A healthy relationship with a vendor takes hard work, effective communication, and setting appropriate expectations. It starts before you sign on the dotted line. Take time to build relationship with potential vendors/distributors well in advance of your target procurement and implementation time frame. A “courtship” is far more than an educational exercise to become familiar… Read More »
Web chat for contact centers is on the rise. Three-quarters of the participants in our 2010 Multi-Channel Customer Contact Survey said they either supported web chat today or planned to do so within the next 2 years. I’m not surprised. Web chat boosts the success rate of Web-based self-service by helping customers solve problems or complete… Read More »
Contact centers have been intrigued by the promise of home agents for years. Technical and economic hurdles have prevented many centers from giving the remote workforce option serious consideration. VoIP-based technology offerings help get centers over the technical hurdles. But you need to consider the enabling technology carefully to ensure that you get acceptable voice… Read More »
Historically, the call center was left to its own devices to care for customers while managing service delivery. It was a cost center aspiring to evolve to a profit center where it held some chance to protect or drive revenue. Then UC came along with big promises of revolutionizing call center operations and their enterprise… Read More »
System crashes, network outages, floods and fires are infrequent events. Yet every business needs to mitigate the risk of a debilitating disruption to their operations. Given the potential for lost revenue, loss of customer goodwill, lost data and service degradation, why is call center business continuity planning such a low priority? Why doesn’t everyone “just… Read More »
I’ve just completed a client engagement in which the focus was on call center customer satisfaction (cSat). Since that’s a concern for a lot of call centers, I thought I’d talk about four areas in which you can generate and sustain cSat improvements. Quality Agents, Quality Monitoring Your agents’ skills, knowledge, and professionalism form impressions… Read More »
Technology is the “Big Top” of contact centers. It has so many thrilling attractions on so many stages that it’s sometimes hard to know where to focus your attention. Every solution promises to reduce your costs, increase your revenue, improve quality and service levels, add efficiency, make your CSRS and Supervisors happier, and win you… Read More »
In reviewing Contact Babel’s recent US Contact Center Decision Maker’s Guide (4th Edition – 2010/11), I noticed several interesting findings about contact center business processes: 56% use agents (not technology) to authenticate callers 60% access 3 or more applications with each call 70% require agents to log into all applications separately 60% launch back office… Read More »
Call center buyers face an embarrassment of riches in call center technology, sourcing, vendor, and distributor options. The good news: It’s a highly competitive market with ample room to compare products and negotiate prices. The bad news: It takes time to get to know the vendors and give them the chance to know you. Don’t… Read More »
I recently had the opportunity to present a webinar with Varolii Corporation entitled Preparing Your Business for Today’s Multi-channel Customer. Most companies already live in a multi-channel world with voice, fax, email, voicemail, IVR, web. Some support web chat, outbound alerting, social media, and mobile, or have plans to do so. It’s an important topic as… Read More »