I’m pretty sure, regardless of the size of your center or company, you seek to deliver a great customer experience. And I’m willing to bet your customers have a choice of channels. Unfortunately, I’m almost nearly as confident that your customers sometimes feel pain from their inability to easily cross channels and achieve the coveted… Read More »
Contact center leaders often express frustration with their current technology. Yet in our experience, they have substantial opportunities to optimize efficiency and improve the customer experience by getting more out their current investments. Here are some high-impact strategies for success. Expand the Role of Data Contact centers should review the information contained in their enterprise… Read More »
Contact centers must rise to the challenge of attaining efficiency and effectiveness. Traditional metrics support the drive for efficiency by measuring average handle time, labor cost, staffing, cost per contact, occupancy, and the like. Effectiveness presents more of a challenge. It demands a careful analysis of data drawn from enterprise applications (e.g., CRM, CIS, ERP,… Read More »
Contact center technology selection is more complex than ever. Vendors offer a mind-boggling array of capabilities. Sourcing options abound and are a bit tricky to navigate. Buyers constantly live in the tension between their enthusiasm for the technology and the reality of budget and resource constraints. This complexity makes it difficult to narrow options and… Read More »
Contact centers need a flexible and secure infrastructure to support remote access to support home agents, “on the go” leaders, outsourcers, business continuity, and branches and retail outlets. Fortunately, enhancements in core technology and network connectivity, along with the proliferation of cloud systems, create a simplified approach to remote access to contact center systems. For… Read More »
Omnichannel is everywhere – vendor marketing, analyst articles, conference sessions, client wish lists. While touted as a new concept, it doesn’t seem all that different from the multimedia routing and reporting (MMRR) that have been around for years and have been so difficult to achieve. So it’s fair to ask: What’s really new? Omnichannel seeks… Read More »
In spite of the fact that nearly every “call center” is now a “contact center,” we observe little substance to the discussion – much less action – around multi-channel Workforce Management (WFM). With “omnichannel” one of the most frequently heard buzz words in our industry, we decided it was time to look at planning, forecasting,… Read More »
Every contact center looks for ways to be more effective and efficient in handling customer contacts. Process improvement is a high impact opportunity. Yet we see few centers focus attention on the agent desktop, a common hindrance to smooth processes and a ripe target to enable dramatic changes. Given the potential payback, agent desktop optimization… Read More »
Over the years, we’ve watched key players in contact center technology evolve their solution positioning from enterprise communication with contact center (CC) applications, to unified communications (UC), to converging CC and UC. They want the market to take notice as their core technology advances, their product portfolios offer more complete and innovative solutions, and/or they’ve… Read More »
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 solutions that are part of a “suite.” The BoB strategy was common when vendors had a more narrow focus. For example, there were “CTI vendors” or “IVR vendors” and “WFM vendors”… Read More »