Call Center and CRM Best Practices

As companies continue to evolve their CRM strategies to attract and maintain customers, the contact center has emerged as an important strategic asset. The agents staffing these centers have a direct impact on customer acquisition and satisfaction. In order to continue providing excellent service, more companies are turning to advanced analytics to ensure that their contact centers are performing at a high level.

In addition, market leaders are using insights from customer interactions to uncover...

According to Nemertes Research, five key trends are reshaping customer-­‐experience management:

Increasing adoption of mobile devices enables engagement with customers and business partners across broad array of devices.

Big Data and speech analytics delivers new and insight into contact center performance and allows companies to improve customer service experience.

 Popularity of consumer social services such as Facebook and Twitter are emerging as a new interaction channel for customer engagement...

In today’s highly competitive consumer marketplaces, effective customer engagement becomes the key differentiator that can separate an organization from the pack and enable it to quickly win market share over domestic and international competitors. Having the capability to quickly respond to marketplace forces and impactful events to deliver performance improvement is critical to immediate and long-term success.

As companies face commoditization of their product and service offerings, they need...

Coaching is as much a critical process in today’s contact centers as workforce management, quality monitoring, and call routing.  Agents need feedback and goals to improve and succeed, and it is the supervisor’s role as a coach to manage and deliver that performance guidance. Unfortunately, in many contact centers today, coaching is not managed with strategy and rigor or treated as a first-class process. Often, the supervisor-agent relationship is broken, jeopardizing the success of...

If you count all customer touch points – from support interactions and in-person conversations to advertisements – the average company has millions, if not billions, of customer interactions a year across paid, earned, and owned channels. For your business, each channel touch point represents an opportunity for greater insight. A branded customer community connects your customers to each other – and your employees – as they talk about your products and services. The insight you can gain from...

It’s no secret that excellent customer service is the key to increased business and revenue. According to Gartner, a mere 5% improvement in customer retention can increase business profits anywhere from 25% to 125%.1 Contact centers have emerged as an important strategic asset for many companies since front line agents have an immediate and significant impact on customer experience.

Contact analytics takes the raw data that is trapped in customer interactions like phone calls, emails, and chats...

Many customer contact organizations have implemented Workforce Optimization (WFO) As an operational strategy to improve the performance of customer care professionals once they are on the contact center floor.

However, an agent’s relationship with a company begins well before he or she handles their first interaction. Therefore, a sound WFO practice starts well before then with the recruitment and hiring of agents who demonstrate the necessary skills and abilities to be successful.  A new HireIQ...

In a six month study, Mattersight Corporation commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the total economic impact and potential return on investment  enterprises may realize by deploying its Behavioral Analytics platform.

The Behavioral Analytics platform captures customer and employee interactions, and then automatically analyzes those interactions using proprietary algorithms and unique behavioral models. The output of this analysis is new data attributes on every interaction measuring...

Today’s customer support operations are overwhelmed by data—more often than not, leading to inaction. Customer support leaders, however, find themselves at an inflection point—they will either harness the tremendous wealth of data at their disposal to deliver transformational service and emerge as new leaders, or ignore the opportunity and engage in the status quo. The deluge of social media content, survey data, rising interaction volumes, KBs, recordings, chats, and more flowing through...

Delivering an exceptional customer experience is both an art & science. The “art” of an experience is based on the premise that every customer is a unique individual. Therefore, a contact center must tailor their interactions “creatively” instead of engaging all customers in a uniform way. The “moment of truth” strikes when the right information is delivered at the right time in the right way with the goal of ultimately making it easier for customers to accomplish their task. These experiences...

The social help desk may turn out to be a game-changer in the ongoing relationship between businesses and their customers. As customers increasingly turn to social media sites for customer service, the social help desk lets you respond in real-time to meet the evolving customer definition of "now." Take a look at this infographic  "The Social Help Desk Revolution".

The call center agent’s job isn’t easy. Most of the day is spent interacting with customers and keeping them satisfied. When time permits agents may be asked to complete training and coaching activities that enable them to do their job well.

Finding the time to train, coach and even communicate with agents remains a challenge for many centers.  As transaction types become more complex, the agent learning curve has become even steeper. Many agents become frustrated with the endless grind, lack of...

Customer Effort Score (CES) is the new hot metric for customer service. (CES) has been widely discussed since the HBR Article, Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers (July, 2010), where Customer Effort Score was touted as being a better predictor of customer loyalty than Net Promoter Score or First Contact Resolution. While CES is an important metric and arguably the best metric to focus your service operation, there is no such thing as a “magic metric”. Getting results from implementing CES...

The digital age has effectively transformed the modern “path to purchase” into a dynamic place with multiple, consumer touch points. While brand influence still remains central to the path to purchase, the customer’s voice is gaining more control at the expense of the enterprise.

The idea behind a VoC program is to ensure that the customer voice is heard and considered by a company. The customer voice is typically shared with the company through qualitative and quantitative methodologies, with...

Customer Effort Score (CES) is the new hot metric for customer service. (CES) has been widely discussed since the Harvard Business Review article, Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers (July, 2010), where Customer Effort Score was touted as being a better predictor of customer loyalty than Net Promoter Score or Customer Satisfaction. While CES is an important metric and arguably the best metric to focus your service operation, there is no such thing as a “magic metric”. Getting results from...

Quality assurance (QA) is a mission-critical business function that identifies contact center and enterprise trends, and provides insights into how well each agent is performing. For the past 30 years QA has been performed in contact centers around the world in basically the same way. Managers search through volumes of recordings to find the 10% to 20% of calls that require attention, either because they are really bad or really good. If a call is bad, the QA specialist or supervisor must...

To the harried managers of a modern commercial contact center, it might seem like nothing could be more urgent than squeezing every bit of efficiency and productivity out of operations. But they would be wrong. There is an environment in which the stakes are higher, where delivering top-notch “service” is an organizational number one priority. That is in the public safety sector, where callers are people in intense distress and the dispatcher is literally providing them a lifeline. Public...

A new white paper from COPC offers seven fundamental changes that they have recommended to their clients to drive improvements in their quality program. By doing so, they have transformed programs to directly and substantially improve their customers’ experience with their contact center operation.

These changes are:

• Redesign the quality form to align with key customer drivers

• Score only output metrics and use sub-attributes to capture reasons for errors

• Measure quality using three metrics...

FCR is one of the best ways to measure the overall performance of your contact center. It tells you how well your service organization handles customer requests the first time. Experts agree that it’s the only true metric that delivers a clear measurement of organizational effectiveness and customer satisfaction. When companies improve their FCR, they also lower their costs, improve their customer and agent retention, and increase their revenue.

Given the importance of FCR and the benefits it...

Communication technology has shifted power from the hands of a few to the hands of the many, with the ramifications of that change reverberating glob¬ally across every aspect of life, from politics to parenting to customer care.

Companies are recognizing the customer experience as a critical, revenue-driving business discipline. Increasingly, they are organizing to devote budget, focus and method to operating from a customer-centric perspective. In 2011, more than two-thirds of customer...