As noted in my article How to Respond to Visionary Ideas, today’s “hot technologies” target business challenges that grab senior leadership attention – e.g., staffing demands, performance improvement, cost containment, revenue drivers, customer satisfaction. For example: Bots purport to deflect loads of calls, chats, and text messages AI improves routing, workforce management, desktop tools, and… Read More »
Our assessment and planning projects often carry the recommendation to build out the team of support resources – e.g., business analysts to address forecasting and scheduling, perform analysis to drives actions, and manage knowledge and process automation. Committed resources for quality assurance and training can be a common gap that grows more evident as the… Read More »
Executives regularly ask contact center and IT leaders to explore (or pursue) technologies that could benefit their organizations. Here are the ideas that we hear on countless projects. Bots Everybody thinks if only they had a bot, it would deflect loads of calls, chats, or text messages and solve many of the center’s problems. Numerous… Read More »
We have the privilege of working with contact centers of many sizes, across a wide range of industries. They all have a few things in common: they want to deliver a great customer experience, meet their target metrics, operate efficiently and effectively, and use technology to their advantage. Credit unions are a bit unique in… Read More »
Cloud vendors regularly crow about their “fast and easy” delivery of advanced contact center capabilities. When their benchmark is premise-based solutions, they’ve certainly got an edge. However, contact centers still need to put themselves and their prospective vendor partners through the planning paces before signing on the dotted line to ensure there’s a good fit… Read More »
Business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) – a.k.a., contingency planning, business continuity management, and business recovery planning – can weigh on CC leaders’ minds. All too often, developing plans and putting resources in place doesn’t make it to the top of the “to do” list or score a “win” in the battle of the budget…. Read More »
I’ve challenged contact centers to make 2020 the Year of the Agent. I’ve built my case around the argument that if you want to deliver a great customer experience, you first have to make sure you’re delivering a great agent experience. In the spirit of action, I’ve outlined two different assignments for you to assess… Read More »
For the past several years, everyone has been focusing on the customer experience. Delivering a good – if not great – customer journey is crucial for building or retaining market share. Customers expect to be treated well at every point of contact. So, it’s no surprise that the customer experience has emerged as a key… Read More »
Contact centers are awash in data. But let’s break this big bucket of data into two chunks: one about customers, and a second one about their interactions and how they are handled. In order to serve customers, centers need good, complete, up-to-date data about them. While names, addresses, contact information are starting points for a… Read More »
Despite all the excitement around contact center technology capabilities and innovation, many centers continue to fall short when it comes to getting value from their investments. Our recent Future of the Contact Center Survey showed that skepticism continues to lurk out there for new technology, such as bots and Artificial Intelligence. I’m not surprised. When… Read More »