Remote Call Center Agents

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...

The staff of CRMXchange was present at the IQPC Las Vegas Call Center Week. IQPC did a commendable job with the content and speakers in the event. The exhibit hours were long, running close to 11 hours on day one, but the vendors were pleased with the amount of interest that people showed in their products and services. 

We traveled the exhibit hall. Below are some vendor highlights.

Analytics

Contact Solutions – The Continuous Improvement Practice (CI) is based on a unique methodology and supported...

Sharing updates with call center agents during downtime is an ideal way to improve your staff’s knowledge and skills. This can be done at minimal cost and without disrupting the flow of operations – which is what happens when agents are pulled from the phones to attend a training/coaching class. The contact center has to be able to send out training/coaching or other information as soon as a slow period is identified, as these lulls generally do not last long.

This means that you will need a...

My colleague, Brent Holland, continues our series on "Generational Hiring for the Optimal Customer Experience".  The second installment considers two important questions:  (1) how to define generational groups and (2) whether contact centers rely on generational groups to guide recruitment.

How does FurstPerson define generational groups for this research?

When we began studying the impact of generational classifications, one of the first things we noticed was that many people disagree on who is a...

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...

Second in a two-part series

Yesterday we looked at the Payment Card Security Council and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard which were established to protect the credit card user. Today we look  specifically at the standard and the requirements it places on contact centers.

DMG Consulting LLC is a leading provider of market research and consulting services for contact centers. The 2009 – 2010 Quality Management/Liability Recording Product and Market Report is the definitive guide to...

Customer needs are increasingly being handled by employees who work outside a formal contact center. This trend is confirmed in Ventana Research’s benchmark research into agent performance management. Their research found that customer interactions typically are handled by a variety of business units – primarily the contact center (in 94 percent of companies) but also sales (42 percent), home-based agents (32 percent), back-office departments (31 percent), customer service (30 percent) and...

How to Purchase Durable Call Center Cubicles

There are many considerations when purchasing call center furniture, in particular cubicles, which range from design, space utilization, ergonomics, durability, and warranty. The call center space needs to be warm and inviting, ergonomically friendly, and designed to last.

Specifically, durability is important because call center agents handle a steady stream of incoming phone calls and emails, meaning that they rarely have a chance to step away from...

For eight straight quarters Sprint has improved its overall customer experience. The improvement in Sprint's customer satisfaction scores, according to third-party studies, is a result of introducing its best-ever handset lineup with Android phones HTC Hero and Samsung Moment, simplifying cell phone plans with Any Mobile, AnytimeSM and Everything Data, and offering 4G service in 27 markets.

 

All of these new products, plans and services create a complex and ever-changing customer...

Are you systems operating as efficiently as possible?  You have invested in coaching, training and quality monitoring programs, yet, your best agents still outperform your average agents by 20-50%, so your average handle time still hovers at its current number. The “ million dollar question”  is why.

The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) and the Mississippi Department of Economic Security(MDES) have established a contact center lab that is available to the industry for the purpose...

Unified Agent Desktop

A unified desktop seeks to condense required call processing information onto a single desktop application and organize the sequencing of screens to coincide with workflow. Demand is growing for these products primarily due to the importance of first contact resolution (FCR).

Prior to the use of unified agent desktops,  improving FCR often came at the expense of increased handing time, as agents needed to search through myriad data sources and/or consult with others...