Impact Every Cusotmer Interaction

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, September 19, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Just as poor customer service can rob a company of precious revenue, a superb customer interaction can boost an organization’s bottom line. In fact, according to a recent survey by Strativity Group, 73 percent of consumers stated that they would expand their purchases with a vendor by 10 percent or more if the customer experience was superior. And 55 percent of consumers agreed that they would stay with a vendor for 10 years or more as long as the experience remained superior. Rising customer...

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Virtual Assistants and Self Service

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, September 14, 2011   |   [1] Leave a Comment »
Virtual assistants originated in the mid 1960’s.  Over the past 2 years however, interest in virtual assistants, or digital characters, and their use in the online self-service and sales ecosystem has returned. Today, a recent analyst’s vendor landscape identifies over 65 companies worldwide that are workingon digital character development in some form or another.

Are you curious about the potential benefits of VA technology for your organization?  There are a number of issues that must...continue reading this post »

Speech Analytics and a Unified Analytics Strategy for Workforce Optimization

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, September 12, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Analytics applications are deployed in a number of functions and departments within the enterprise, and for a number of requirements in service operations. It is as critical to sales optimization in the marketing department, for example, as it is to performance optimization in the contact center. As a result, analytics often performs in a cross-functional capacity, typically without the benefit of coordination among users.

In the contact center, “cross-functional” may be narrowly defined as...

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Social Media and Informal Learning

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, September 7, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

According to the comScore 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review, social networking sites accounted for 12% of all time spent online in 2010, and the average American spent more than 14 hours watching online videos in December, a 12% increase over the previous year.

As social media continues to gain popularity in our culture.  Many call center agents are comfortable with social learning in their personal lives and, as a result, more and more companies are adopting social and informal learning platforms...

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Improving Process Efficiency with Workflow Automation

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, August 29, 2011   |   [1] Leave a Comment »

Quality management (QM), with its ability to drive agent behaviors that impact the customer experience, is a valuable tool for contact centers. Technological advances have increased QM process efficiency by replacing paper forms and making recordings more readily available. Significant areas of inefficiency still exist, however, increasing the cost of quality to the business.

According to a new CXM white paper,   integrating workforce automation and quality management offers opportunities for...

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The Win-Win-Win of the Home Agent Model

Posted By Jeff Furst   |   Friday, August 26, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
SYKES Home

Listen to Faye Victora, VP of SYKES Home, share her experiences with Jeff Furst on contact center home agent recruiting, compensation, and success factors in the most recent FurstPerson podcast. 

Click here to listen or access the transcript.

The 9 Characteristics of Highly Successful Outbound Care

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Thursday, August 25, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

 One of the key priorities for a customer care organization is the engagement and retention of customers. To strengthen rapport with customers at scale, some companies are turning to interactive outbound interactive voice response (IVR) solutions. However, poorly executed outreach can alienate customers rather than ingratiate them, so it is important to select a platform that delivers your ideal customer experience.

 

Customer service is increasingly viewed as a strategic element of a product’s...

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Basic Featured of Unified Desktop

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Tuesday, August 23, 2011   |   [1] Leave a Comment »

Features commonly provided by unified desktop solutions are as follows:

Single login/logout - Once the agent logs into the application they have unified access to multiple applications. There is no need to log in and out to access data bases or other applications.

Pre-populated screen pops - Unified desktops rely on the CRM as well as other sources, such as IVR entries and data gleaned from enterprise data bases to fully populate screens before the agent takes the call. All unified desktops pop...

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Multi Channel Preference Survey for the Banking Industry

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, August 15, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

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...

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Is Social Media Changing the Sales Process

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Friday, August 12, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Is the future of sales in social media? Sales trainers Landy Chase and Kevin Knebl think so. Their new book, the Social Media Sales Revolution, leads you step by step through the process of using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

The authors discuss six fundamental shifts in the B2B marketing place that are driving the future of selling professionals:

Rule 1:  Abandon Traditional Prospecting – The majority of B2B communication occurs through email, which the authors see as superior to...

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Is Web Self-Service Right For You

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, August 10, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

A new white paper from IntelliResponse 6 Tell-Tale Signs That Your Organization – And Your Customers – Are Ready For Next Generation Web Self-Service discusses if web self-service is right for your company.

According to Forrester Research, 72% of U.S. online consumers prefer to use a company’s Web site to get answers to their questions rather than contact companies via telephonen or email.

Telltale Sign #1:
The primary customer service features on your web site are FAQ and help pages and/or a site...

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Why Companies Invest So Much, But Get So Little From Their Quality Program

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, August 8, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
Based on 15 years of experience,  preeminent expert in Quality redesign and execution in contact centers, QPO, feels that companies are getting little value from their quality program.  

Upon interviewing senior executives, they found that most executives pay little attention to the quality scores reported by the quality program.  Based on over 1,300 assessments of the contact centers in 60 countries, QPO has determined that companies routinely experience 7 common quality pitfalls that plague...continue reading this post »

Driving the Customer Experience and Top Line with an Integrated VoC

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, August 8, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Customer Experience has become the mantra of senior management looking to enhance revenue and margins. This is a huge opportunity for whichever department can create a unified picture of the current CE and then help management to decide how to manage and improve it. Innovative, data driven departments as diverse as customer service, quality, consumer affairs or marketing services could capitalize on this opportunity to dramatically raise both their visibility and status within the organization.

Cu...

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Unified Desktop

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, August 3, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

These devices are variously called, "smart desktops," "intelligent desktops," "universal desktops," and "unified desktops."  However, all these products seek to condense required call processing information onto a single desktop application and organize the sequencing of screens to coincide with workflow. For ease of communication we will use the term "unified desktops."Demand for these products is still in the formative stages but growing rapidly.

Behind the interest is the same fundamental...

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Are You Ready For Next Gen Self-Service

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Tuesday, August 2, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
According to Forrester Research, 72% of U.S. online consumers prefer to use a company’s Web site to get answers to their questions rather than contact companies via telephone or email. Clearly, the web has become the primary first point of contact between many organizations and their stakeholders. Despite this fact, frustration and inefficiency abounds online, resulting in unsatisfied customers and increases in escalations to expensive contact center mainstays like phone calls and e-mails.

For...continue reading this post »

Capturing the Voice of the Customer

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, July 13, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
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...continue reading this post »

2011 Quality Management/Liability Recording (Workforce Optimization) Market Share Report

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, July 11, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

DMG Consulting’s annual Quality Management/Liability Recording (Workforce Optimization – WFO) Market Share Report is essential for vendors and investors who want to understand the current status and expected future performance of the 45-plus WFO competitors. In its eighth year, the Quality Management/Liability Recording (WFO) Market Share Report provides a detailed analysis of the performance of WFO suite providers, applications and sectors for fiscal 2010.

While some vendors experienced a...

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Getting Workforce Optimization Right

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, July 11, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
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 »

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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Additional Highlights from Call Center Week 2011

Posted By Larry Matte   |   Wednesday, June 29, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

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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