To many, optimization is synonymous with driving costs out of the business — moving contacts to lower-cost channels (self- service, etc.), reducing human contact with the customer, and driving down handling times. “This is all wrong,” says consultant Mary...
A popular trend in process improvement is the effort to correlate specific contact center activities to overall customer satisfaction. For example, some consulting organizations have been convincing clients to lower service level objectives because their scatter...
As a primary customer touchpoint, the contact center has enormous potential to provide other business units with valuable intelligence and support. This can include input on customers, products, services and processes — information that, when captured, identified,...
In recent years, I have seen a trend to streamline and simplify agent performance standards. In many cases, they had become too complex — weighted averages, percent time in this and that mode, formulas that would take a mathematician to figure out. Yes, if...
The very forces that are making scheduling difficult — more complex products and services, additional contact channels, faster pace of change, and the need for diverse agent skills — are creating an environment in which accurate scheduling is absolutely essential....
