Remote Working

Contact center labor markets are tight. Employees are re-imagining and re-engineering their lifestyles, their perspectives, and their prospects for shaping their careers. It’s a pretty exciting time for them. In turn, many employers have...

Our top blog posts in April share a common theme with those from March. Our readers continue to focus on how to move forward in the new normal. Specifically this month, our authors talk...

The contact center industry has had to evolve with seismic shifts over the past year and a half. Businesses everywhere shifted en masse to work-from-home (WFH) environments: and digital acceleration went into overdrive to...

Hybrid, remote, or fully in-person? This month, our top blog posts are all about how to move forward in the new normal. Our authors offer insights on hiring and training remotely, the best ways...

Despite their increasingly important role in attracting and retaining customers and revenues, contact centers continue to face high agent turnover. Yet to keep delivering excellent customer service and support and making sales, centers must...

Contact centers have long emphasized a strategy that is customer first, and for good reason. Delivering an outstanding customer experience is essential to driving brand loyalty and equity. Often neglected however, was the agent....

Going remote was just the beginning. If 2020 was about transitioning and uncertainty, consider 2021 the year of acceptance and innovation as contact centers embrace the new reality. Eighteen months into the COVID-19 pandemic...

The idiom The New Broom Sweeps Clean is great for the New Year since it essentially means to get rid of the old and bring in the new. It appears in John Heywood’s 1546...

It is a good news/troubling news story for contact centers. How they and their supplier partners plan and respond will help determine how well the industry succeeds in the post-COVID-19 pandemic “new normal” era. On...

Video has long had promise in the contact center by providing information-rich and personal face-to-face interactions between individuals. But it took the COVID-19 pandemic to bring video to the fore. As the pandemic hopefully...

I just wrapped up my 13th anniversary message for the March issue of Contact Center Pipeline. In doing so, I was reflecting on our very first issues of the magazine back in 2008. Just...

GreenState Credit Union of North Liberty, Iowa, is a 290,000-member financial cooperative with assets of $7.8 billion. It prides itself on its excellent customer service that is delivered through its 23 branches and by...

Work from home (WFH) has finally become an accepted business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) strategy. And it appears that it is becoming a large and a permanent part of companies’ employment strategies. I am personally very...

Everyone likes simplicity, especially in the world of customer service. The best contact center agents will simplify difficult situations for callers, and smart contact center managers will simplify training and workforce development for their...

Video has been refined for use in business for over 15 years and it is certainly a key part of any digital transformation strategy. But while the industry has talked about the use of...

“Rewritten by machine and new technology/And now I understand the problems you can see” Video Killed The Radio Star (The Buggles) No, video did not kill the radio star, contrary to the famous lyrics that launched MTV...

During the first quarter of 2020, I recall when COVID-19 started appearing more prominent in the U.S. we as a call center weren’t sure how everything would play out. Though we had several plans in...

In today’s business environment people matter. Customers rightly want the option of speaking to live agents. Automated self-service alone, even with sophisticated tools like artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chatbots, is not enough to enable superior...

“Now that we’re working from home, no one else (in the company) knows who we are,” said a veteran contact center agent during one of my sales training classes. His frustration was echoed by...

2020 was a tough year for contact center supervisors. While the quick shift to work-from-home was a shock to almost every level’s work routines, no role has transformed as much as that of the...