CRMXchange

We’ve all been there – the frustration of trying to reach a prospect with a cold call.   If you have no connection to that person, it is twice as likely that your call will not be returned.  If we do have a connection, there is an 11x more likely chance that you will hear back.  The key is to leverage your network of connections – from your business, your school, and associations with your prospect’s connections.   With tools that are available today, such as Reachable, you have a better chance...

Call centers play a huge role in determining a company’s quality of customer experience because the call center interacts with the organization’s most precious asset: its customers. Therefore, the primary goals of a call center are to achieve the company’s sales objectives by effectively meeting and anticipating customer requirements, as well as to improve customer satisfaction and retention in order to ensure business success. The operational performance of a call center must be effective in...

The latest generation entering the workforce brings a new energy to the contact center, which also brings new challenges to the table for call center management.  But this generation also represents the new social customer, so understanding what makes them “tick” can provide invaluable insight into what motivates your customers.

Donna Fluss, a recognized thought leader and innovator in contact center and real-time analytics, will join Knowlagent CEO, Matt  McConnell,  for an interactive webinar on...

Over the last ten years, interest in remote agent contact center models has steadily increased. For example, attendance at the February 2012 Remote Agent Summit increased by 30% over 2011. And home agent models are not limited to the United States and Canada. Several firms are operating home agent models in Europe and a UK version of the US Remote Agent Summit is planned for July. Michele Rowan of At Home Customer Contacts which hosts the Remote Agent Summit and Workshops reports that:

Survey...

When you hear the term “contact center” today, the image that may come to mind is a large operation with hundreds of agents in headsets busy on calls.  However, if you were to visit the most typical call center, you would only see a couple of dozen frontline staff.  That’s because most call centers are actually small in size with three out of four centers employing fewer than 20 agents. 

According to Pelorus Group statistics, 75% of call centers have between 1 – 20 staff and another 15% have...

 Benchmark research carried out by Ventana Research shows that contact center executives and managers are under pressure to provide the best possible customer service while staying within tight operational budgets. At the same time centers are receiving ever more inbound calls and responding to other types of interactions such as email messages and chat sessions. To demonstrate success, managers must improve the key performance metrics on which they are assessed, especially customer satisfaction...

New research from Psychtests.com reveals that money and other financial rewards have been replaced by less tangible sources of motivation.

Employee motivation is no longer as simple  as the old "dangle the carrot in front the donkey" bit - or in this case, dangle the big fat bonus.  After assessing over 1000 different people from all walks of life about what keeps them motivated at work, PsychTests' latest research reveals that Financial Reward didn't even crack the top ten of their 23 work...

Unlocking Customer Experience - Top 5 Key Performance Indicators for the Contact Center

The "US Contact Center Decision-Makers' Guide" is the major annual report studying the performance, operations, technology and HR aspects of US contact center operations. Taking a random sample of the industry, a detailed structured questionnaire was asked to 210 contact center managers and directors between November 2011 and February 2012. Analysis of the results was carried out in February and March 2012. The result is the 5th edition of the largest and most comprehensive study of all aspects...

Revolutionizing the Contact Center Using Speech Analytics and Chat Technologies

http://bit.ly/y3tgT2

The contact center landscape is experiencing significant changes, both in the business model itself and its underlying technology. The ability to access telephony and applications over the Internet has increased the flexibility of the contact center workforce, introducing a new trend: the work-at home agent. Driven by a greater need for both flexibility and cost control, cloud contact center solutions (also known as hosted contact centers) are seeing double-digit growth rates.

Cloud contact...

Calibrating contact center quality assurance (QA) performance is a key practice for ensuring agents are delivering on their organizations’ promises to provide excellent customer care and service.

Calibrating contact handling evaluations to an excellence standard prevents them from being politicized by evaluator preference or prejudice. Failure to calibrate the evaluation process can be detrimental to organizations’ strategic goals of attaining advantage and differentiation through customer care...

The bills known as Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) were created with the intent to stop copyright infringement and protect intellectual property belonging to media makers. While we do not condone using copyrighted material, the legislation seeks to destroy the Internet by censoring sites and content distributed through channels like YouTube, Google, Craigslist and basically any search engine or web publishing tool.

On Wednesday, January 18th, Socialmediaclub.org along...

How to use a Facebook Commerce Pop-up Store / Social Commerce For Small Business and Monetize Fans

Social commerce is the addition of shopping to social networks. Small business can profit from Facebook Commerce. But if businesses aren’t careful, social commerce has the potential to ruin social networks. That’s why it’s important how brands fulfill on f-commerce. It will directly affect the success not only for their own individual brand, but as an industry as a whole. If social networking...

Interested in hottest trends, tools, apps and advertising in the mobile space? Social Media Club LA will have David Teichner, CEO of the mobile couponing app, Yowza (co-created by actor/entrepreneur Greg Grunberg of “Heroes,”) will be joining Patrick Mahoney, VP of Strategy & Business Development from the mobile CRM solution,  Mogreet and Tim Street, VP of Mobile Video from the “smart stream solution,” mDialog, for our first SMCLA panel of the year.

They will be speaking and discussing the...

Improve your company’s bottom line with the ripple effect a formalized and aggressive coaching program will create: agents will be better trained, attrition will be decreased, productivity will increase dramatically—all leading to dramatic bottom line results.

Recently we published a whitepaper discussing the relationship between recruitment effectiveness and the use of assessments.  As part of that discussion, we examined some reasons driving the increasing adoption of talent assessment solutions.  The growing use of assessments is being driven by several factors ranging from technological innovation to the ability to standardize a process that is often ad hoc and open to variance.

1. The growth of cloud-based applications is one technology...

Social Commerce isn’t just for big brands. Facebook commerce or f-commerce can help any size business sell more and monetize their fan based. And big companies can learn from what smaller brands are doing. Ettitude is using Facebook commerce to provide a range of premium and unique eco-friendly products in a quick, convenient, online shopping environment. Because they have such a compelling store, it is a natural for people wanting to share this among their social graph.

Who heads up this great...

With the growing interest and application of assessments as part of a data-driven talent acquisition process, understanding factors that may limit your organization’s use of assessments is important.  Your recruiting process is potentially one of those factors.  The recruiting and sourcing process potentially creates a bottleneck that reduces the effectiveness of your assessment tools and ultimately your talent acquisition process.

The validation process is an important step in the setting up...