Contact Center
CONTACT CENTER/CRM
In today's fiercely competitive marketplace, outstanding customer service is the key to retail success. Contact centers are the front line in the battle to win customer loyalty, so it is essential to equip them with the best technology, agents, and processes. Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions combine these elements to provide the optimal mix of customer service and data management. For case studies and advice, check out the articles below.
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Online Merchants Must Treat Live Chat as Distinct Channel
For online merchants to reap the most benefits from live chat, they have to treat it as a distinct communication channel, according to Bold Chat’s 2012 Live Chat Effectiveness Research Report. ...
J.C. Penney Says Drop in Call Volume Means Contact Center Closing
The Pittsburgh contact center is a stand-alone, leased facility, while Columbus and Milwaukee are housed inside existing J.C. Penney facilities owned by the company. Calls to JCP dropped 30% since the company started its "Fair and Square" pricing policy in February....
Report: Merchants Need to Address Live Chat
Merchants need to “move off the needle” to support live chat because it has reached a “tipping point” of adoption, according to Bold Chat’s 2012 Live Chat Effectiveness Research Report. ...
5 Questions That Will Help With Up-selling and Cross-selling
To be successful, a cross-sell/up-sell program has to clearly answer very specific "what, who, why, when and how" questions. You may have the "what" right, but have you clearly documented the "who" or communicated the "why?" ...
Fulfillment and Contact Centers: Making the Internal vs. Outsourcing Decision
Is 3PL for you? Here's how to analyze your current operations, as well as your options....
Benchmarking Contact Center Best Practices for Cross-Selling & Up-Selling
Taking advantage of cross-selling and up-selling can maximize company profits and significantly enhance the overall customer experience by adding value to customers during inbound interactions and limiting the number of outbound calls potential and existing customer receive. Here's four steps for effectively incorporating cross-selling and up-selling into your contact center’s future marketing campaigns, and how to know if you're successful....
Best Practices for Up-selling and Cross-selling in the Contact Center
Cross-selling and up-selling initiatives have existed in the contact center industry for a very long time and implemented with varying levels of success. Perhaps it is time to consider the "best practices" most often neglected in these initiatives … those that represent the practices utilized by the most successful programs. ...
Six Tips to Upsell in the Contact Center
Upselling is an essential element of retail marketing, and contact centers are ideally suited to do it effectively and efficiently. Contact Centers should be every retailer’s conduit to upselling for greater profitability. Here’s how our company, educational toy seller MindWare, has found success with our contact center, Global Response. ...
Four Simple Ways to Help Your Inbound Service Team Drive Sales
During peak times the order calls roll in at contact centers, but during off peak it’s sometimes hard to find ways for the inbound team to help drive sales. Here are four simple ways on how to improve in this area. ...
5 Ways Contact Centers Can Use Web 2.0 Channels
The voice of the customer has now amplified. This shift in consumer behavior does not signal the death of the contact center model, but an evolution in the way companies must address customer concerns. Here are 5 ways contact centers can connect with customers using Web 2.0 channels. ...
12 Tips to Reduce Customer Hold Times
Reducing the amount of time your customers stay on hold will not only result in shorter handle times, but will make your customers more satisfied and your agents a lot happier. Here are 12 tips to reduce the amount of time your customers wait on hold in your contact center. ...
4 Tips on Information Sharing in Your Contact Center
Finding effective ways to communicate important updates quickly can greatly enhance your contact center environment. Here are four tips that will make information sharing easier....
5 Tips to Help You Find Time in Your Contact Center
How do you find more time in your contact center? Here are 5 tips to help you develop a leadership time planner that allows you to stay in control. ...
The Top 20 Contact Center Metrics for 2012
The three main stakeholder groups are pretty obvious. The most important group is, of course, is your customer base. The second group is the senior management team. And the third group is your contact center workforce. We’ll explore measures of service and quality related to customers, efficiency and profitability for senior management, and workplace and satisfaction concerns for the frontline staff. ...
Using Call Centers to Qualify Online Leads
An increasing number of Internet advertisers are turning to call centers to verify and generate leads, drive inbound calls and increase incremental revenues from existing programs. ...
Training Your Reps to Handle Live Chat
Your contact center reps should be well trained to handle live chats, since it’s quite different from telephone service. Here are a few quick tips for chatters....
Live Chat for the Holidays
It might seem odd that, in a survey of merchants that have implemented live chat on their Websites, “optimization of live chat” was fourth on the list of site improvements that they planned to implement this holiday season. But the high showing of chat optimization indicates that “like SEO, the live chat job is never done.”...
Should You Untether Your Customer Service Reps?
When the Internet first came along as a viable channel, custom logo apparel cataloger Queensboro Shirt Co. thought it would be able to shut down its call center, according to chairman/founder Fred Meyers....
Measuring and Rewarding Reps for Telephone Selling
Creating a successful selling or upselling program is a matter of putting the right people on the phones, training them properly, and creating policies and incentives to make them successful....
Redcats USA to Close Contact Center
Multititle cataloger Redcats USA announced it will close its customer contact center located in Universal City, TX, on Dec. 18. Nearly 500 employees will be laid off....
Contact Center Shared Staff Arrangements
Some catalog centers with a busy seasonal holiday pattern look to local businesses that may slow down in the fall. Some recruit workers directly with great success from businesses that have a summer peak. You can choose to try to reach these potential staff with wide and well-timed advertising, or you can elect to go directly to the source and work with those businesses directly....
Customer Care After a Merger
Considering a merger or an acquisition to beat the recession? A lot of companies find that there’s strength in numbers these days. But you have to think about how your customers will be affected, and how your contact center agents can help allay any concerns they might have. ...
Principles for Contact Center Productivity Measures
The first thing your contact center management team needs to do when sitting down to create an agent productivity metric is agree in principle about what this is all about. Following are four principles we believe will make your journey on the road to productivity a safer one. ...
Keep Your Product Vendors in Line
Multichannel merchants could be doing a better job keeping tabs on their merchandise vendors, according to Curt Barry, president of operations consultancy F. Curtis Barry & Co. Specifically, Barry told attendees at the NCOF show in Las Vegas last month that more direct merchants should be using vendor scorecards. ...
Why EarthLink Likes Click-to-Chat
Is click-to-chat a wise option for every merchant’s Website? No, it’s usually not for those who sell low-consideration, low-margin products. But live-chat customer service does make sense for low-margin items if the customer is a high-value customer overall, or if the contact-center representative can cross-sell or upsell during the process. ...
