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...
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By Greg Levin
True contact centre success comes when organisations make the
critical switch from a ‘measure everything that moves’ mind-set to
one of ‘measure what matters most’. Given that we are now living in
the Age of Customer Influence, ‘what matters most’ is that which
most increases the likelihood of the customer not telling the world
how evil you are via Twitter.
No longer can companies coast on Average Handle Time (AHT) and
Number of Calls Handled per Hour. Such metrics may have ruled...
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While it’s easy to decide your CRM
software is no longer suiting your needs, it’s not easy to
implement an entirely new system. However, proper CRM software is
critical for any customer care team or call center, whether
in-house or outsourced.
So, instead of jumping ahead of yourself, it may be smart to
perform some auditing on the software to determine the root cause
of your CRM problems in the first place. Some potential problems
include:
- Over-customized software
- Outgrowing of the software
- Basic...
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The Value in Naysayer Feedback - Actionable Steps
to Improve Customer Experience for Contact
Centers
While the call center has many metrics for determining success,
the overall customer experience has the biggest impact on your
bottom line, yet it is also one of the most difficult metrics to
measure. Fortunately, your customers don’t think in terms of
metrics. The only thing that matters to them is that they have a
positive experience. Take FCR as an example: there are many ways to
measure FCR,...
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Recently we have noticed a new call center layout trend from
several of our customers: classroom style layouts for their agent
workstations. Since Interior Concepts is fortunate enough to
work with contact centers from across the county, we have a unique
opportunity to identify call center trends. This layout has
three benefits for contact centers.
The first benefit is
visibility. The classroom style layout allows
supervisors to easily see all agents. This setup also allows
agents to face the...
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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...
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The main topics of interest at the IQPC Call
Center Week Las Vegas were ‘cloud’ and ‘multi-channel’.
Attendees were also concerned with the use of social media.
How customers connect to companies is evolving. Customers
want to connect on their own terms with the channel that suites
them best. Vendors are attempting to respond to the
customer’s needs with a variety of new solutions. Below is a
recap of exciting technologies and solutions that were at the
event.
360'CRM is
a full spectrum CRM...
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In the first quarter of 2012, Knowlagent surveyed workforce
management professionals to learn more about the goals and
challenges that pertain to their role within the call center.
We wanted to understand more about the group whose daily
responsibility is to deal with the complex nature of the contact
center to match supply (agents) with demand (calls). We heard about
the issues involved with scheduling agents, ensuring they have time
to complete the necessary off-phone work that helps them be...
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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...
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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,...
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Contact centers today have four core objectives:
1. To delight customers.
2. To sustain or increase revenue.
3. To minimize operating costs.
4. To provide valuable business insights to the entire
organization.
The relative importance of each mission varies based on the nature
of the enterprise. Organizations that have invested heavily in
developing brand equity will be most concerned with customer
delight and business intelligence. This would include virtually all
businesses that cater to...
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Quality Monitoring has been a cornerstone of contact center
operations for more than 30 years. It has served organizations well
as a method of managing agent performance, while driving gains in
operational efficiency and service delivery. However, while the
traditional quality assurance (QA) process has been effective to
this point, organizations are finding that QA alone is no longer
enough. This traditional process makes significant assumptions on
what customers really want and appreciate and...
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The following are some more information on the vendors who
attended the IQPC event.
Analytics
For companies frustrated with isolated or disparate data sources,
360'CRM's latest advances in its InSight data
analytics tool provides new levels of actionable information for
the Call Center or Channel Management practitioner. InSight
not only automatically draws call center performance data in to a
common, universally comparable dashboard and report analytics
library, it also integrates internal...
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First call resolution, and the closely related call resolution
rate, are the most important operational metrics for call center
managers because they address productivity, quality and customer
satisfaction in one number.
To realize the benefits of these essential key performance
indicators (KPIs), leaders need an objective, accurate and
automated mechanism for capturing and calculating one or both of
these measurements. Organizations that employ FCR to firmly
establish a corporate mindset...
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Virtual queuing bridges the customer service gap between
customer self-service and live service. According to Triad
Research Group, 75% of consumers who use virtual queuing technology
have a more favorable opinion of the company that they are doing
business with.
Companies using virtual queuing in their contact
center find:
• Ease of transition between self-service and
live-service
• Increased customer satisfaction and customer retention
initiatives
• Improved contact center metrics such as ASA,...
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According to a new white paper from VPI,
Quality Assurance 2.0, The Rebirth of Contact
Center QA, traditionally QA involved random recording or the
selection of a random sample from all recorded calls from which to
periodically evaluate and score a small number of calls for each
agent. The objective was to confirm that agents exhibit desirable
behaviors, without deviating from prescribed internal rules,
scripts and policies. The outcome of the evaluation was then
reflected in the agents‘...
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Enkata found a
recent
Harvard Business Review article authored
by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman,
Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers, insightful in its
recommendations to improve customer loyalty by reducing the amount
of effort required on the part of the customer to resolve service
issues. Enkata, agrees with the authors’ position on how best
to measure customer effort by tracking and correlating call
reasons, repeat calls, and specific call timeframes.
What Should You...
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The days of ‘telephone-only’ customer service are long gone. Our
customers now expect to contact us through email, chat and the web,
including social media. Managing service across all these disparate
communication channels can be a challenge. Businesses that do this
well have a distinct and potent competitive advantage. Their
customers are more satisfied, less apt to take their money
elsewhere and inclined to increase the business they conduct.
One key to improving customer satisfaction,...
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A most often asked question is “Where do you begin your search for
the KPIs and supporting metrics you need?” The starting point
may not be in any particular contact center system, application or
report. It isn’t in the contact center at all…. it’s in the
executive suite.
The contact center’s KPIs from strategic targets and goals is
set for the company as a whole by its leaders. An hour spent
with the vice-president of sales and marketing or the chief
financial officer — or the CEO — can go a...
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Quality management has stood as a cornerstone of contact center
performance management for many years, and for good reason. It
focuses on the interactions between agents and customers; those
little moments of truth where customer satisfaction hangs in the
balance. For the most part, quality management hasn’t changed much
through the years. The advent and rapid adoption of analytics
technologies in the contact center is about to change that.
A new white paper from Ventana Research explores...
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