Many contact center managers are optimizing their staffing models around a metric called ‘queue time’. In simple words, queue time measures the time your average customer spends waiting in queue for an employee to pick up their call or answer their email. There are different variations of this also known as wait time, average speed to answer and probably many more.

For a long time, ACD’s were only capable of producing these metrics and we had hardly any choide to use these as our compass for reading the efficiency and effectiveness of customer service.

That said, we now have a new type of metric to leverage. ‘Net Promoter Score’ and ‘ Customer Effort Score ’ are every day language for leading brands and many business managers. These metrics are designed to measure customer lifetime value instead of short-term cost optimization only.

What is great about having these new metrics is that we can now cor... read more >

Did you ever hear of the Engineer’s Dilemma? An executive wants an engineer to quickly build a strong bridge and do it cheaply. The engineer replies, “Fast, Good, or Cheap? Pick two, because you can’t get all three.”

How about the Kobayashi Maru? It’s an interesting leadership test from Star Trek , with surprising relevancy for Customer Service leaders. In the Kobayashi Maru, a leader is tested in his or her ability to solve an unsolvable situation. Regardless of what you do, there is nothing to win. Failure is assured. Ouch!

The Vulcan trainee should have spent more time in Customer Service. Captain Kirk’s recommendation: Get some Contact Center experience before trying the Kobayashi Maru again .

What is the Customer Service Dilemma? Consider the challenges of a Customer Service leader. He or she desires to achieve three goals in managing their customer service organization:

Keep custome... read more >

Workforce Management solutions have been around for a long time but essentially there are two categories of WFM solutions. The ‘pure players’ focus on Workforce Management and specialize in this area and the ‘integrated solutions’ who are tightly coupled to an interaction management platform.

When selecting your workforce management solution you should have a clear understanding of the capabilities you require in-order to find the right balance between good operational performance and employee satisfaction.

Another topic to keep in mind is how easily you can retrieve information like interaction volume and average handle time without having to create integration projects for each communication channel separately.

What are the 6 capabilities your future workforce management solution should have?

Multi Channel Forecasting – The world is no longer single channel – e-channels and social channels a... read more >

As you are aware from my previous blogs, my background is based in leading customer care organizations. There is no question that the most rewarding, and at times the most frustrating aspect of running a customer care organization is managing large groups of people. It can be very difficult to operate at a high level of efficiency and effectiveness and the slightest misstep can create chaos.

Here are two factors that drive success.

The first factor of success is leadership, but not just the leaders, Director of Operations, Operations Managers and Supervisors interacting with the front line CSR’s, but how they interact with other departments like Workforce Management, and Human Resources.  

Leadership development starts from the top down. Inspect what you expect on a daily basis. Every operation I have been directly involved with has an attendance policy. The policy is usually based on some form of excused and unexcused absenc... read more >

The relationship with customers is like any relationship, it’s built on trust and on promises. 10 years ago I worked for a UK company who at that time saw its key differentiator being the customer experience that it delivered and the customer care that it offered as ‘part of the deal’.

As soon as I joined the organization I was inducted into this ‘brand culture’ and one of the key messages that has stuck with me ever since is that Brand is a promise delivered .

We all hate it when promises are broken, it’s often why personal relationships breakdown and it’s also why our relationship with organizations breakdown.

We all know that it’s easy to make promises but so often in business we fail to deliver and that ruins the reputation of the Brand.

In business, promises are made in many different ways:

The products and services we develop The marketing messages we creat... read more >