Meet our April Wall of Fame Author: Leslie O’Flahavan
Area of expertise:
I am a plain language writing expert. I help customer care organizations improve the quality of their written communications with customers. I help customer service agents write better email, chat, social media,...
Outgrowing Contact Center Growing Pains
Most of us understand the idiom “growing pains” as it relates to the stresses of actual physical human growth in ourselves and/or in our children. It is also a reference to experiencing challenging and...
Upleveling Contact Center QM to the Analytics Age
Exceptional customer experiences (CXs) are critical to short- and long-term business success. Because of this, it’s instrumental to have a detailed understanding of what occurs during each customer interaction and along the customer journey....
Four Ways to Turn Delivery Problems Into Good CXs
As the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a halt, supply chains everywhere felt the pain. A shortage of truck drivers, decreased port access, and international delays made it tough to get products into...
How to be Great in Workforce Management
Not all roads to WFM Training follow the same path. Here is some information to help you understand the characteristics and the differences amongst them.
I. VENDOR TRAINING
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
—Benjamin...
Making Virtual Training Engaging
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,...
Avoiding Agent Underhiring and Undertraining
My first professional exposure to contact centers came in 2005, and it didn’t take long to fall in love with the industry.
The pace, challenges, and mission piqued my curiosity and inspired me to...
Call Center Training in the New Era
The COVID-19 pandemic did disrupt the old normal of grabbing coffee and rushing into the office. Today it’s more like hitting the alarm and running to your work desk to log in to take...
Top 5 Posts in November
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...
Walking the Walk: TD Bank’s New Financial Wellbeing Program
One of the key missions of banks is to help their customers understand their finances, and the choices and the products and services available, in order to help them make the best decisions. These...
Keeping the Customer Promise
Promises are the most personal and binding of commitments, and therefore are to be made carefully, kept fully, and broken only in the most extenuating cases and with thorough explanations.
So, when a company, its...
How to Make Holiday Hires More Productive
It’s time to staff up for the holidays!
Yes, it’s hot out there. But contact center managers know that winter is around the corner and what these holidays mean in their business: call volume...
5 Ways to Manage Risk
2022 has been a pivotal turning point in the age of sales, risk, and technology. Traditional business-to-business (B2B) selling strategies, through inside contact centers and mobile in the field, have been replaced by data-driven...
If I Were a Rep . . .
I have spent many hours in Contact Centers of varied shapes, sizes, and purposes - both premise-based and remote. At times, I have been haunted by what I would “want” if I were a...
Coaching Security and Compliance
A call comes into my line at 5:50 pm, just 10 minutes before the call center closes, I do my greeting, and the caller requests to change his grandmother’s health plan selection.
Assuming that he...
Create a Culture of Accessibility
Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, employers, like contact centers, (known as “covered entities” under the law), have scrambled to understand how the act applies to them.
Overwhelmingly,...
Four Reasons Why Training Today Is Failing Employees
Today’s model for training, educating, and preparing our workforce is broken. The rapid acceleration of technology and changing workforce calls for something new. Workers today are disengaged and unprepared for work. But there are...
The New Broom Sweeps Clean
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...
Top 5 Posts in October
Throughout October, our blog readers have been looking to the future! Our top 5 posts this month focus on learning from the past and using these lessons to put our best contact center foot...
Top 3 Trends for the Future of Contact Center Training
The world of contact center training is complicated. Trainers are responsible for helping the onboarding process run smoothly for new agents by delivering the best possible training program tailored to the training class and...