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...
continue reading this post »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,...
Although the economy is seemingly improving, pressure on contact
centers to improve customer satisfaction while reducing internal
costs remains. Managers face challenges in ensuring that they have
employed the right number and best-skilled staff, delivering
relevant training and preparing agents to handle customer queries
efficiently. All too often, agents do not have the right
information at their fingertips and customers must wait while
representatives search different applications and input...continue reading this post »
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...
continue reading this post »Your customers are coming to you via an variety of
channels. As a result, every employee is now customer facing
— either directly or indirectly — and distinctions between the
front
office and back office are blurring. With many more channels
coming to the multi channel contact center, and a
much more dispersed workforce, organizations today are forced to
manage a dizzying array of customer service systems, customer touch
points and customer-related tasks.
The question is, how do you make sure...
continue reading this post »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...
continue reading this post »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 »
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 »
The goal of the strategic/operational plan is to make sure the
exact right amount of call center agents show up to work every
Monday morning. There are methods of optimizing the levers
available to management- hiring, controllable shrinkage, overtime
and undertime- so the long term goal is met every week.
Other items to consider:
• Seasonality of workforce forecasts, call center scheduling, and the appropriate level of detail for each forecast
• Methods for developing week over week...continue reading this post »
Other items to consider:
• Seasonality of workforce forecasts, call center scheduling, and the appropriate level of detail for each forecast
• Methods for developing week over week...continue reading this post »
Desktop and Process Analytics software can help
organizations uncover and analyze their business processes. These
solutions capture and measure desktop application activities to
provide objective, unbiased visibility into how work is performed
from the point of origination, across multiple steps, applications,
and systems, and on through completion. For example, DPA solutions
can show:
•What staff members are doing at any given time on any given
day.
•Whether they’re performing the activities...
We talk a lot about balancing efficiency and effectiveness in our
call center operations. Something we don’t talk as much about is
balancing agent productivity and quality of life. Agent attrition
is the bane of call centers, and its costs are huge. For every
agent that leaves a new one must be recruited, screened and
trained. Those are just the direct costs associated with
agent turnover. Often overlooked are the indirect costs from
turnover’s impact on productivity, service quality and...continue reading this post »
Most call center and operations managers realize there is always
room for improved productivity and performance. By answering these
5 simple questions, you will gain the insight to know where to
focus in order to realize the greatest opportunities for
improvement.
Do I know?
1. What my people are doing at any given time on any given
day?
2. Are they are doing the activities they are scheduled to do when
both on and off the phones?
3. How are they performing their tasks and activities; meaning...
One my favorite Yogi Berra quotes came to mind the other day while
reading a white paper on the importance of good planning in the
contact center. “Prediction is difficult, especially about the
future.”
Accurately predicting future resource requirements is very
difficult in the contact center because of the impact of
seasonality and other complex factors. It’s difficult, yes, but
that doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and give up. Many
people in the industry view workforce management...
continue reading this post »Ovum has outlined five secrets to success that enterprises
should follow when implementing e-learning and coaching
solutions.
Use data and applications that already exist within the
contact center
Enterprises should use the information they already collect on agents’ skills and knowledge to determine the best time to schedule course and tailor the information. There are a number of applications that can be integrated with e-learning andcoaching including PM, WFM, Quality Management (QM) and...
continue reading this post »According to the white Enkata white paper Analytics Is Transforming Quality Assessment and Monitoring , typically the core of a company’s quality monitoring process involves listening to a very small number (sometimes less than five percent) of randomly selected call recordings and using a single form to score the agent’s performance. In some more mature companies, this process is supplemented with feedback manually gathered from completed customer survey forms. Given the nature of...continue reading this post »
There are days when contact center analysts, supervisors and
managers feel like they’re staring at an indecipherable waterfall
of data. The many, various and complex systems that make up
the modern contact center form a fount of data that never runs dry;
they collect information on virtually every measurable aspect of a
customer interaction, how it was handled, and by whom. Typically,
the number of database records rises into the millions in short
order.
Contact center systems usually offer
an...continue reading this post »
Contact center systems usually offer
an...continue reading this post »
Frost &
Sullivan recently hosted an eBroadcast titled “The First Step Toward
Improving the Customer Experience: Recruiting and Hiring the Right
Agents”.
In Part I, we summarized ideas from Keith Dawson, Frost’s Principal Analyst for Information and Technologies, and his concept of a “blind spot” that many contact center managers have when it comes to understanding the importance of automating their hiring process and its relationship to overall customer satisfaction.
In Part II, Mike Trotter, VP...continue reading this post »
In Part I, we summarized ideas from Keith Dawson, Frost’s Principal Analyst for Information and Technologies, and his concept of a “blind spot” that many contact center managers have when it comes to understanding the importance of automating their hiring process and its relationship to overall customer satisfaction.
In Part II, Mike Trotter, VP...continue reading this post »
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... continue reading this post »
“What If?” Insights... continue reading this post »
In an earlier posting, we revealed information about the average
wages for contact center employees in 2009. Now we’ll
look at another key finding from our 2009 Contact Center
Recruiting and Compensation Survey: the top reasons
for employee turnover in 2009.
About 46% of center leaders reported that at least one-half of their monthly attrition is voluntary (see Figure 2). Nearly 34% of respondents reported a voluntary attrition rate below 20%. Compared to 2008 results, 2009 voluntary turnover...continue reading this post »
About 46% of center leaders reported that at least one-half of their monthly attrition is voluntary (see Figure 2). Nearly 34% of respondents reported a voluntary attrition rate below 20%. Compared to 2008 results, 2009 voluntary turnover...continue reading this post »
Customers communicate with agents through a variety of communication channels, and many centers have been transformed into multichannel contact centers. Customers have the choice of contacting companies by telephone, email, snail mail, and increasingly, using web-chat. From the company’s perspective, the move to new communication channels has benefits in terms of both differentiated customer service and cost reduction.
Research has shown that, on average, the cost of handling calls is five times...
continue reading this post »
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