Quick Tip: One Word That Infuriates Customers (and You Use It Everyday)
Are your agents saying the right thing? If you are like most call center leaders, quality assurance requires a lot of your attention and time. How many times have you revamped your program in...
Top 5 Quick Tips for 2016
Our Quick Tips posts are just that—brief posts providing advice or actionable items from industry experts. These are tried-and-true practices that have proven successful for the provider, and which can be implemented across a...
Quick Tip: Show Appreciation for Agents Working Holidays
Working on a major holiday is tough for anyone. Your agents’ bodies may be in the contact center, but their thoughts and hearts will be with family and friends.
Show your agents how much...
Quick Tip: How to Get Support from Other Functions
Departmental silos will stop a customer service initiative dead in its tracks. Silos also throw wrenches into daily service delivery goals when the contact center is unaware of projects and activities in other areas...
Quick Tip: How to Prevent Hiring Failures
I often ask leaders of award-winning contact centers what they think is the key strength of their operation. They almost always point to their people. Many also stress that the “secret sauce” is hiring...
Quick Tip: End Team Huddles on a Positive Note
Taking the time to show frontline agents how much they’re valued is a critical role for the center management team—or should be. Jill Houghland, senior operations manager at InterCall, and a finalist for ICMI’s...
Quick Tip: Evolving Beyond Automated Alerts
Mention the word texting in a B-to-C context, and most people think of automated alerts. Some text alerts allow for a basic level of two-way interaction (e.g., an appointment reminder alert that asks the...
Quick Tip: Consider an Internal Advocacy Program
Employee advocacy can be very impactful if there is a really clear and articulated business case for the program, and if every element of the program is anchored in the business case, says Christopher...
Quick Tip: Try a Phased Approach to Tech Implementation
What is a common issue that prevents organizations from realizing the full value of their contact center technology investment?
Usually, when a new contact center solution is deployed, all of the tools are made...
Quick Tip: Training Home-Based Agents
Training programs for home-based agents, especially new-hires, should include ongoing personal contact with a support team member—a supervisor, team leader or senior agent—who they can turn to for a quick response to questions and...
Quick Tip: Act on Employee Feedback
Berlin Packaging has a long history of business success, which its leaders attribute largely to its focus on employee engagement and a culture of shared commitment to “Being Greater, Faster.”
It’s a culture that...
Quick Tip: Give Agents a Voice in Process Improvement
Despite the growing popularity of the collaborative corporate culture, the more traditional directive model is still common today. In a directive organization, leaders give their subordinates specific orders on what to do and how...
Quick Tip: Promote Agents with the Right Qualities
While many top-performing contact center agents desire opportunities for growth and development, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re cut out to be supervisors or coaches. Even so, in many centers promotions are still based...
Quick Tip: Give Agents a Voice in Customer Initiatives
Successfully transforming into a customer-centric culture requires agent buy-in. Anna Convery, CMO & EVP Strategy at OpenSpan recommends getting agents more engaged in customer initiatives upfront by making sure that they have a voice...
Quick Tip: Engage Supervisors with Targeted QM Goals
In centers that suffer from high absenteeism, you'll typically find disengaged supervisors. Like agents, supervisors who are performing the same coaching tasks day in and day out can get into a rut. Disengaged supervisors...
Quick Tip: Indicators Influencing FCR Performance
Even the most effective measures will not impact the company’s ability to deliver an exceptional experience if the feedback cannot be translated into improvements at the point of contact.
Leading-edge organizations regularly analyze behavioral...
Quick Tip: Recognition for Schedule Performance
Programs that offer honor and prestige for top performance not only inspire employees to reach for higher goals, they help to create a positive workplace environment that attracts quality candidates.
At SWBC, a diversified...
Quick Tip: Why Do Agents Join?
New-hire surveys can help to identify the breakdowns in trust that can occur early on when new agents decide that the job is not what they expected—a common cause of new-hire turnover in contact...