CRMXchange

Recently at the International Customer Service Association (ICSA) conference in San Antonio, Barbara Morrison, a Human Resources Director for Suddenlink Communications, and Jeff Furst, President and CEO of FurstPerson, presented a case study titled Separating Myth from Fact: Hiring for Peak Performance and Service.  Based on this discussion, FurstPerson has summarized three key strategies that enable contact center hiring managers to separate myth from fact when developing and operating contact...

Last month at the International Customer Service Association (ICSA) conference in San Antonio, Texas, Barbara Morrison, a Human Resources Director for Suddenlink Communications, and Jeff Furst, President and CEO of FurstPerson, presented a case study titled Separating Myth from Fact: Hiring for Peak Performance and Service.

Based on this discussion, FurstPerson has summarized three key strategies that enable contact center hiring managers to separate myth from fact when developing and operating...

According to a new Knowlagent sponsored DMG white, a growing number of leading contact centers are putting their agents to work during idle time. They are using an emerging set of workflow-enabled applications to identify agent downtime and deliver work items and tasks to fill those idle periods. These emerging solutions are helping to speed up and reduce the cost of processing.

Most contact center agents know a great deal about what happens throughout their organization because of the training...

Pillar #1: Holistic Multiple Touchpoints = Multiple Opportunities
The first step to creating a superior, loyalty-building customer experience involves cross-channel interaction analytics. Customers today communicate with companies across a variety of touchpoints, from Web-based forums to Twitter feeds. Discovering what’s really happening across all these channels, and knowing how to react can be challenging.

Pillar #2: Contextual Putting Service in Perspective
Closely linked with the insight and...

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...

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...

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...

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...

 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...