Call Recording and the Law

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Thursday, July 7, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

The current legal landscape for call recording consists of numerous state and federal laws, along with industry mandates. These rules and regulations have been written primarily to protect individual rights to privacy and to protect individuals and businesses from fraud and abuse.

It is useful for contact center managers, among others, to have a common resource that offers useful guidance on best practices necessary to achieve and maintain both compliance and verification. “Call Recording and...

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Contact Center Quality Assurance

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Tuesday, April 5, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
The measurement of performance is fundamental to contact center operations of all sizes. The contact center quality assurance (QA) measurement process is often one of the main performance data collection vehicles for management. With the power of analytics-driven QA, organizations can see the quality of their operations and customer interactions clearly at all times, along with early warnings of problems and bottlenecks.  However, many contact centers do they have adequate resources in place...continue reading this post »

Call Center Quality Monitoring and Worforce Optimization Report

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, March 9, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
after nearly three decades, the contact center quality management (QM)/liability recording (also known as workforce optimization (WFO)) market continues to evolve and progress at a surprisingly rapid pace.

While many consider QM and recording solutions to be commodities, the 2010 – 2011 Quality Management/Liability Recording (Workforce Optimization) Product and Market Report reveals quite the opposite. The core concepts of QM, recording and WFO have certainly become standardized, a clear benefit...continue reading this post »

Call Center Agent's To - Do List

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Tuesday, March 8, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
The agent’s to‐do list provides opportunities for call centers to operate more efficiently. It is designed to make agent available time more productive. Agents can learn a new skill set, read up on new policies or complete mandatory HR assessments.

According to a new  Knowlagent white paper “Create the To‐Do List”,  the most challenging part of creating the to‐do list is gathering all of the tasks that need to be done for all agents and figuring out which tasks need to be completed first. Most...continue reading this post »

Looking for KPI’s in the Wrong Place

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, October 11, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

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...continue reading this post »

Finding Hidden Costs In Your Contact Center Plans

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, October 11, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

The operational planning process evolved to solve the core inbound contact center business question: given the seasonality of call volumes, the seasonality of agent attrition, the seasonality of agent sick time, vacation requests, and other shrinkage items, the seasonality of handle times, given that all of these items are different by center location and type of staff required, and given learning curves, training times, and other important and complicating characteristics, how does...

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How Workforce Management Transforms the Back Office

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Friday, July 16, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Back-office operating areas that process orders, applications, claims, white mail, payments, etc., have historically been left to develop their own staff planning approach. Senior management perception was that little could be done to improve the performance of these people-intensive, but non-strategic operating areas. So, these departments have received limited attention and investment dollars, or have been outsourced.

Call centers used to confront similar challenges before new tools and...

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Task Completion Rate (TCR) - metric that promotes caller success

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Friday, July 2, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
Operational metrics like call containment rates and average handle time (AHT) are commonly used as key performance indicators in contact centers, but these metrics mislead managers from the business goal of increasing customer satisfaction.

These indirect metrics mask problems that cause customers continued frustration, and contact center managers risk making decisions that could actually worsen the experience.
Task Completion Rate (TCR), is  a metric that promotes caller success to provide a...continue reading this post »

Don’t Shortchange Yourself – Get the Full Value of Your Virtual Contact Center

Posted By Larry Matte   |   Thursday, July 1, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
I don’t know how many times I have heard contact center professionals extol the virtues of using remote (at-home) agents to extend their agent resources beyond the infrastructure of their organizations.   But apparently, (in my brief survey), many companies with centers in multiple locations have not taken the benefits of virtual contact centers to the next level.

Combining these resources into one big agent pool allows an organization to balance the demand fluctuation across...continue reading this post »

Are you benchmarking your customer experience?

Posted By Brian Spraetz   |   Thursday, July 1, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
It shouldn’t come as earth-shattering news to anyone that the experiences customers have when interacting with a business have a major impact on satisfaction, and ultimately the company’s survival. Before you can effectively manage customer experience though, you need to know where your organization stands today. The old adage, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”, still applies.
 
One good way of measuring current performance is through a formalized benchmarking process. A major benefit of...
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Are you benchmarking your customer experience?

Posted By Brian Spraetz   |   Thursday, June 17, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

It shouldn’t come as earth-shattering news to anyone that the experiences customers have when interacting with a business have a major impact on satisfaction, and ultimately the company’s survival. Before you can effectively manage customer experience though, you need to know where your organization stands today. The old adage, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”, still applies.

One good way of measuring current performance is through a formalized benchmarking process. A major benefit of...
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Internal Monitoring Isn’t Enough to Protect Your Brand & Customer Experiences

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Thursday, June 10, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Your company’s brand and reputation depend on your team’s ability to deliver a superior customer experience. Yet, people, processes and technology often conspire to create headaches for management and unsatisfactory interactions for customers.


Do these problems sound familiar? You receive calls from management demanding answers about why a host went down or why customer complaints are up. You may be  off for the  weekend but you still worry that a problem will not be detected as quickly as it...

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How Cloud-Based Contact Centers Minimize Risk and Increase Customer Satisfaction

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, June 2, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

In a recent Blog, we reviewed a report from Ovum that analyzed the growth of the hosted contact center market and ranked its leading vendors.

Today, we’ll look at a new white paper from Contactual, a global leader in hosted contact center technology, which concludes that rapid technological changes make on-premises contact centers obsolete soon after they are installed, and suggests how enterprises can eliminate capital expenditures, increase customer satisfaction and stay on the forefront of...

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Back-Office Inefficiencies Register with Customers and Reflect in the Bottom Line

Posted By Aspect Blog   |   Tuesday, May 11, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
Blind spots to back-office performance – due to a lack of proven processes for managing multiple types of tasks consistently and efficiently – can cost an organization more than productivity. Contact center interactions may leave customers delighted, but processing delays, billing errors and other inefficiencies can sabotage even the most positive experience. To contain the financial risk of customer attrition, you need to reduce the considerable costs of suboptimal staffing.

“What If?” Insights...
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Greening of the Contact Center - Go Green With Call Center Furniture

Posted By Jennifer Way   |   Thursday, February 18, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

When furnishing your call center, certain call center cubicles and call center furniture can help in the 'greening' of the contact center. Here's how.

MAS certified GreenLEED Standards
Selecting MAS Certified Green call center cubicles and other furniture can help to create a greener call center. MAS Certified Green furniture meets the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) indoor air quality standards after rigorous product testing. It is approved as a low-emitting furniture system by compliance with...

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Call Center Resources- Call Center for Dummies

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, January 25, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Call Centers For Dummies serves as an easy reference resource for call center managers. Concentrating on revenue generation, efficiency, and customer satisfaction, as well as how to enhance the customer experience, this book helps managers improve their results and affect their company's bottom line. With new tools and tactics specifically designed for call center managers, Call Centers For Dummies helps put a value on customer relations efforts undertaken in call centers and helps managers...

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Spring Color Trend for 2010: Turquoise Call Center Furniture?

Posted By Jennifer Way   |   Thursday, January 7, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Turquoise FurnitureInterior design color trends often follow fashion trends, so colors that you see on the runways in the spring will soon be seen in trendy home stores and maybe even in your office. Since colors influence interior design, this will lead to complementing and coordination of the furnishings. Thankfully, more and more people selecting furnishings for call center and office spaces look to current design trends and outside of the traditional (and slightly boring) all gray color schemes of the past.

 

Pan...

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Greening the Contact Center

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, January 6, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Interior Concepts is in the business of the  “greening” of the contact center.

LEED Standards
Selecting the right call center cubicles and other furniture can help to create a ‘greener’ call center.  Interior Concepts furniture meets the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Indoor air quality standards after rigorous product testing and is approved as a low-emitting furniture system by compliance with the BIFMA X7.1 Furniture Emissions Standards which addresses Total Volatile...

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To Tweet or Not To Tweet: That’s NOT the Question Customer Experience and Social Media

Posted By Lior Arussy   |   Tuesday, January 5, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
Here we are again. A new technology is taking over and the world as we know it is coming to an end. The advent of this latest and greatest technology allows individuals to broadcast short messages of up to 140 characters anytime, anywhere. With this newfound ability, some pundits are proclaiming that customer relationships as we know them are over. I should confess that I’m a bit tired of such proclamations and punditry particularly when it is all too apparent that people are simply glorifying a...continue reading this post »

Accelerating Call Center Monitoring Results and Workforce Optimization with Desktop Screen Analytics

Posted By Patrick Botz   |   Tuesday, December 15, 2009   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Authored by Patrick Botz, Vice President of Solutions Marketing, VPI

 

Call center monitoring software is now a fundamental technology in virtually every competitive call center environment. As the economy begins to recover, 2010 is expected to be another tough year for enterprises, with contact center managers asked once again to reduce their operating expenses while improving the customer experience and satisfaction scores. They will be expected to achieve this goal with limited resources and...

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