Contact Center and CRM Best Practices

Posted By Herb Greenebaum   |   Friday, October 12, 2012   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

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:

•...

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Contact Center & CRM Best Practices

Posted By Herb Greenebaum   |   Thursday, September 27, 2012   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

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...
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A new perspective on the customer experience

Posted By Herb Greenebaum   |   Monday, July 30, 2012   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

I'm the new kid on the block here at CRMXchange,but since I've been involved in customer-related issues since the prehistoric days when CTI was the golly-gee tecnhology and it was still acceptable to use the dreaded 'T" word to summarize the industry as a whole, I'm not all that new and hardly a kid.

I've seen the terminology migrate from customer service to customer care, to customer relations management--before it became the acronym we now all know and love. But the growing demand for immediate...

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Call Center Week - Review of Solutions

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Friday, June 22, 2012   |   [4] Leave a Comment »

The main topics of interest at the IQPC Call Center Week Las Vegas were ‘cloud’ and ‘multi-channel’.  Attendees were also concerned with the use of social media.

How customers connect to companies is evolving.  Customers want to connect on their own terms with the channel that suites them best.  Vendors are attempting to respond to the customer’s needs with a variety of new solutions.  Below is a recap of exciting technologies and solutions that were at the event.

360'CRM   is a full spectrum CRM...

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Moments of Truth: Key Trends that Impact How Your Call Center Delivers in the Clutch

Posted By Matt McConnell   |   Friday, June 15, 2012   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

“Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.”
~Phillips Brooks

Call center agents hold the power of your brand promise in their hands.

The moment of truth can be when customers need to talk to an agent after exhausting self-service options.  Or, it can be the accumulation of experiences across all channels.

As problem calls increase and interaction points expand, companies need to adjust their customer experience strategies to ensure agents are equipped to...

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Marrying the Analyses of Service, Cost, Revenue, and Customer Experience

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Saturday, January 14, 2012   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Contact center executives like the certainty contact demand, resource availability, operational efficiency, and maybe most importantly, the certainty of agent performance and customer experience delivery.

However, certainty is the one thing that the manager of such a complex operation will never have.

The best equipped contact center executives tame the uncertainty of their environment with good management and with the help of mathematical models. These models provide the next best thing to...

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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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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 »

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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How to Improve Business Results with Engaged Employees

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Tuesday, May 31, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

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...

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Contact Center Surveying/Feedback and Analytics Market Trends

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, May 4, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

According to a KnoahSoft reprint of the DMG Contact Center Surveying/Feedback and Analytics Market Report, the market trends are as follows:

•The contact center surveying sector is doing well, as organizations seek to improve relationships with customers.

•Social networking/social media is starting to play a significant role as a source of unsolicited customer feedback for contact centers.

•A growing number of multi-channel surveying application providers are delivering solutions that address...continue reading this post »

Communication Channels Foster Stronger Customer Relationships

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Tuesday, May 3, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
From June through September Opus Research mounted a Web-based survey to gain insights into the deployment plans and levels of interest in a variety of channels and networks for customer care and marketing efforts. Here are the top line findings:

• Transformational times in the Contact Center – Contact center personnel are increasingly engaged in multi-modal, multi-channel and social interactions.

• Monitoring and call recording are high profile – In response to questions about technology in...continue reading this post »

Quality Assurance 2.0, The Rebirth of Contact Center QA

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, April 20, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
Intelligent QA systems rapidly identify and deliver insights into critical business issues and opportunities to improve the customer experience and revenue.

A new VPI  white paper, Quality Assurance 2.0, The Rebirth of Contact Center QA,  defines Quality Assurance as:

1) A proactive method for rapidly identifying and resolving business issues associated with customer interactions.

2) A requirement to minimize liability risk and ensure compliance with laws, regulations and internal policies.

3) A...continue reading this post »

Capabilities Missing from CRM solutions

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, January 17, 2011   |   [1] Leave a Comment »
A great deal has changed in the contact center and CRM technology landscape in the past ten years, and most companies lag way behind in taking advantage of new functionality. An obvious example is social media.

DMG Consulting estimates that more than 93% of existing servicing/CRM applications do not have the ability to access, route, queue and respond to social media interactions. However, this is not the only capability missing from servicing/CRM solutions. Unified communications, desktop...continue reading this post »

Creating a Customer-Centric, Multichannel Contact Center

Posted By Brian Spraetz   |   Friday, December 24, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
The days of ‘telephone-only’ customer service are long gone. Our customers now expect to contact us through email, chat and the web, including social media. Managing service across all these disparate communication channels can be a challenge. Businesses that do this well have a distinct and potent competitive advantage. Their customers are more satisfied, less apt to take their money elsewhere and inclined to increase the business they conduct.
 
One key to improving customer satisfaction,...
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DMG 2010-2011 Text Analytics Product & Market Report

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, November 17, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »


Text analytics has been a recognized IT sector for more than 15 years, yet it remains one of technology’s best-kept secrets. With an estimated 3,500 text analytics implementations globally, there is a huge opportunity for vendors to better educate the market on the practical application of this technology in the marketing and business worlds. And end users have a real chance to utilize this application to gain a competitive advantage by knowing exactly what is being said about them, over what...

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Finding Hidden Costs In Your Contact Center Plans

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, October 11, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

The operational planning process evolved to solve the core inbound contact center business question: given the seasonality of call volumes, the seasonality of agent attrition, the seasonality of agent sick time, vacation requests, and other shrinkage items, the seasonality of handle times, given that all of these items are different by center location and type of staff required, and given learning curves, training times, and other important and complicating characteristics, how does...

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Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Contact Centers

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Tuesday, September 14, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
According to Gartner, through 2013, four major initiatives will dominate overall customer service strategies:

•Tying together service interaction channels
•Integrating social CRM capabilities
•Analyzing the customer experience
•Applying business rules and knowledge in real time

Two major challenges will impact the definition of market leader in the CRM customer service contact center space, which focuses on tools for the human agent or service representative:

•A new generation of customers has a...continue reading this post »

Don't Forget About Maintaining Superior Voice Quality

Posted By Larry Matte   |   Friday, June 18, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
How many calls do you deal daily that have with poor voice quality?   Too low, not clear enough, too much interference – these are some of the typical distractions that we encounter.   Our contact centers focus on providing a highly satisfactory customer experience by training their agents and adding technology to make the customer experience more satisfying across multiple contact points.   Multi channel contact centers give users customers the ability to choose their preferred method of...continue reading this post »

Internal Monitoring Isn’t Enough to Protect Your Brand & Customer Experiences

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Thursday, June 10, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Your company’s brand and reputation depend on your team’s ability to deliver a superior customer experience. Yet, people, processes and technology often conspire to create headaches for management and unsatisfactory interactions for customers.


Do these problems sound familiar? You receive calls from management demanding answers about why a host went down or why customer complaints are up. You may be  off for the  weekend but you still worry that a problem will not be detected as quickly as it...

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