Contact Center Pipeline Blog

According to thefreedictionary.com, “onward and upward” is an expression that is defined as “something that you say in order to encourage someone to forget...

Welcome to the January issue! I wish you the very best of health and contentment in 2018! May you and your loved ones be...

A number of years ago, I was performing a WFM assessment for a company in Arizona. In the middle of a meeting with the...

The end of December is a great time to reflect on the past year. It's also a time when I like to dip into...

Procurement processes are undergoing change in concert with the revolution ushered in by cloud solutions. Buyers want the benefits of advanced technology without the...

Of all the things employees despise, end-of-year performance appraisals (PAs) are at the top of the list. The Washington Post has research to support...

There have been significant changes in the social media world over the past eight years, for sure. New networking sites have emerged, and others...

The senior population has been a fast-growing customer segment since the first wave of baby boomers turned 65 in 2011. This year, the number...

Happy Holidays! I am taking some idiom liberties in this last month of 2017. “Joy to the World” isn’t exactly an idiom, but it...

Last week’s post offered a brief look back at a couple of social customer care pioneers—two companies that led the industry in 2009 by...

What does it take to deliver standout customer service? It’s a question on the minds of many business leaders since customer experience trumps price...

Contact Center managers and business owners who have invested in sophisticated unified communications networks typically understand the urgency of maintaining a skilled, consistent and...

Social customer service has come a long way since I first wrote about it in Pipeline eight years ago (“The Impact of Word of...

Yet another year is coming to a close, and I can think of no better way to prepare for 2018 than with a round...

As the year draws to a close, I extend wishes to you and your loved ones for the happiest of holidays and a very...

This month, it was all about the human element in the contact center. Our five most-read blog posts in November focused on people-centric topics...

Skills-based Routing (SBR) is a feature found on any ACD today, and it’s been around for over 30 years. It is so common, in...

Contact center leaders often express dissatisfaction with their current technology. They think that if they’d just implement some new technology, they’d be primed to...

As an executive in any organization that provides customer service, the worst possible message that you can receive is that “suddenly” a customer is...

The Professional Association for Customer Engagement (PACE) stands alone as the only trade association that provides advocacy, compliance, education and networking to the contact...

Mentorship is enjoying a resurgence in popularity, thanks largely to millennials and social networking. Mentoring is actually an age-old development concept with references reaching...

In contact centers, the first 90 days is known as the critical make-or-break period for new agents. New-hires can quickly be overwhelmed with information...

With the Thanksgiving holiday around the corner and other holidays approaching, I expect retailers, product and other service providers to solicit consumer feedback via...

Remember Oscar the Grouch on “Sesame Street”? For some reason, he was our son Brendan’s favorite character. He even had an Oscar the Grouch...

Many of this industry’s most successful leaders started out on the phones… and yet, many call centers still suffer from a reputation for being...

Unified Communications (UC) has brought a slew of new capabilities to the modern contact center, increasing the flexibility, mobility and functionality of workers through...

It’s November. We are celebrating Thanksgiving in the U.S., so it’s a great time to talk about gratitude. Our gratitude for our families, our...

I’ve always maintained that the frontline supervisor is the most critical role in a contact center. They have a tremendous impact on agent satisfaction...