Automation, digitization, WFH, and rising expectations are reshaping the business customer experience.

It’s time to conduct an in-depth review of three WFH factors: benefits, trade-offs, and risks.

How task mining and RPA can help agent productivity, and ultimately the customer experience in contact centers.

How WFH contact center employees can best engage with customers and colleagues.

How a contact center adapted and executed its BC/DR plan, and lessons learned

Companies have been rushing to add channel choices for customers, but more is not always better.

Empathy is very important to our clients. Each client is very different, and we need to understand their needs and goals.

Emphasis on production metrics is reflective of an old-school model that does not apply to today’s complex contact centers.

The ability to resolve issues competently and quickly is a core skill set of the contact center worker.

The contact center is finally a place for investment rather than budget cuts.

In an otherwise unpromising employment environment, the contact center space may shine like a bright beacon.

The global pandemic caught most of the industry flat-footed and scrambling to respond quickly and appropriately.

Now is the time to review all technology and ensure that your agents have virtual access to everything they need to be successful.

These new shifting patterns made us more aggressive with our forecasting approach.

Our model allows for tremendous flexibility, which boosts employee morale because they're working a schedule that works for their lifestyle.

Be prepared and be flexible enough to modify your plans according to the fluidity of the situation. As they say, stay calm and call on.

Are you tough enough to endure? Smart enough to change?

When a caller is greeted with a synthetic voice, there is often a visceral reaction that subtly cues a negative reaction.

One common misconception about virtual assistants is that they are ‘all or nothing,’ meaning that the goal should be to fully automate a customer interaction.

WAH agents don’t just have to be wired technically, they need to be properly wired emotionally.

In less than a week, we went from most of our teams handling calls in one of our brick-and-mortar sites to 91% of our contact center base working remotely.

Given the dynamic environment that contact centers now find themselves in, adaptability and flexibility have never been more important.

Planning for unlikely events has been shoved down the priority list for years, and we must be cautious against that same complacency creeping in again.

What is the ROI on readiness? Peace of mind and the ability to respond.

We need to be extreme in terms of building trust, caring for others, showing genuine empathy during these very challenging times.

Even though artificial intelligence has its advantages, it does not have the capacity to show compassion, encouragement or patience to a hurt world.

Repeating a hold message every 20 seconds will almost certainly increase abandons. People don’t need to be reminded constantly that they are on hold.

There’s a 10-year track record of work-at-home results in the contact center environment. It’s become hard to ignore, even for those executives who personally don’t prefer or like the thought of a distributed work environment.

Getting virtual new-hire training right takes 12 to 18 months.

The additional volume that comes as a result of a wildly successful holiday season can easily overwhelm a company that isn’t prepared, swamping customer service and negatively impacting customer satisfaction.

The rule of 150 can improve quality and employee engagement in the large contact center environment. How do we know? Let’s look at ants.

Thousands of miles might separate them, but their workforce mindset must be as one to perform in unison.

We will do whatever it takes to get people the information, audits and training to make them successful.

The most significant security risk to a company’s data or systems comes from within—human error.

Providing a broad range of technology options allows us to fulfill our clients’ knowledge management needs across maturity levels.

Even the most careful, professional and fastidious agent is prone to human frailties.

Happy workers = happy clients and pleased customers. They all interconnect.

The ability to properly plan, and measure the performance of the plan, improves your contact center’s visibility as a valued asset.

What you need to know to not fall victim.

Measuring FCR is not always black and white. Add an FCR scoring matrix to cover those calls that fall into the gray area.

Practical, actionable advice for positive coaching and feedback results.

Strategies to retain top talent during the holidays and beyond.

The gig economy is beginning to become such an economic driving force that there are many who believe that having gig workers in the contact center - i.e., on-demand agents - is only a matter of time.

In the U.S., the minimum wage is below the poverty rate, and thus, is a failed policy.

The influx of data and analytics isn’t necessarily changing contact center metrics; rather these new insights are adding deeper context to the numbers.

It’s crucial to empower CSRs to play an active part in maintaining contact center security. After all, they witness more of what takes place on the call center floor than supervisors.

Benefits like flexible scheduling and the ability to work from home play a major role in an employee’s decision to take a job or quit one.

Invite the EDO to your office to explain your situation. You want to make sure that they understand your needs.

The at-home agent workforce is now mainstream in the global contact center industry and will likely dominate the industry before the end of this decade.

Those who begin a centralized scheduling contact center without a solid plan may wind up with an inefficient and costly model, one that is broken up into small groups dedicated to individual practices.

It can take weeks—or longer—for a community to recover after a disaster. Supporting your staff during and after a catastrophe calls for a great deal of compassion and understanding

If you want to differentiate based on service, you have to adopt the approach that everyone counts, and your people, processes and technology have to be built to support that approach.

While service level has long been seen as a measurement tool, its primary strategic mission is to serve as a strong and stalwart planning tool. It is the foundation without which realistic budgeting and staffing are at risk.

Manage your future, your visibility and your value by contextualizing all contact center activities in the framework of customer experience—only then will the most senior levels of the enterprise recognize and fund the contact center of the future.

Every 1% gain in FCR directly translates into a 1% gain in customer satisfaction.

In my experience, this is a time when those who are at work really benefit from the feeling of camaraderie and teamwork.

When considering their KPIs as a whole, contact centers seemed less than confident that their choice of metrics aligned well with the organization’s strategic objectives.

A speech tool is not a plug-and-play technology. Your organization must be prepared to dedicate the proper resources that will ensure its success.

Culture is the heartbeat of the contact center. It’s the single, most important thing to drive.

With the advent of the Internet, cloud computing and advances in voice technology, it is now possible to intelligently route calls globally from the cloud.

In many organizations, dysfunction is sitting below the surface like a dormant virus. Yes, it is quiet most of the time. But if a certain grouping of circumstances comes together, it awakens in a most viral and menacing fashion.

The metric mirage is just that—a thin veil disguising a difficult truth—temporarily. Advocatus diaboli urges you to use only the metrics that support the conditions you know to be true.

Visually, a transactional call looks like a straight line, while a conversational call has a number of curves and off-shoots.

Contact center management will have to wear many new hats—traditional operational and HR, of course, but also customer experience and corporate strategy.

When customers need the human touch, technology enablers can help to ensure successful interactions.