Managed Services: Easy to Want, Hard to Buy
Managed services (MS) are easy to want given the desire to lessen reliance on IT, add agility, secure specialty expertise and/or change cost structures....
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...
The 3 Winning Data Strategies for Contact Center Success
Effective data use can separate the preeminent contact centers from the rest of the pack. As you work to leverage your center’s data, consider...
Moment of Truth
The origin of the idiom Moment of Truth is a “translation of the Spanish el Momento de la Verdad, signifying the point in a...
Inside View: Cassidy Klundt, Sitel
It has often been said that the most effective leaders are lifelong learners. They are driven to continually develop their skills and abilities, and...
4 Ways to Expand the Value of Quality Monitoring
I have always been a big proponent of quality monitoring (QM) programs. It’s the best process we have to determine how well agents are...
Top 3 Failure Points for Work-at-Home Programs
Over the past few years, we’ve worked with 800-plus organizations in design, implementation and continuous improvement of work-at-home programs for contact centers.
Now...
The Profession of Contact Center Management
How many of you reading this chose contact center management as your career?
Like many of you, I “fell” into this industry. I had just...
From Transaction Processors to Knowledge Workers
Service is delivered through people. Despite all the advanced technology and Six Sigma processes that we institute in our contact centers, the frontline agent...
Top 5 Posts in February
The top blog posts in February ran the gamut from a look at the “plan it, prove it” concept to explain WFM to execs,...
10 Common Retention Mistakes
Some of the best lessons about customer service happen when you are the customer. In my case, I spent 20 years as a loyal...
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...
The (Near) Death of WFM
If your livelihood depends on the sales or service of WFM technology, calm down. Despite the title of this article, your occupation is safe....
Smart Technology Decisions in a Changing Market
As companies make decisions about sourcing for new contact center technology, a crucial question to answer is whether to pursue “best-of-breed” (BoB) solutions or...
Change Management: Common Mistakes That Kill Initiatives Midstream
Contact center leaders with the ability to embrace change and align functions across the enterprise play a key role in driving customer-centric change. But,...
Some Love for ANI
We all know Automatic Number Identification (ANI). You may recognize it better by the consumer-oriented term “caller ID.” While these two services are technically...
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...
To NPS or Not NPS
If, by chance, you are unfamiliar with the phrase Net Promoter Score (NPS), it is a way of scoring customer loyalty based on the...
Training Vs. Skills Development
In the Contact Center Challenges & Priorities Report released last month, contact center leaders revealed that one of their top priorities for 2016 is...
3 Nonfinancial Motivators That Influence Behaviors
Pay is a critical consideration for most contact center employees in whether they stay or leave, and how they view their role—and many managers...
Top 5 Posts for January
People management was at the top of the Pipeline reading list in January. The most-read posts for the month offered tips to help frontline...
Defining the Branded Experience
How do you begin to translate your company’s brand promise into actions that your frontline agents can carry out?
One of the key strategic questions...
Plan It, Prove It—A Vision for WFM
“Plan it, prove it.” I say those words to every client. To me, they define the role of WFM in the contact center. It...
What Is an Effective Culture?
In a business sense, culture is defined (by Merriam-Webster) as “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterizes an institution or...
Coaching the Coach
Our coaches occupy the most critical blocks on our organizational charts. Wedged between those who set the policies for handling customers and those who...
The Three Ms of Implementation
Three management factors play a key role in technology implementation success: Project, Change and Vendor Management.
Most organizations focus on project management (PM)—the discipline of...
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...
Dawn of a New Day
The “Dawn of a New Day” is an expression that means “a new or fresh beginning or a turning point that achieves as much”...