Contact Center

According to Nemertes Research, five key trends are reshaping customer-­‐experience management:

Increasing adoption of mobile devices enables engagement with customers and business partners across broad array of devices.

Big Data and speech analytics delivers new and insight into contact center performance and allows companies to improve customer service experience.

 Popularity of consumer social services such as Facebook and Twitter are emerging as a new interaction channel for customer engagement...

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...

Coaching is as much a critical process in today’s contact centers as workforce management, quality monitoring, and call routing.  Agents need feedback and goals to improve and succeed, and it is the supervisor’s role as a coach to manage and deliver that performance guidance. Unfortunately, in many contact centers today, coaching is not managed with strategy and rigor or treated as a first-class process. Often, the supervisor-agent relationship is broken, jeopardizing the success of...

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...

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...

The cloud contact center market is experiencing tremendous growth, while the on-premise sector struggles on. NewVoiceMedia, a leading provider of integrated cloud contact center services, experienced fourfold growth between Q1 2011 and 2012, and now serves more than 8000 agents in 30 countries including PhotoBox, QlikTech and SHL.

NewVoiceMedia’s CEO Jonathan Gale believes that the contact center market has lacked innovation from traditional on-premise vendors for many years. The company is...

Interior Concepts has a dedicated team that works with individuals in the contact center industry on a daily basis. These close interactions allow us to keep up to speed regarding changing market conditions and trends. Click the links to see virtual tours of successful contact center installations for NOVO 1 and OLC Global.

A new Interior Concepts white paper, Eight Trends for Contact Centers in 2013, focuses on eight trends to keep in mind when you build or retrofit your contact center this...

Delivering an exceptional customer experience is both an art & science. The “art” of an experience is based on the premise that every customer is a unique individual. Therefore, a contact center must tailor their interactions “creatively” instead of engaging all customers in a uniform way. The “moment of truth” strikes when the right information is delivered at the right time in the right way with the goal of ultimately making it easier for customers to accomplish their task. These experiences...

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...

Using Workforce Productivity Solutions and Practices to Turn the Contact Center into a Profit Center

The traditional view of the contact center as a cost center that needs to be managed solely for efficiency is outmoded. For your company to remain competitive, your contact center has to go beyond cost savings and evolve into a revenue contributor.

The enormous potential of the contact center as a tool to build customer loyalty, win new customers, and increase revenue has now been recognized by...

Contact Center Physics

The concept of entropy is one that many of us discussed in physics class: it can be simply described as the “process by which things with energy wind down over time, unless outside energy is pumped into the system.”  Entropy is why a glass of ice sitting in a room will melt. The heat energy in the room will move to the cold glass of ice. Over time, the glass of ice will warm up and melt, while the temperature in the room will fall imperceptibly.

Now, a top call center...

Mobile WFM: Defining Success for Next Generation Contact Centers

Many contact centers now draw their staff from the millennial generation who largely use smartphones and tablets for their personal and social communication. For these progressive organizations, adopting a mobile WFM solution is often the defining element in successful operation. Leveraging  mobile Web-enabled devices to connect contact center managers, supervisors and agents can increase efficiency as well as staff and customer...

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...

If “first-come-first-serve” is your contact center’s current method of vacation planning, now is the best time of year to consider adopting a new, more proactive approach.

Here are seven best-practice contact center vacation planning tips to help you get the ball rolling:

Tip #1: Establish an annual vacation bid

Conducting an annual vacation bid (typically administered in November of the prior year) is the perfect way to create some win-win structure in your contact center. It’s good for the...

Why Deliver Customer Service in the Cloud?

In a volatile and hyper-competitive market, consistently delivering exceptional multichannel customer service is essential. But providing world-class service on tight budgets and to even tighter deadlines is a tough challenge for even the largest organizations. That’s why so many of the world’s most successful organizations choose to deliver customer service in the cloud.

Organizations across the globe are making the move to the cloud to help them:

•...

Achieve Better Performance Results with SharePoint

Contact centers utilizing SharePoint demonstrate significant efficiency gains, In a a recent report published by Aberdeen Research, “The 2012 Guide on Building a Next Generation Contact Center through Microsoft SharePoint,” some of the advantages outlined include:

* 43% better results in first call resolution rate

* 16% greater agent utilization results, which on average translates into approximately $1,872 in incremental annual cost per agent

*...

It's Time to Get Mobile Self-Service Right

The mobile channel has become a make-or-break point of engagement with your customers.

But most companies offer a terrible mobile engagement experience, damaging the customer relationship in the process. This white paper from IntelliResponse shows you why mobile has moved to the forefront of the multi-channel strategy, and how to get mobile self-service right. Highlights include

•  7 reasons why the mobile channel offers the greatest improvement opportunity...

PCI Compliance Best Practices

Contact centers that handle credit card transactions face considerable risk from compromised customer payment card data. Organizations put themselves in financial peril if they fail to secure payment card data, resulting in monetary penalties and loss of business due to negative publicity. This focused CallCopy white paper provides critical details on how to comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) v2.0. Learn how PCI affects call recording...

Roadmap for Selecting a Contact Center Infrastructure

Choosing a new contact center infrastructure is one of the most crucial decisions your business can make. But with so many premise- and cloud-based solutions available, the selection process can be daunting This white pape,r by respected industry analyst Donna Fluss, provides a detailed roadmap that will get you to the best option for your business, and outlines how your organization can:

• Narrow your choices swiftly and intelligently,...

What Has Your Quality Monitoring Program Done for You Lately

How do you translate voice recordings into real-time business intelligence? While most contact centers actively record customer interactions, this data is useless until it has been analyzed – a process that can be time-intensive, inefficient and overwhelming. At best, most supervisors have the capacity to analyze only a fraction of the actual data collected.

Learn how to do more with the data you have. This white paper from Aspect...