The latest generation entering the workforce brings a new energy
to the contact center, which also brings new challenges to the
table for call center management. But this generation also
represents the new social customer, so understanding what makes
them “tick” can provide invaluable insight into what motivates your
customers.
Donna Fluss, a recognized thought leader and innovator in
contact center and real-time analytics, will join Knowlagent
CEO, Matt McConnell, for an interactive
webinar on...
When you hear the term “contact center” today, the image that
may come to mind is a large operation with hundreds of agents in
headsets busy on calls. However, if you were to visit the
most typical call center, you would only see a couple of dozen
frontline staff. That’s because most call centers are
actually small in size with three out of four centers employing
fewer than 20 agents.
According to Pelorus Group statistics, 75% of call centers have
between 1 – 20 staff and another 15% have...
As the contact center landscape changes, so too must the
reporting and analysis solutions that drive decision-making and
performance management. Each contact center is a unique mixture of
systems, applications, people and culture serving a specific
customer or client segment, each will need a different roadmap to
their destination.
There are four common reasons that contact centers are driven to
undertake this journey in the first place:
1. Current reports don't meet requirements: Typically,...
Join the annual November Virtual Contact Center
Conference. The popular online Conference features
presentations by experts on issues that confront customer care
professionals daily. The Conference is fully interactive and
all customer care professionals within an organization are able to
participate.
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...
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...
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.
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 »
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...
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...
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.
Even in the best-managed and busiest contact centers, where
workforce management solutions are used to optimize agent
schedules, there will always be unexpected downtime without calls.
Using this idle time productively will improve agent satisfaction
and service quality while reducing agent-related costs. Delivering
real-time, targeted training, coaching and communications during
slow periods can alter your contact center’s dynamics – boosting
productivity, quality and customer perception. A new...
Are you satisfied with the usefulness and return you’re getting on
your contact center workforce management solution? If you are not,
you’re not alone. According to a report by DMG Consulting,
overall satisfaction with workforce management solutions is very
low, with ratings averaging 3.3 out of 5.
Reasons for dissatisfaction include cost, weak intra-day
capabilities, inflexible solutions, inaccuracy of data, and
difficulty of use. If implemented correctly, however, your
workforce management...continue reading this post »
With the advent of analytics in the contact center over the past
decade, the industry has experienced unprecedented gains in
operational productivity and customer service. Typically deployed
as part of a workforce optimization (WFO) solution, analytics is a
primary driver of performance and quality monitoring improvements.
Analytics provides an objective means by which to identify where
opportunities for improvement exist while providing a pathway for
executing on those opportunities.
after nearly three decades, the contact center quality management
(QM)/liability recording (also known as workforce optimization
(WFO)) market continues to evolve and progress at a surprisingly
rapid pace.
The first decade has seen steady growth in market demand for
analytics solutions of all descriptions as evidenced by the results of the annual
survey of contact center end-users conducted by Saddletree Research
in conjunction with the National Association of Call Centers
(NACC). An offshoot of the Call Center Lab at The University of
Southern Mississippi, the not-for-profit NACC conducts surveys of
its members and newsletter subscribers in order to keep a finger on
the pulse of the industry...
The goal of the strategic/operational plan is to make sure the
exact right amount of call center agents show up to work every
Monday morning. There are methods of optimizing the levers
available to management- hiring, controllable shrinkage, overtime
and undertime- so the long term goal is met every week.
Other items to consider:
• Seasonality of workforce forecasts, call center
scheduling, and the appropriate level of detail for each
forecast • Methods for developing week over week...continue reading this post »
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...
We talk a lot about balancing efficiency and effectiveness in our
call center operations. Something we don’t talk as much about is
balancing agent productivity and quality of life. Agent attrition
is the bane of call centers, and its costs are huge. For every
agent that leaves a new one must be recruited, screened and
trained. Those are just the direct costs associated with
agent turnover. Often overlooked are the indirect costs from
turnover’s impact on productivity, service quality and...continue reading this post »
Back offices are a critical element of delivering great customer
service, but it’s often difficult to gauge the productivity and
effectiveness of back office operations. Customers may not
see very far beyond their contact center interactions, but the
quality of their experiences is indirectly influenced by the
effectiveness of back office employees’ performance. By
attending this webinar you’ll learn how automated workforce
optimization solutions can increase the productivity of...
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