Call Center and CRM Best Practices

The process of hiring customer service professionals, whether in the commercial contact center, retail store or bank branch, often includes a telephone interview early in the recruiting and hiring process. This manual process frequently means that recruiters spend significant time and multiple contact attempts to schedule and conduct these phone interviews. This unnecessarily elongates the hiring cycle and often overlooks well-qualified candidates who might not be available during a recruiter’s...

Precision monitoring is a process that is enabled by the introduction of speech analytics into contact centers.  According to a new DMG report, managers set up special QA searches in their speech analytics application – it is a best practice to set up multiple searches to address various aspects of QA. Here are some recommended searches:

1.Greetings – define all of the appropriate ways agents should perform a greeting, and capture interactions where this does not happen.
2.Closings – same...

Fizzback’s experience in the sector provides a framework through which they drive positive business transformation and allow their clients to ‘drive by the voice of customer’. The rules represent a guideline to engage with clients on a case-by- case business ensuring the solution they provide is tailored to each of their clients’ unique culture, & conditions.

Below are a few Fizzback rules:

“Define your brand DNA. Own it. Name it.” stresses the importance of companywide ownership &...

It should come as no surprise that people are frequently dissatisfied and annoyed with the level of customer service they receive from the companies and organizations with which they do business. Surveys consistently find that many people are not getting the kind of service and help they feel they deserve. Complaints run the gamut from not being able to find answers on company Web sites, to not being able to speak with a knowledgeable company representative. Given the countless...

In the wake of the Great Recession businesses face a rising tide of regulations and restrictions on the financial services industry. After a year of preparation, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection has started operation amid great expectations that it will change the way Americans interact with financial institutions large and small.

As it rolls out new regulations, and as other provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act take effect, expect corporate IT resources to be tied up implementing them for...

As the contact center landscape changes, so too must the reporting and analysis solutions that drive decision-making and performance management. Each contact center is a unique mixture of systems, applications, people and culture serving a specific customer or client segment, each will need a different roadmap to their destination.

There are four common reasons that contact centers are driven to undertake this journey in the first place:

1. Current reports don't meet requirements: Typically,...

The demand for customer collaboration solutions is somewhat new but growing fast. Not surprising for a new market is the confusion caused by competing vendors' claims for their solutions. A recent Frost and Sullivan white paper, Customer Collaboration - A Richer Customer Experience Drives Profits,  provide a "what to look for" list as an aid to sorting out these claims:

• Web-based co-browsing functionality that works with all modern browsers and computer operating systems found in the market,...

 Nuance Communications announced results of a recently conducted Twitter survey focused on consumer perceptions of voice biometrics. The results of the survey found that consumers in general are enthusiastic about the idea of using their voice to authenticate their identity, particularly if the technology increases security.

The latest survey from Nuance found that 62 percent of respondents have more than 11 usernames and passwords, and that they forget their passwords between one and five times...

Gartner predicts the worldwide spend on social CRM offerings will balloon to more than $1 Billion by the end of 2012.   What does the  Social CRM bandwagon mean for the customer service executive? Does the hype and focus placed on social media translate into real business value? Are consumers really clamoring to have their questions answered on Facebook? Are they abruptly changing their online habits and taking their customer service questions into the social channel en masse?

A sober...

According to a new Knowlagent sponsored DMG white, a growing number of leading contact centers are putting their agents to work during idle time. They are using an emerging set of workflow-enabled applications to identify agent downtime and deliver work items and tasks to fill those idle periods. These emerging solutions are helping to speed up and reduce the cost of processing.

Most contact center agents know a great deal about what happens throughout their organization because of the training...

Pillar #1: Holistic Multiple Touchpoints = Multiple Opportunities
The first step to creating a superior, loyalty-building customer experience involves cross-channel interaction analytics. Customers today communicate with companies across a variety of touchpoints, from Web-based forums to Twitter feeds. Discovering what’s really happening across all these channels, and knowing how to react can be challenging.

Pillar #2: Contextual Putting Service in Perspective
Closely linked with the insight and...

Just as poor customer service can rob a company of precious revenue, a superb customer interaction can boost an organization’s bottom line. In fact, according to a recent survey by Strativity Group, 73 percent of consumers stated that they would expand their purchases with a vendor by 10 percent or more if the customer experience was superior. And 55 percent of consumers agreed that they would stay with a vendor for 10 years or more as long as the experience remained superior. Rising customer...

Analytics applications are deployed in a number of functions and departments within the enterprise, and for a number of requirements in service operations. It is as critical to sales optimization in the marketing department, for example, as it is to performance optimization in the contact center. As a result, analytics often performs in a cross-functional capacity, typically without the benefit of coordination among users.

In the contact center, “cross-functional” may be narrowly defined as...