Leaves are turning green; lawns are springing back to life, flowers blooming. This can mean only one thing--contact center industry awards season! This is our Oscars, our time to shine, our opportunity to recognize and congratulate ourselves for doing what it is that we do.

For me it’s time to create another folder on my hard drive to store all the press releases I’m about to receive from dozens of companies that have all won the same award. Happens every year and there never seems to be the slightest hint of embarrassment from the company that bestows all these identical awards, or the companies that pay good money in order to get them.

There is, however, an industry award that is decidedly different. This one requires no entry fee, the judging is done entirely by third-party industry analysts who receive no monetary compensation, and the award sponsor has absolutely no say in who wins. It is as pure an award as this industry has to offer and it comes from CRM Magazine in the form of their annual CRM Service Awards.

The CRM Service Awards process requires a panel of unbiased analyst judges in each of several categories to rate each company in each category on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest rating. Companies are scored in a number of categories such as “Company Direction,” “Depth of Functionality,” and “Customer Satisfaction.” Judges must justify their scores with supporting comments and the editors of CRM Magazine verify judge’s comments, compile the results and announce the winners in the March issue of the magazine each year.

Despite all the awards the contact center industry bestows upon itself, I believe the CRM Service Awards to be the industry’s most fairly judged awards, the toughest industry awards to win, and the most meaningful awards given during the year. These are awards worthy of industry attention.

In the workforce optimization (WFO) category, this year’s winner was once again Verint. I say once again because this is the eighth year in a row that Verint has won this award. This is not an achievement to be taken lightly.

WFO can be considered a mature contact center solution, but given the industry’s mass migration toward optimizing the customer experience, it is only growing in importance. A good WFO solution is necessary to guarantee adequate manpower availability in order to ensure an optimal customer experience, is essential to quality management, and is critical to measuring and managing agent performance and the overall efficiency of the contact center. A good WFO solution is, among other things, the foundation upon which a successful customer service contact strategy is built.

For Verint to win this award eight years running in the face of increasingly sophisticated and capable competition is nothing short of phenomenal. It not only says a lot about the product, it says a lot about the people behind the product and the confidence the industry as a whole has in this solution. Marketing and PR people can say what they like about a product, but third-party validation such as the CRM Service Awards means so much more.

If you’d like to see what the judges had to say about Verint’s WFO solution and why it won again in 2015, visit http://tinyurl.com/owdvgs6. Take a few minutes to read this and you’ll understand how Verint continues to set the standard for WFO in the global contact center market.