Call Centers
CALL CENTERS
Call centers are more than just a room full of service reps. They are the interface between most direct-commerce businesses and their customers. This section offers you in-depth strategies to measure agent performance, schedule assignments, monitor call quality, benchmark speed-of-answer and call abandonment rates, and train and evaluate employees.
Ebags Brings Call Center to U.S.
To better cater to customers looking for phone help, online handbags and accessories seller eBags has brought its call center to the U.S., Ebags, which had been using a services provider based in the Philippines, went with Peoria, IL-based Affina....
The Power of One in Call Center Staffing
Whether manually created or developed through workforce management systems, once you have carefully devised a set of workforce schedules, it’s critical that your staff sticks to the plan. But one of the hardest things to manage in many call centers is getting agents to adhere to their daily work schedules. ...
Training Phone Reps to Upsell
Many call center reps see themselves as order-takers or processors or helpers, not as salespeople, and they can be fearful--and in some cases, downright negative--about selling. So the approach of teaching reps to “make the ask,” as fundraisers call it, instead of asking them to “sell,” often creates less resistance....
Increasing AOV on the phone
What's the AOV this week? How's the AOV trending? When marketers start talking about average order value, I can't help thinking of Garrison Keillor's...
Helping Phone Reps Increase AOV
You can do a few things to increase your average order value. But you’ll have to work for it. Most customers calling to order have chosen their merchandise before they dial; some have even calculated their order total. So triggering the impulsive act of adding on to an order will take a little bit of advance planning....
Surveying Call Center Success
The long-term success of any organization, and particularly a service organization such as a call center, depends upon continuous improvement. Most call centers have numerous measures of individual, team, and overall call center performance. ...
Putting a Cap on Calls Resolution
You know why you should strive for first-call resolution, and if you read our last article (http://multichannelmerchant.com/opsandfulfillment/advisor/first_call_0129/index.html), you know how to do it. This week we’ll focus on limiting the number of calls to or from a customer it will take to resolve any problem or issue....
THE NEW SCHOOL
Thinking of buying a new CRM system? Save your money until your employees know what they're talking about. Technology alone won't help you provide customers...
Health Issues Plague Offshore Call-center Staff
American consumers--and Europeans for that matter—often get testy when they find their calls have been transferred to a contact center based in India. And they tend to unleash their fury and frustration on the call agents, which, according to a recent story in the Washington Post, has resulted in a rash of stress-induced ailments among India-based phone reps....
Call Center Customers: The Waiting is the Hardest Part
The gap between customers' perception of waiting time and actual waiting time has been clearly conceptualized but rarely measured. ...
Elfing It Up at Lands’ End
To liven up the holiday order experience for both customers and telephone representatives, Lands’ End’s three contact centers are participating in a new company promotion, “Elf of the Day,” which began Nov. 28....
Top 10 Tech Tools for Call Centers
Technology has revolutionized the contact center in recent years, and there’s no shortage of must-have systems to choose from. But what’s the equipment centers can’t or shouldn’t live without? ...
Is this New Delhi?
Haband is doing it. So are Home Decorators Collection and Creative Irish Gifts. Dell's still at it — even after customers told it to stop. What are these merchants doing? They're outsourcing all or part of their incoming calls to overseas call centers....
Quick Tip: Hiring a Phone Rep? Pick Up the Phone
You know you have to hire a rep for your call center, but you’re pressed for time and can’t even think about interviewing agents. While you will eventually need resumes and in-person interviews, but you can learn a lot from in initial phone call with candidates....
Eye on Offshore Call Center Outsourcing
The worldwide market for customer service outsourcing hit $12.2 billion in 2007, compared with $8.4 billion in 2004, according to Gartner Research.
The main reason it’s so popular? Marketers can save around 40% of their call center bills by outsourcing overnight or overflow calls, says Art Hall, principal with management consulting firm Marsel and Alvarez. ...
The Skinny on Call Monitoring
Managers typically monitor their agents' performance in responding to telephone calls, e-mail, etc. for purposes of quality control and training. Research shows that best-practice contact centers monitor 5 to 10 calls per agent per month. ...
Customer Intimacy: Getting Past the First 15 Seconds
Most call centers these days are tailoring their opening by balancing the requirements of their strategy and what their customers prefer. The best-in-class standard is not so much "agent first and last name" or "first name only" but rather what fits into the company strategy and customer segment. ...
Dark Days for Offshore Service?
Have you off-shored any of your customer contact operation? If so, how do you ensure there are no “dark and stormy” nights in your agents’ or customers’ experience?...
Should customer service reps sell?
Customers love to buy. We love when someone helps us solve a problem, meet a need, satisfy a desire, or do something nice for ourselves. If it's true,...
Giving FEEDBACK
Why put yourself through the agony of giving performance feedback when 1) the problem really isn't very bad, 2) she's probably not going to change anyway,...
Making Screen Pops Pop
Screen pops are basically any technology, including interactive voice response (IVR), automatic number identification (ANI), or computer telephony integration (CTI), that presents corresponding data ...
9 Questions for Choosing the Right Home-Agent Provider, Part One
In evaluating providers of home-based agents, many organizations make the mistake of focusing on tangibles such as skill-based routing, digital recording, real-time reporting, e-mail and chat capabilities, and redundant system configurations. ...
A Strong Case for Call-Center Certification
During a recent best-practice study, a call-center certification tale piqued my curiosity. I must admit to becoming a little jaded because of all the call-center certifications that have come and gone in my 20-plus years in this industry. But the one was different....
Boost the Accuracy of Call Volume Predictions
The usefulness of the staff schedule created by workforce management software will rise or fall on the reliability of the predictions it makes about the expected volume of incoming work. Without the right assumptions about the workload to be handled, the software’s ability to accurately calculate staffing needs is doomed. The effect on the bottom line can be as chilling as a bad day on Wall Street on an investor’s stock portfolio....
TAKE TWO
When the holidays approach, you've got to ramp up, even during an economic downturn. Whether you prefer to put the pedal to the metal or to sit idling...
