Call Center Management posts, articles, and infographics

Promoting Customer Service Agents to Leadership

November 28, 2011 by Melissa Kovacevic
with 114 views

Choosing the right agents to promote to front line Leadership roles in our contact centers and our customer facing service offices is often a challenge. [read more]

There’s No Such Thing as “Social Media Samurai” or “Customer Service Ninjas”

November 21, 2011 by John Burton
with 396 views

Image: R'eyes/Flickr(creative commons)

Samurai aren’t experts in search engine optimization or online community management. Ninjas don’t wear hands-free headsets and hide in the call center waiting for you to have a problem with your PC, broadband access or satellite TV. [read more]

Zen And The Art Of Social Customer Service

November 14, 2011 by Esteban Kolsky
with 136 views

Image: Pittaya Sroilong/Flickr(creative commons)Z

I am truly interested in attaining enlightenment in when dealing with customers. This enlightenment is the only way we will succeed at understanding them, knowing them, and serving them properly. [read more]

Is the Office of the CMO the Right Place to Drive Customer Engagement?

October 23, 2011 by Mitch Lieberman
with 67 views

Primary sourced research is valuable, adding one’s own interpretations (which I will) is the added benefit of blogging. The most recent IBM research “From Stretched to Strengthened – Insights from the Global Chief Marketing Officer Study” (URL) is a good read. Research based on CMO conversations is arguably meant for a CMOs. As usual, I... [read more]

How a Social Care Strategy Can Increase Overall Brand Sentiment

September 30, 2011 by Jennifer Bach
with 304 views

As business continues to adopt social media into overall their communications, providing customer service through these networks is an emerging trend. “Social care” involves providing assistance to customers via platforms such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter. I’ve just finished pulling together a new benchmarking study of seven Fortune... [read more]

All It Takes is One Bad Agent Experience

September 7, 2011 by Melissa Kovacevic
with 99 views

We’ve all had this experience. The phone rings at home and you pick it up. If you’re in the Contact Center business, you hear the slight Autodialer delay and know it is a Contact Center call, possibly an outsourced one. You hear the myriad of other voices in the background as the Agent asks for your spouse. You say he/she isn... [read more]

Inside Sales: The Customer is Mad as Hell

September 1, 2011 by Josiane Feigon
with 75 views

Photo: Lara604/Flickr (Creative Commons)

This independent, busy, distracted, and opinionated buyer has something to say and it’s time for salespeople to listen, understand, and know how and why they make decisions. [read more]

12 Actions to Drastically Reduce Customer Hold Times

August 2, 2011 by Barbara Burke
with 271 views

Three years is too long to wait. Statisticians have estimated that in a lifetime of 70 years, the average person spends at least three years waiting. Waiting is an inevitable and even necessary aspect of human life. We wait in line at the grocery store, for red lights to turn green, and for movie trailers to finally stop so we can see... [read more]

Management and Either/Or Decisions...

July 29, 2011 by Dave Brock
with 45 views

Management is about making choices and setting priorities. We have to choose to do somethings, choosing not to do others. We have to set priorities and maintain focus. Choosing everything, setting everything to a top priority, consciously or by default (otherwise known as piling on), is a sure path to failure. Having... [read more]

There's No Place like Home – And Customer Service Is Home

July 15, 2011 by Emily Yellin
with 161 views

In the new e-book just released, Rethinking Customer Service: The Call Center as Corporate Information Hub, we started with the idea that call centers and customer service departments are evolving into richer, more vital parts of companies as a whole. The premise makes sense, because we all see that customer service has to evolve, or it... [read more]

Are You Doing Customer Service Agent Attitude Quality Checks?

July 15, 2011 by Melissa Kovacevic
with 177 views

In our Contact Centers and Customer Facing areas, we are focused on quality related Customer contacts, process accuracy and many other quality touch points. We do these quality checks by listening to calls, reviewing emails and live chat records, by back-end calibration, and reviews of data input and record updates. And then... [read more]

8 Tricks Customers Use to Find a Real Person when Contacting Customer Service

June 21, 2011 by Douglas Hanna
with 377 views

Photo: Cal Evans/Flickr (Creative Commons)

How customers avoid contacting customer service or divert away from the phone tree by overriding systems and asking for transfers. [read more]

4 Steps to Keep it Simple in Social Customer Interactions [Exclusive]

June 16, 2011 by Jennifer Bach
with 500 views

Photo: Flickr/Kevin Hutchinson (Creative Commons)

As companies continue to explore best practices in delivering customer service online, sometimes less is more. This was the main takeaway of a study we recently completed that reviewed how brands talked to their customers in online chat. [read more]

Cloud-Based Customer Service Solutions Win on Costs, TCO, and ROI

June 6, 2011 by Alyson Stone
with 182 views

Photo: Karin Dalziel/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Contact centers can lower the cost of their customer service infrastructure by up to 43% over a five-year period by choosing cloud-based customer care tools rather than on-premises options, according to Frost & Sullivan’s Premise Vs. Hosted Contact Center: Total Cost of Ownership Analysis. [read more]

Exclusive: You Own a Yacht and a Prize-Winning Labradoodle. You Don't Own Your Customer

June 3, 2011 by John Burton
with 149 views

Photo: Steve Parker/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Who is responsible for the customer relationship? Marketing drives the brand, sales is a 'rock star diva,' and customer service waits around 'for hell to break loose.' A fun Sustainable Business Forum Exclusive for your Friday. [read more]

Proactive Customer Service and the Great Debate on Handling Complaints

May 21, 2011 by Douglas Hanna
with 266 views

As customers, we want to choose the companies we do business with based on personal recommendations, reviews, and past performances. Unfortunately, when it comes to telecommunications, most of us are still somewhat limited as to our choices, but still that is absolutely no excuse for poor customer service. Two days ago I called AT&T... [read more]

With the Rise of Social Media, Will the Call Center Disappear Like the Mustache?

May 20, 2011 by John Burton
with 584 views

Perhaps this is not the type of thing one should say in public but… sometimes I find myself reminiscing about the 1970s. It was a wonderful, glorious bygone era when men (well, at least real men) sported large, unashamed, unwieldy mustaches. Tom Selleck, Burt Reynolds, Charles Bronson, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Frank Zappa. Heck,... [read more]

Self-Service for the Social Customer?

May 16, 2011 by Hansen Lieu
with 468 views

However, my take-away from Maoz's observation is that it is still important for companies to offer a combination of touch points in the future. Organizations need to balance the level of service they deliver to the resources that they have while making a reasonable return for their investors. Self service offers organizations the ability to help customers solve their problems quickly and provides a high ROI. [read more]

Adventures in the Customer Service Underworld

April 29, 2011 by Robin Fray Carey
with 245 views

Are we in danger of creating a customer caste system? Or put another way, if a customer service complaint falls into the phone queue, and not on Twitter or Facebook, will anybody hear? Last week I descended into the customer service underworld when I lost my wallet on the Washington Metro. You know the drill—first denial, then... [read more]

The Future of Buyer Relationships

April 14, 2011 by Tony Zambito
with 203 views

Image via Wikipedia

This decade, we are beginning to see the continuing impact of the advent of the digital and social age and the robust evolution of the new buyer experience economy. Our developing views of the buyer undergoing perhaps the most profound transformation in the last 100 years. By the end of this decade, what buyer and... [read more]