In honor of Contact Center Pipeline’s 15th Anniversary, we have pulled together the Top 10 Blog Posts of All Time. These blog posts represent the most popular topics viewed on our blog in our 15 years. As I read back over these posts from some of our favorite authors, I am amazed that despite how much has changed over the past 15 years, so much remains the same. We still battle so many of the same challenges in our centers. The insights and advice offered throughout the years are still highly relevant to combat these ongoing issues.
As you read these, what are your take-aways on where the industry was 15 years ago vs. where we are today? Which insights can you implement in your center? Improvements for your remote work program? Coaching strategies? Tips for how your agents can convey more empathy in their written responses (we can all use more empathy!)? Or maybe a whole new outlook? I hope you gain some bits of wisdom from our Top 10 of All Time.
4 Key Drivers of Agent Engagement
What is it that makes the agents in certain contact centers especially enthusiastic about their jobs and more committed to delivering a high-quality customer experience on call after call? Higher pay alone won’t produce passionate concern for the company’s well-being and dedication to helping it achieve its vision or goals. The following are four key drivers found in centers with high levels of engagement.
To NPS or Not NPS
If, by chance, you are unfamiliar with the phrase Net Promoter Score (NPS), it is a way of scoring customer loyalty based on the customer’s zero-to-10 rating on the question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” The concept was presented in a “Harvard Business Review” article in 2003, and continues to spark debate across the business world. In many organizations, it has worked its way deep into the contact center scoreboard.
Where Contact Centers Go from Here
Everyone is talking about the way we’re functioning now as our “new normal.” But is this current routine just a short-term patch while we work through the COVID-19 crisis, or will it change the way we operate in the future?
A Chip on Your Shoulder May Block Your Career
According to Wikipedia, the expression “a chip on the shoulder” comes from the ancient right of shipwrights within the British Royal Navy Dockyards to take home a daily allowance of off-cuts of timber, even if good wood was cut up for this purpose.
Chatbots series: Chatbots in the Contact Center
With consumers expecting anywhere, anytime access to conduct simple transactions, more businesses are deploying chatbots to handle routine and repetitive customer service tasks. Automation has enormous appeal as an efficient, affordable option for companies that lack the human staff to effectively manage the workload in the contact center (one of the top 3 challenges cited by participants in our recent Challenges and Priorities survey).
Contact Center Challenges & Priorities for 2020: The Year of the Agent
It’s 2020: A new year, a new decade, and all kinds of opportunities to talk about perfect vision! Let’s start off this exciting year with a look at the top challenges contact centers face and the priorities they hope to pursue. This is our fifth annual survey, and we had 275 participants chime in on their top three challenges and priorities. The consistency we maintain in our list of options lets us compare from year to year. Minor tweaks as our industry evolves (or participants provide us guidance in the “Other” category) let us look at what’s new.
20 Empathy Statements to Show Stressed-Out Customers That You Care
These are difficult times, and our anxious customers need us more than ever. Some of them need help with a simple task, like: “How do I add a new driver to my auto insurance policy?” Others need help solving a problem: “Why was I charged twice for inflight WiFi?”
12 Tips to Find Time for Coaching
Customer experience, employee engagement and sales results are driven by effective coaching. Coaching helps develop your agents’ skills. Done right, it also improves morale and employee retention. However, coaching needs to be done on a consistent basis. You wouldn’t exercise just once in a lifetime and say that you were done. The same is true for coaching agents. Frequent coaching is more effective than one big monthly or yearly review. However, where do you find time to coach?
Moving Forward: What Will 2023 Bring for Contact Centers?
The New Year’s message has as its core, promises of better things ahead. And yes, that did happen to some extent in 2022. The worst of the COVID-19 pandemic appears hopefully behind us. The economy—and spending and consequent demand for service for items and services that need contact centers for—has bounced back. And customers have made it known loud and clear that they expect an excellent customer experience (CX).
The Top 5 Mistakes Companies Make with Remote Work
Remote work in contact centers has evolved from an alternate staffing strategy to a core employee benefit. In fact, 80% of contact centers today embrace flexible scheduling and remote working for some segment of their population.
