CRMXchange

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...

Customer Effort Score (CES) is the new hot metric for customer service. (CES) has been widely discussed since the Harvard Business Review article, Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers (July, 2010), where Customer Effort Score was touted as being a better predictor of customer loyalty than Net Promoter Score or Customer Satisfaction. While CES is an important metric and arguably the best metric to focus your service operation, there is no such thing as a “magic metric”. Getting results from...

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...

What Contact Centers Can Learn from Public Safety

To the harried managers of a modern high-octane commercial contact center, it might seem like nothing could be more urgent than squeezing every last drop of efficiency and productivity out ofoperations. But they would be wrong.

There is an environment in which the stakes are higher, where delivering top-notch “service” is a number one priority for the organization. That is in the public safety sector, where callers are people in intense distress...

Quality assurance (QA) is a mission-critical business function that identifies contact center and enterprise trends, and provides insights into how well each agent is performing. For the past 30 years QA has been performed in contact centers around the world in basically the same way. Managers search through volumes of recordings to find the 10% to 20% of calls that require attention, either because they are really bad or really good. If a call is bad, the QA specialist or supervisor must...

Debunking 5 Myths of Hosted Contact Centers

No Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) discussion is complete these days until someone touts the multiple benefits of moving applications to the cloud. It’s hard to ignore the promise of CAPEX and OPEX savings, especially when many businesses are still recovering from the economic crisis and searching for ways to provide additional value to their customers. But not all SaaS offerings are created equal. Some applications are a better fit for the cloud than...

Now You Want to Sell: 4 Steps to Hiring the Right Service AND Sales Agent

More and more service organizations are adding a sales component to their calls. Their goals include:

• Creating revenue opportunities that did not previously exist

• Shifting contact center operations into profit centers as opposed to cost centers.

• Pinpointing the strongest cross-sell or upsell offers to make by using available technology to automatically  review customer records.

How does selling on a service call impact...

How Speech Analytics Helps You Take Charge of Compliance and Liability
 

If you are a contact center or enterprise business facing compliance measures, you know who you are. More than likely, you have established a compliance process to ensure business integrity, resolve disputes or comply with industry regulations on phone-based transactions.

The question is…do you really know what your employees are saying or doing that might be putting your business at risk?  If the answer is “no” or “I don’t...

Improve Your Customer Experience:
Design Your Quality Program to Link Directly to Customer Satisfaction

Everyone who works in the customer contact industry has experienced this—quality scores in the 90s, but customer satisfaction (CSAT) or issue resolution results that are in the 60s or 70s. How can that be? Why is it that quality results are not aligned with CSAT and other business measures? Do you really know what your customer is experiencing with your contact center? How can there be such a...

The Value in Naysayer Feedback - Actionable Steps to Improve Customer Experience for Contact Centers

While the call center has many metrics for determining success, the overall customer experience has the biggest impact on your bottom line, yet it is also one of the most difficult metrics to measure. Fortunately, your customers don’t think in terms of metrics. The only thing that matters to them is that they have a positive experience. Take FCR as an example: there are many ways to measure FCR,...

Recently we have noticed a new call center layout trend from several of our customers: classroom style layouts for their agent workstations.  Since Interior Concepts is fortunate enough to work with contact centers from across the county, we have a unique opportunity to identify call center trends.  This layout has three benefits for contact centers.

The first benefit is visibility.  The classroom style layout allows supervisors to easily see all agents.  This setup also allows agents to face the...