period, that’s growth of 100% in 2009, 50% in 2010 and another 50% in 2011.

Now one might question the relevance of a consulting firm defining a market segment and then predicting its growth, but Fluss contends that people questioned her years ago when she started following speech analytics in the contact center — and that’s turned out pretty well so far. As for customer experience analytics and desktop analytics?

” We see the coming together of marketing and service,” Fluss said. “It’s analytics — not reporting on steroids — that are going to drive that. The last really exciting thing we had [in contact center technology] was speech analytics. DA and CEA are also in that category of high value. They’ve been struggling to find their niche and I think they’ve come to the point [where] they’re real.”

And while there’s likely little appetite for investment in the contact center in the next year or two, given the current economic climate, that optimistic growth prediction is a factor of the current size of the market and the savings these applications can produce, Fluss said.

Desktop analytics, tools that measure departmental performance and the agent’s experience with desktop servicing applications, has been used by IT departments for years, Fluss noted, but when it comes to determining how well agents are serving customers, there’s a big difference between running quality assurance on a couple hundred calls out of one million a month and using analytics.

“If you’re an agent and all of a sudden there’s latency in response time of a second to two, the impact to the agents is significant, but if you don’t have a way to measure it, you’ll never know,” she said. “Desktop analytics provides that transparency and supplies savings from 1 to 5%. I think desktop analytics is just a gift.”

Desktop analytics vendors include Knoa, eGlue, Iontas, which approach the market from the application side and Verint and NICE, which come at it from the contact center side.

Customer experience analytics measure the customer experience during IVR, self-service and Web interactions, adding in agent supported situations and fulfillment of the request, Fluss said.

“We have vendors that claim to do one and two but nobody who’s closing the loop yet, with fulfillment, but that’s what we need to do,” she said.

CEA vendors include: ClickFox, eGlue and EnKata, Iontas, Merced and Nuance.

“It’s about call reduction and reductions to average handle time,” Fluss said. “What’s the contact center mentality? Do more with less. That’s why this is a gift.”

Still, getting funding for the contact center remains a challenge. According to Gartner’s annual survey of more than 1,500 CIOs, attracting and retaining customers dropped from their second highest business priority to fifth this past year.

Yet Gartner warns that despite the economy, companies need to redouble their efforts to extend tools, training and compensation to customer service representatives, particularly when it comes to extending channels.

Gartner predicts that by 2012, managing Web interactions will be a core competency of the contact center with customers expecting customer service reps to know everything about them at the time of interaction – down to their recent Web posts in relevant online communities.  That means by 2014, standard practice in 30% of contact centers will be to have two monitors on each agents’ desktops.

Companies like Comcast have already started down that path. I interviewed Frank Eliason, about his company’s online service initiative last week.

Gartner issued a release this month, identifying four areas contact centers need to focus on to create a higher impact at lower costs: personalized customer assistance; better contact center application design; integrating Web interactions into the contact center; and speedy and accurate service interactions so agents can more quickly navigate multiple channels.

All of this sounds sensible and it’s hard to argue with the fact that companies that commit to their customers and contact center now will reap the rewards when the economy turns around. I’m just curious if the money and initiative will come and if it does, just who was able to convince senior management to spend it and how.