Your Opportunity to Create a High Performance Workforce

Your reputation is on the line. If you invest in training for your contact center supervisors and managers, will you get a return on investment? What benefits can you expect to see? Can you justify the investment to bring this training to your location? This whitepaper highlights the benefits of supervisor/manager training, and outlines a business case for investing in call center training.

About AtelUSA Contact Center

By Ricardo Navarrete
We have been servicing 40% of the inbound/outbound calls of Mexico's largest mobile carrier for the past 16 years.

Looking Across the Full "Spectrum of Customer Interactions"

By Alex Black
As organizations have evolved their communications strategies over recent decades, contact centers have become widely recognized as a cornerstone in delivering the best possible experience across every customer interaction.

CIAC Certification: Your Fastest Route to a "Best-Managed Center"

By Marta Kelsey
If you have ever questioned the tangible business impact of investing in customer service excellence, consider the following facts: a 5% increase in customer retention can increase business profits by 25% to 100%; 65% of customers leave because they are upset with the service they've received.

Serve the Customer, Not the Channel

By Karen Andrews, Robb Duke
Start with IVR for first-contact resolution. What does the acronym FCR mean to you? Is it known in your organization as "First-Call Resolution" or "First-Contact Resolution"? Lately, some might even refer to FCR as "Frenzied Customer Report".

Inmate Contact Centers: Training on the Inside to Work on the Outside

By Brad Atkins Oregon Corrections Enterprises provides inmates with an opportunity to become productive citizens and improve their lives.

Picking the Right Category of KM Software

By Duane George
Don’t try to fit a square peg into a round hole. Select a knowledge management solution that creates value based on your contact center’s unique requirements.

Atel USA

By Ricardo Navarrete
Many companies have found Mexico to be a great nearshore option to support their Hispanic market sales and marketing strategies.

The Purpose and Goals of a Call Center Audit

By Colin Taylor
In today's competitive environment, call center audits are a necessary checkup to maintain a healthy, well-functioning operation.

Building a “Quality” Program that Drives Business Success

By Linda Duba
A Quality Redesign Roadmap for changing the quality culture from a “monitor” environment to one of focused, proactive change management.

How to Choose the Right Third-Party Verification and Call-Recording Partner

By Gregory Carter
Five key factors for selecting the right phone verification and call-recording partner.

Embracing Change Head-On:

The Advantages of Cloud-based Contact Center Software Solutions

Moving to integrated, cloud-based contact center technology has allowed companies to eliminate the high costs and hassles of maintaining complex internal systems and to drive real benefits from the rapid scaling and business flexibility provided by this technology. In this report, we’ll examine the strategy of migrating from premises- to cloud-based contact center software solutions—why it makes sense for some organizations, what to consider, and how a few real-world migration efforts have fared.

How to Improve Agent Performance in Three Easy Steps

People and process are just as important as technology in optimizing agent performance. Three cost-effective ways to invest in the success of your call center staff.

The Critical Nature of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Disasters and hardware failures come without warning and can have a devastating impact on your company’s image and bottom line. Ideas to ensure that you stay operational when disaster strikes.

IDC Social Media Insight- 1011 Published 229996

Social media is a hot topic in today's customer care conversations, and for good reason. Social customer relationship management (CRM), also referred to as SCRM, is having an enormous impact on customer care today. Customer care providers have largely taken the dive into the world of providing social CRM to their customers, whether with large and comprehensive offerings or at a minimum with some basic services allowing their customers the opportunity to dip a toe in the water of social media. These services being relatively new offerings, providers are wading into unchartered territory. This recently released whitepaper from IDC titled "Social Media Services Trends in Customer Care Outsourcing" discusses the social CRM services offered by customer care outsourcing providers and illustrates the characteristics and trends as well as the benefits and challenges of these services. This whitepaper also provides a highlight summary of several customer care providers' social media service offerings.

Sustained Management: Changing the Game with Genesys iWD

By Bradley Baumunk
The Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD ) solution has the potential to do for your back office what the phone switch did for your contact center. A five-step process for ensuring a successful implementation.

Why Workforce Optimization Needs to Change with the Times

By Tom Goodmanson
Today’s customer demands a new kind of service through social media and other channels. Providing customers agents, managers and executives with ready access to the right data at the right time with the right tools is key to a stronger, more successful enterprise.

No Time to Coach?

By Rachel Miller
Coaching agents isn't something that is done only when time permits, for poor performers or when it's review time. Coaching—the art of giving feedback to employees—is a required management skill.

Hope Is Not a QA Strategy: Don’t Leave Your Contact Center Quality to Chance

By Patrick Botz
Are you getting the most from your QA program? New QA solutions that record all calls and apply analytics will uncover all kinds of issues and challenges that you never knew you had.

Hosted Contact Centers Save More Than 40% Over 5 Years Vs. Premises-Based Offerings

By Mariann McDonagh
It has always been common sense that if you switch from a premise-based solution to the cloud, the savings (both in dollars and time) is substantial. However, a new report from Frost & Sullivan, Premise Vs. Hosted Contact Center: Total Cost of Ownership Analysis, shows that, not only is that assumption correct, but the savings get better and bigger the larger the contact center and the more solutions being used.

Personality Mapping Technology Drives Improved Results

By Allen Kurzman

Satisfied Agents = Satisfied Customers

By Tom Goodmanson
In the contact center business, we understand how vital each contact center agent is to a company’s bottom line. Agents serve as a critical entry point for customers looking for help or wanting to buy. Without good service from your contact center, customer satisfaction suffers as does the overall business. In order to help achieve good service, companies must first satisfy those who run the contact center engine—the agents.

The Importance of Proper Hiring, Training, Career Path Development, Skilling and Routing

By Bradley Baumunk
Hiring the right people in the contact center and back office has always been challenging. Hire the wrong person and they’ll often either leave within the first 90 days, a cost that has been reported as high as $12,000 per person, or else they’ll likely contribute to the customer experience in a negative manner.

Is the last thing considered for a contact center establishment the furnishings? Should it be the first?

By Kevin Singleton
Well, we did the math, the numbers look good, and we are bringing our contact center back to the United States. We have the facility, all the hardware, software and people. Oops, we forgot about the furnishings! Oftentimes, our customers fnd themselves in this situation. They run frantically to the nearest systems furniture dealer to resolve the issue. Generally, the big manufacturer systems dealer sees dollar signs. While the poor contact center project manager sees a dwindling budget. But cookie-cutter furnishings will just not be the best fit for the operation. One size does not fit all.

When Disaster Strikes, Keep on Talking

By Mariann McDonagh
Finally, there is an alternative to building a $750,000 plus backup facility. Business disruption is every contact center's nightmare, yet defending yourself against an extended outage had traditionally carried a staggering price tag.

Staffing and Workload Management: Challenges and Opportunities

The second article in this series fleshes out the importance of properly managing contact center and back-office work, especially through the alignment of employee skill sets. The proper marriage of the contact center and the back office can directly translate to an improved customer experience and decreased employee attrition.

Don't You Know Who I AM?

What your customers want you to know about IVR self-service.

Social Media and Customer Service: Fix the Process Before You Run Out of Socks

By Steve Kraus
A lot of attention, and rightfully so, is being paid to the ability for customers to directly influence other customers and prospects through the use of social media. Social media serves as the "bullhorn" that amplifies the underlying flaws in customer service that many of us have experienced for years.

Tiered Service: The Next Step in Optimizing Contact Centers

By Jason Williams
Savvy businesses have long segmented customer perks according to customer value. The same tiered service concept can help contact centers cope with business pressures ranging from escalating costs and mounting competition to reduced product/service differentiation that complicates customer retention efforts.

"Rethinking Contact Center and Back Office Processes: The Challenges of Achieving Balance and Consistency" details the critical need of ensuring that customers are provided with a consistent service level while at the same time making sure that your employee occupancy is balanced. This will lead to an optimized headcount while minimizing internal costs and improving overall customer satisfaction.

A Frontline-Driven Approach to Service

An Interview with Cooney Solutions Group's Tim Montgomery
Cooney Solutions Group’s Tim Montgomery discusses top challenges facing the contact center industry and the role that a customer-centric culture plays in improving performance while keeping a handle on operational costs.

Southwest Airlines Reaches Passengers in Seconds Flat

For Southwest Airlines, timing is everything.

When flights are cancelled, passengers want to know—before they arrive at the airport. That’s why the airline implemented Varolii automated communications. Rather than make agents scramble to reach every affected customer, they now quickly reach passengers through SMS, email, and automated voice messaging to inform them of the disruption with options to rebook another flight or make other arrangements. Passengers love the service, and so do the contact center agents.

Know what your customers want to hear—before they do.

In this free information kit, learn how proactive notifications can change your business by cutting operating costs, building loyalty and keeping your best customers informed—not annoyed.

Even in a Declining Economy, Workforce Optimization Delivers a Tangible ROI