Welcome from Diane Halliwell

I would personally like to welcome you to the Align Customer TouchPoint blog.

Let me give you a little background on who I am.

I have been consulting in the voice arena for almost 30 years, first as a traffic engineer, and then as an evaluator of alternative telephony solutions.

Almost 20 years ago, I entered the Contact Center space, and have never left. I started out on the very technical end of the spectrum, evaluating alternative solution platforms for my clients. After the evaluation phase, our clients typically engage us to then design, implement, and provide end user documentation for the solutions we recommend.

While engaging in my work as a technical resource, I discovered one of the most important lessons in working in the Contact Center space. Technology alone will never get my clients where they need to be. Rather, it is a delicate balance of the right technology and the requisite processes, workflows, and communication within the organization that will ultimately bring success. Part of that delicate balance is having consistent and effective customer touchpoints.

This philosophy is what drives my consulting practice, and I bring this perspective to each and every engagement.

To complete my "biography", I sit on the Consultant Professional Advisory Councils of Avaya and Siemens, feeding back to the senior management of these firms the consultant view of the effectiveness of their organizations and the strength of their products. In addition, we provide to these firms the viewpoint of the end user customer -- helping them understand what they need to do to be effective in being a vendor partner to our clients.

I also am a long-standing member of the Consultant Liaison programs of Cisco, Genesys, Interactive Intelligence, NEC, and Nortel.

I lead the Contact Center practice at Align, and am extremely proud to have four of the most talented professionals in the world working on my staff.

I look forward to discussing with you pertinent topics regarding the Contact Center space, and in my next blog entry tomorrow morning, I'll describe the following:

1. Definition of a customer touchpoint.
2. Purpose of the Customer TouchPoints blog, and the audience we hope to touch
3. Future topics that we will be addressing in the short term

Stay tuned, and again, welcome.