Calling for a Contact Center Review
Before the visions of sugarplums have danced completely away for another year, be certain to contemplate the performance of your contact center during the holiday season immediately past....
Multichannel Service Improves--or Does It?
A study from e-Gain Communications, a Mountain View, CA-based supplier of customer service and contact center software, reveals both good news and bad news regarding the state of multichannel customer service. ...
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....
Next-Generation Contact Centers
Many of us are stuck. We have talked about becoming customer-centric, value-added, mission-critical, and a lot of other hyphenated things, but we are...
Managing Your Cost Per Call
The direct industry has a difficult balancing act to perform. On the one hand, we want to provide a high level of customer service—and that's getting tougher each year. On the other hand, the cost of direct labor per hour has increased from less than $7 to more than $11 per hour during the last five years. In some markets rates are well over that, as high as $14 an hour. Benefit costs have also increased, and now average 15% to 20% of pay....
Supporting Telephone, E-mail and Chat Inquiries
Can one agent handle telephone, e-mail, and chat inquries? And is that even a good idea? That depends on the communication skills you evaluated your agents on prior to hiring them and/or any additional training you have provided them since. Verbal and written communication skills are two distinct competencies, and being well-versed in one doesn't necessarily guarantee success in the other....
Upgrading the Contact Center
Businesses that want to get closer to their customers are transforming their conventional call centers into multichannel contact centers that support...
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...
The Big App
The minute she walked into my office, I knew she was trouble. Trouble, with a capital T, and that rhymes with C, and that stands for CRM. Before I even...
Power Broker
SPECIAL SERIES FORECASTING, PART 2 Shortly after Scholastic Inc. started using new workforce management software at its Missouri-based customer contact...
CRM at the crossroads
The good news is, it's February! OK, that may not seem like much, but think of it: This means you've survived the Big Holiday Shopping Season (such as...
Calling All Agents
Employees have hardly been at the forefront of companies' priorities in the past year, but in at least one area, they're receiving some recognition. Call...
Out of Service
If You Think Customer Service Stinks Now, Brace Yourself, cautioned the headline of a press release that landed on my desk recently. Apparently, we are...
IT Budgets to Stay Flat This Year
THE UPCOMING YEAR will be far from stellar for IT vendors, according to an AMR Research survey on technology initiatives. One hundred respondents from...
Easy Rider
Consider the Never, perhaps, has a single letter had such dramatic ups and downs in popularity and reputation. Not long ago, this fifth letter of the...
super balance
All Superman had to do was jump over tall buildings. You, by contrast, must boost your facility's operating performance, reduce costs, increase reliability,...
Five Aces
Business is no game, and it's too important an activity to leave the results to chance. An ace in the hole is hardly cheating; instead, it's a reserve...
Easy Access
Easy assembly. Easy access. Easy on, easy off. We're so accustomed to these clichs that the word has lost much of its meaning. Yet it is at the core of...
A Passage to India
Should you move your call center off shore? As with any business decision, it comes down to weighing risk and reward. On the reward side, the advantage...
2002: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT?
It wasn't supposed to be like this. 2001 was to be the year when colonists on the Moon discovered a black monolith, which emitted an ear-piercing signal...
The 3-D Customer
Everything is going digital. Just think of all the little computer chips that surround us in our phones, TVs, CD players, watches, appliances, cash registers,...
HOW DOES YOUR CALL CENTER GROW?
The rows of tomatoes you plant as seedlings in your back yard or the flowers you lay out every spring in geometric patterns to impress your neighbors...
