Remote Working

Our top 5 posts for January are set to start us off on the right foot for 2023. Our Advisory Board offers their insights on trends we should expect to see for our centers...

Formal Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) planning has always been a very important aspect of contact centers’ success. In the May 2020 issue of this esteemed publication, I showed how Covid and the...

I’m seeing contact center trends change, and how could they not? Coming out of the COVID-19 health emergency, consumer life is largely returning to more familiar patterns and expectations when it comes to...

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...

Dear Contact Center Pipeline bloggers, I read this article this morning about Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks saying he is annoyed that workers aren’t in the office and is “ordering” employees to return to the...

The year is 2023, and the contact center industry is on the brink of change. With new technologies and approaches being developed daily, it’s hard to predict what the next year will bring. However,...

Providing excellent customer service, support, sales, and billing relies on having the right numbers of the skilled contact center agents at the right times. But ensuring that critical task is accomplished successfully appears to...

Organizations are now well in their third year of operation in the remote or at-home/work-from-home (WFH) contact center environment. And they are working to devise sustainable workforce management (WFM) strategies. In today’s challenging job...

Virtual training is here to stay! With many contact centers going hybrid or staying fully remote, how do you ensure training keeps people engaged, encourages interactivity, and effectively improves their skills? To find out,...

Reflecting over the last two plus years, as contact centers worked remotely, learning and development (L&D) teams had to pivot so quickly to ensure that new hires, existing team members, and leadership were provided...

This month, our blog readers were interested in a variety of topics affecting their centers. Leslie discusses the skill that is of the utmost importance for our remote workers--writing well. The pandemic has brought...

I know, I know. Last time you heard from me, in my January 2022 column in this magazine, I told you I was retiring. And I did. For the most part. I’ve found retirement to...

Navigating the legal landscape has always been challenging for employers in the contact center industry, but a wave of new laws affecting hiring and management practices will complicate matters further. Handling these additional requirements...

Throughout October, our readers explored a variety of the most pressing topics facing our centers. Our authors discussed whether our agents should continue to WFH, how to best lead our agents with compassion, and...

Customers want to be contacted, but how that is done will shape their impressions of organizations and ultimately their loyalty. Being alerted to a new deal can save customers money and/or provide them with invaluable...

One of the long-running conversations in the contact center industry has been whether to have staff (agents and supervisors) work-from-home (WFH). Proponents argue that WFH provides contact centers with access to a larger pool...

Welcome to the top 5 blog posts in September! As the start of October will ring in Customer Service Week, it is only fitting that our top post this month is another annual favorite...

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced a new age of remote work and accelerated digital innovation in several industries – contact centers were not exempt. But even before the virus struck, there were some undeniable changes brewing...

As with business-to-consumer (B2C) contact centers, business-to-business (B2B) contact centers also had to suddenly have their agents work-from-home (WFH) when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Businesses selling to other businesses have long had a culture...

The COVID-19 pandemic stood the workplace on its head and in doing so, cleared workers’ heads as well. Offices shut down, jobs went remote, and work-life got recalibrated. Workers were freed from corporate routine...