Call Center Optimization

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...

Expert Planet - Why and How We Use Virtual Agents

Expert Planet designs, develops and measures targeted sales and marketing campaigns for some of the largest organizations on the planet. Using a unique community of topical experts—talented agents with sales skills and specialized knowledge relevant to client programs—this outsourced contact center service provider is able to quickly deploy, test, measure, and optimize client programs, without operating a physical contact center.In four years, the...

I'm the new kid on the block here at CRMXchange,but since I've been involved in customer-related issues since the prehistoric days when CTI was the golly-gee tecnhology and it was still acceptable to use the dreaded 'T" word to summarize the industry as a whole, I'm not all that new and hardly a kid.

I've seen the terminology migrate from customer service to customer care, to customer relations management--before it became the acronym we now all know and love. But the growing demand for immediate...

In a recent call center agent productivity study conducted by Ventana Research, 81% of those call center leaders polled cited improving agent performance as a top priority in their organization. So, if improving agent performance is a key initiative for most call centers, and coaching is a proven contributor to positively impacting agent performance , why do so many call centers continue to struggle with providing agents with enough effective coaching?

It certainly isn’t for a lack of effort. In...

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...

“Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.”
~Phillips Brooks

Call center agents hold the power of your brand promise in their hands.

The moment of truth can be when customers need to talk to an agent after exhausting self-service options.  Or, it can be the accumulation of experiences across all channels.

As problem calls increase and interaction points expand, companies need to adjust their customer experience strategies to ensure agents are equipped to...

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...

Since the emergence of multi-channel self-service, there is a growing disconnect between the typical strategy employed in telephone self-service design and what many customers actually need. A new Nuance report details the results of a commissioned survey which attempts to uncover customer channel preferences for an array of banking tasks, including recommendations for optimizing the IVR to both accommodate those preferences and minimize the frustrations associated with today’s multi-channel...

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...

The staff of CRMXchange was present at the IQPC Las Vegas Call Center Week. IQPC did a commendable job with the content and speakers in the event. The exhibit hours were long, running close to 11 hours on day one, but the vendors were pleased with the amount of interest that people showed in their products and services. 

We traveled the exhibit hall. Below are some vendor highlights.

Analytics

Contact Solutions – The Continuous Improvement Practice (CI) is based on a unique methodology and supported...

Even in the best-managed and busiest contact centers, where workforce management solutions are used to optimize agent schedules, there will always be unexpected downtime without calls. Using this idle time productively will improve agent satisfaction and service quality while reducing agent-related costs. Delivering real-time, targeted training, coaching and communications during slow periods can alter your contact center’s dynamics – boosting productivity, quality and customer perception. A new...

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,...

The first decade has seen steady growth in market demand for analytics solutions
of all descriptions as evidenced by the results of the annual survey of contact center end-users conducted by Saddletree Research in conjunction with the National Association of Call Centers (NACC). An offshoot of the Call Center Lab at The University of Southern Mississippi, the not-for-profit NACC conducts surveys of its members and newsletter subscribers in order to keep a finger on the pulse of the industry...

In Q3/Q4 2010, DMG Consulting conducted a benchmark study of 149 enterprise, operations, contact center and IT managers, directors, leaders and decision-makers around the world.  They found that a growing number of contact centers of all sizes are looking for a low-risk approach to enhance and optimize their contact center servicing/CRM applications. Many of these companies have been sitting on the sidelines for years, waiting for a more attractive solution to enter the market to help them...

Our fourth post in Brent Holland's series, “Generational Hiring for the Optimal Customer Experience”, discusses research examining whether generational groups produce a different customer experience.

Do generational differences affect perceptions of the customer experience?

In the last post, I shared research indicating that more mature workers are likely to turnover less often than younger workers.  That’s only half the equation, however.  An equally important issue concerns whether generational...