SWPP Conference (Day 1)
I'm back in Nashville for my favorite conference of the year, the SWPP Annual Conference. It's my favorite because this conference is full of...
The Top 5 Posts in February
Take a look at our top five blog posts for the month to see which topics your fellow contact center professionals were most interested...
Manage Change by Listening
Have you ever heard the saying, “There’s a reason we have two ears and one mouth”?
I work with many companies looking to decrease attrition,...
Who Receives Training in Your Contact Center?
More organizations are focusing on employee learning and development as a critical component for building employee engagement and a successful culture. What does this...
A Tool to Drive New-Hire Engagement and Retention
Given the importance of the supervisor-employee relationship, what steps can companies take to ensure that frontline managers support new-hires through this critical period and...
A Day in the Contact Center with TIM HEIDEMANN
When it comes to running a contact center, it would be hard to find someone with more know-how than TIM HEIDEMANN. With a long...
Valuing the Frontline Role
Generally speaking, many contact centers do an excellent job of discovering and rewarding great performance. Whether through reports, monitored calls or customer satisfaction surveys,...
Contact Center Analytics: A Look at Goals Vs. Current Use
Do contact centers derive value from their analytics tools? In our 2014 Contact Center Analytics Survey, conducted by Strategic Contact and Contact Center Pipeline,...
The Cost of a Bad Hire
We’ve all been rooting for the U.S. economy to recover, but as it improves, it’s getting harder to attract and retain agents. In an...
More Tips to Maximize Your Training Investment
In my previous post, I offered five tips to stretch your training dollars and do more with less. The following are five more ideas...
Home Agents: 4 Tips for Building a Cohesive Team Culture
Over time, all work groups develop norms, which are the rules and expectations (either formally or informally established) that guide the team members’ behaviors....
Promoting a Culture of Recognition
Do you have a culture of retention or turnover? Do your employees feel like they are on a progressive journey, or that the foot...
Finding Your FCR Opportunities
Any contact received from a customer comes with a set of expectations, and one of those is that the issue will be completely resolved...
Coffee, Anyone?
If you are a WFM Scheduler and need a quick way to boost employee morale, try out a test-run of offering three 10-minute breaks...
Practice Forgiveness
Have you heard of The Golden Rule? It’s common English phrasing is:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The Golden Rule,...
Management 101: Flying by the Seat of Your Pants
“Flying by the seat of your pants” is an expression coined by World War II fliers. It was used to describe flying when instruments...
Get the Most Out of Your Training Budget
Training can be one of the biggest costs in any contact center. If you take several hundred (or thousand) agents and multiple that by...
What? You Don’t Trust Your WFM System?!
If you feel like your WFM system just doesn't give you the right net staffing, here is the approach I take to fixing it....
”My Husband Just Died“: What Will Your Agents Do Next?
While sitting on the panel during a town hall meeting of contact center leaders, I was asked by Mary, one of the attendees, “I...
Frontline Coaches: Ask Don’t Tell
Despite the critical role that they play in employee satisfaction and retention, frontline supervisors often are not provided with the training on how to drive...
A Day in the Contact Center with LINDSEY ANSLOW
LINDSEY ANSLOW has dedicated her career to working in customer-centric contact centers. As Director of Operations at DependableIT, a third-party provider of commercial and residential...
WFMing on a Mac and in Excel Without Add-Ins
Have you ever tried to calculate how many people you’d need to answer 100 calls with a 30-second ASA and a 3-minute handle time? ...
Why Training Matters: Linking Training Program Success to Larger Company Goals
Wait a minute, if it’s 2015, shouldn’t we have flying cars by now? Much to the disappointment of Marty McFly from “Back to the...
Map Your Customer’s Journey
Today’s customers own multiple technology devices and use them to interact with companies and brands like never before. People’s preference for—and reliance on—technology to...
What Causes Slow Service?
Speed is the ultimate compliment that we can pay our customers. It shows that we value their time and we recognize they have better...
Co-Create an Experience that Customers Value
What is often missing during the development of the customer experience strategy is the main element: the customer. Making assumptions about what customers value...
Keeping Core Values Top of Mind
How do you get your entire company to support and live your core values? By engaging staff and leaders in defining what your organization...
Is Your Contact Center Training Aligned with Organizational Goals?
It’s an unfortunate reality in many companies that staff development becomes an easy target anytime the budget needs to be tightened. Once training resources...