If you’re committed to delivering great customer service, you won’t want to miss this opportunity to learn from others who share your commitment.

The Genesys G-Force 2013 conference is taking place May 15-16 in Boca Raton Florida.  Every year, this event brings together a large group of customer service experts to share experiences and best practices – and every year, people leave with new inspiration and ideas. 

This year’s conference promises to be something very special. In addition to the conference tracks, highlights include:

A bonus Education day on Tuesday, May 14, with multiple pre-conference sessions free of charge for conference attendees The G-Force party on Wednesday evening, May 15 Free certification exams on Thursday and Friday, May 16-17 Dedicated sessions for Latin American customers on Friday, May 17 And of course, you’ll be able to see the latest in customer service technologies fro... 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’s use case concerns virtualizing your Outsource Business Partner(s)

Another scenario for virtualization of resources is to include your outsourced operation into the common platform approach. Typically, outsource partner utilization is determined by a number of performance metrics (typically service level and handle time) for the outsourcer and a static mechanism to deliver work at the outsourcer’s doorstep. The risk with such a scenario is a potential to introduce an operational disconnect between the customer experience, efficiency, and quality of the customer service operation. Especially when working with a multi-vendor strategy for outsourcing work, virtualization brings a number of exciting opportunities that... read more >

There has been a lot of chatter recently on multichannel customer service and never has multichannel service been so important nor the payoff to business more obvious.  Consider:

73% of consumers would pay more for a better customer service Companies that rate higher than their competitors as measured by the American Customer Satisfaction Index have market caps up to double their industry peers Nearly 70% of companies don’t monitor interactions (think of all the people now on Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social communities) One in four of displeased customers will share bad experiences socially 77% of consumers use more than one channel when seeking customer service Only 3% of companies manage customers across channels Tri-channels shoppers spend up to 70% more The facts are clear, people want much better customer service across all the channels they use, while most companies are still handling service interactions through a separate silo for ea... read more >

Want to improve customer satisfaction with your service? The first thing to do is to look at your routing strategies.

According to research by Convergys, the top three reasons people are unhappy with customer service are:

Having to make multiple attempts to resolve a problem Resolutions that take too long Having to repeat themselves You can significantly reduce all of these problems through the smart application of contact center routing strategies. Connecting people with the right person the first time accelerates resolutions and makes for happier customers.

The problem: Variable demand, finite resources

The trick to providing good customer service is lining up your resources with customer needs to deliver a consistent customer experience.

At first glance, consistency seems to be mathematically impossible:

On the one hand, you have fixed resources: a fixed number of agents, limited skill sets, and a limited ... read more >

Who or what is the real heart and soul of business process management? Is it identifying the processes that generate the highest quality products and services, or documenting and implementing a quality system? Increasingly companies are recognizing that the heart and soul of their BPM processes is, in-fact, its people.

Most organizations have been focusing on process and increasing the quality of their processes by using quality guides such as ISO 9001:2000 which specifies that key processes are properly identified and documented. Then, there is Six Sigma which emphasizes consistency. While organizations have achieved significant benefits from quality efforts, there is a growing opinion that there is a limit to what they can provide.

The neglected area in BPM: People

In the book, Human Interactions, by Keith Harrison-Broninski, the author describes the limitations of quality processes that do not include a people element. The quality process... read more >