Blog

Have you given your agents a hug lately? These folks have a challenging job. Using the common military analogy, the call center agent constitutes the "front line" of the business. When a customer is unhappy, they ring the call center. When the customer has a question, they ring the call center. When...

In the world of customer service, everyone is looking for a secret recipe guaranteed to deliver excellent customer service. Early in my career I was taught what I believe is one of those recipes to regularly deliver excellent customer service. The recipe is to "under-promise then over-deliver". A promise can also be an expectation....

Contact centers come in all varieties: some are focused on handling in-bound support calls, some specialize in out-bound collections, others on in-bound direct response selling, and so on. It thus follows that contact centers would have varying missions and business goals. At a strategic level, I contend that there are only 3 core business goals...

Once upon a time I worked for a company that largely marketed its products through direct response advertising. The company had a robust call center that took product orders, returns and customer queries. My first day on the job (working in marketing), my boss sent me to the call center to monitor calls. At the time it...

A recent research brief published by FurstPerson made some interesting observations regarding the effects of moving high performing agents into an at-home model and its effect on overall customer satisfaction and loyalty. A common practice for contact centers is deploying a mixed-mode model, using at-home opportunities as a reward for high performing agents....

First, a qualifier and a disclaimer. I have been involved in telecom billing for 25 years. I have experience in rating, tarriffs, costs, design, programming, troubleshooting and monthly processing of telecom bills with more than a half dozen telecom companies and as many different billing systems. I will be the first to say,...

More and more companies are wising up to the industry trend of tossing those 10 page QA forms and replacing them with an effective abbreviated form that focuses on critical process contact essentials as well as CSAT. This makes perfect sense since customers are not likely to be aware or feel dissatisfied if an agent fails...