The Pipeline blog has been heating up all month! Our most-read topics in July included blog posts on aligning agent metrics with key customer satisfaction drivers; new ideas for agent development initiatives and career paths; how to design an effective agent training program; a conversation with contact center industry guru Bob Furniss, recipient of ICMI’s Lifetime Achievement Award; and quality monitoring best practices.
Are Your Contact Center Metrics on Target? Follow This Easy 3-Step Process to Find Out
Contact center days are jam-packed with activity. It’s easy to lose sight of the thread that should tether contact center performance metrics to what matters most to customers. Doing so can leave the contact center and its agents disconnected from their own customers. Use the easy template below to make sure the path between what customers want to what experience agents are giving is straight and clear.
Creating Career Paths for Agents
There is no doubt that technology has accelerated the pace of change in contact centers. Yet when it comes to the human element, some things have remained the same for decades. Agent turnover has been and remains a top challenge in centers. The repetitive nature of the job and limited potential for career advancement create a revolving employment door in many centers. Perhaps change is finally coming to this critical aspect of contact center management. Key trends are converging that are likely to reshape the way centers view agent career development.
5 Best Practices for Designing a Successful Training Program
David Merrill, renowned educator and coauthor of Reclaiming Instructional Design, defines instructional design as a “technology that incorporates known and verified learning strategies into instructional experiences which make the acquisition of knowledge and skill more efficient, effective and appealing.” We all want our employees to receive the most effective training, and to apply their new capabilities to their role in the most effective way. The instructional design community is a dynamic resource for improving how organizations like yours train and develop people. We’ve identified five ways to use instructional design in your training program for minimum cost and maximum effectiveness.
A Q&A with Bob Furniss, ICMI’s Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient
In May 2017, the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) recognized Bob Furniss, VP, Global Service Cloud Practice, Bluewolf, an IBM Company, with its Lifetime Achievement Award. According to ICMI, the recipient is “a person who embodies the spirit of customer service and has contributed to all aspects of the contact center industry—the people, the organizations, the technology and the customers.” That seems a most fitting way to describe Bob and his career.
Bringing Quality Monitoring into the Heart of the Contact Center
According to our latest report, “The State of Quality Monitoring—2017,” non-voice interactions are not being as closely monitored as calls. For example, only 32% of contact centers are evaluating web chat interactions and just 48% are evaluating email. Clearly, there is a disconnect between the analysis of non-voice interactions and in a multichannel world this disconnect will prove detrimental.
