With corporate budgets tightening, contact center leaders might be tempted to cut into your quality management funding. But quality management is a vital area of your business — it’s what ensures your customers get top-notch service. If they don’t get it, they’re likely to move on, costing your business money in the long run. A…
Agent performance optimization isn’t a new challenge for CX leaders. Post-pandemic, distributed workforces operating in remote and hybrid environments, though, have made getting the most out of your teams a lot more complicated—and important. Add uncertain economic conditions to the mix, and the need for maximum employee output is acute. The most successful contact centers strike…
Working with virtual teams of agents in your contact center can sometimes mean you feel disconnected from them — or even worried that you aren’t able to properly manage their performance. Those concerns might be why almost half of the contact center leaders in our 2022 remote work research study told us that they’re bringing…
Let’s face it, the call center of yesteryear is not wholly relevant when looking at customer service operations today. Even the terms “call center” and “contact center” are called into question, given the images they evoke of rows of agents in cubicles lined up to fill a room. For convenience, I’ll use the term “contact…
During my career in workforce management, call avoidance was always an issue — regardless of the location of the business, the nature of the business, or the location of the agent. Call avoidance, now known as interaction avoidance, denotes the steps an agent takes to avoid handling a customer interaction. It can take time and…
These are difficult times, and our anxious customers need us more than ever. Some of them need help with a simple task, like “How do I add a new driver to my auto insurance policy?” Others need help solving a problem: “Why was I charged twice for inflight WiFi?” All of our customers need our…
When it comes to call avoidance (or, more accurately these days, interaction avoidance), you usually know it when you see it. Unless you don’t. It’s easier than you think to misjudge an agent in an interaction, so I’ve assembled examples of interaction avoidance along with actions you should take when it occurs. We’ll also look…
Call avoidance is a common issue in contact centers and must be dealt with to ensure a positive experience for your customers. But agents can quickly become frustrated and overwhelmed when dealing with irate customers and high contact volumes, leading them to avoid interactions. While the issue is not unusual, it’s easier to manage if…
Any good product manager will tell you that a big part of their job is forming a deep understanding of customer needs. User idea suggestion portals are a helpful tool in doing that, but they might not be the best (or only) one for the job. What Are Idea Portals And How Do They Work?…
“Time is money” is a phrase attributed to Benjamin Franklin, first appearing in The American Instructor, a book published in 1748. For contact center managers, this phrase rings in their heads each time they create a forecast, build a schedule, or track schedule adherence. Working efficiently becomes even more important when costs are rising, agents…
WEBINAR
How Is AI Shaping the Customer Services Industry?
Tuesday, May 21, 2024 at 1:00 PM EDT