Contact centers very frequently start small and evolve leading to silod operations that are built around lines of business or geographic areas.

As businesses grow additional centers are often added or outsource partners brought-in to gain ‘speed-to-market’ or create extra capacity at a lower cost. This brings higher levels of complexity and increasing potential for customer and employee frustration.

In order to keep the contact centers ‘focused’ on answering customers any work that cannot be handled there is then passed off to other administration teams; the Back Office.

With so many silos there are many opportunities for a break down in service which again can lead to customer frustration and lowered staff morale, a vicious circle that will ultimately drive customers and your best contact center resources away.

Here are four steps for moving from this unfortunate cycle.

Step 1 – Break u... read more >

In this series of four blog posts about Virtual Customer Service, each time I will reveal a use cases for considering Virtual Customer Service. In the introduction you can read about the rationale behind Virtual Customer Service.

Today we’ll talk about implementing a ‘home agent’ strategy

Another flavor of virtualization is the ability for contact center agents to work from home. Home working has a number of advantages for both the employee and the employer. Even environmental considerations can be reasons to introduce the home working concept.

With the adoption of domestic broadband Internet connections it is very feasible to guarantee quality of service for the voice channel for your employees.  With quality management solutions being able to record conversations utilizing the IP protocol, ensuring and managing quality is no longer a concern. For employees, the ability to work from home provides a level of freedom and... read more >

In the early days of call and contact centers, CIO’s often had little to look after when it came to designing the customer communication architecture. The main (and often only) channel to provide customer service was through a PABX and typically one organizational unit, the call center, was the key customer of this device. Of course transactional applications such as case management and later CRM had to be provisioned but all-in-all it was fairly straightforward.

Today, driven by ever increasing customer demand, competitive pressure and the rise of non-voice channels the CIO and his team have a lot on their plate. Voice is transported over the same network as your data-packets and there are a number of other channels to support and information systems to integrate with.

So far so good you would think.

But now that the borders of the contact center are merely virtual,  the whole organization can play a role in the customer conversation.... read more >

How effective would you be if you had four or five buckets of work on your desk and you were expected to complete the work before the end of the day?  But wait, there’s more!  The phone rings every minute or so with an important call from one of several hundred people you support and these calls require your full attention.  When the call ends, you attempt to select the best job from one of your buckets.  These buckets of work are not highly prioritized and there is no value correlation between buckets.

Should I select a social media message, or an email, or a trouble ticket from the Web, or a web form?  And the phone keeps ringing. Seems like a pretty tough environment.  Wouldn’t you be ineffective and frustrated?  This is the environment that multi-channel employees face each day.

According to Ovum, agents are the focal point

Keith Dawson, an Ovum analyst recently wrote in his blog, “… soc... read more >

In this series of 4 blogs about Virtual Customer Service, I will reveal a use cases for considering Virtual Customer Service. In the introduction you can read about the rationale behind Virtual Customer Service.

Today’s use case: Include experts at branch locations

Contact centers invest a lot of time and money in training on products and services to ensure that ‘first contact resolution’ is at the right level. When the right balance is found it means customers are happy, the operation is efficient, and the required training investment is acceptable.

But first contact resolution will never reach 100% as it’s simply too expensive and in those situations where an agent cannot solve the customers’ problem, having an expert available immediately can still drive a positive customer experience and reduce customer effort.

With relatively simple functionality, experts or ‘knowledge workers’ ca... read more >