Santa is coming to town and he waits for no one! Getting time to do everything we want to do; whether it’s taking time to see friends and relatives, going shopping with our family, preparing for everyone to visit or attending (plus sometimes recovering from...) the annual office party, it makes for a very festive [...]

If you spend time browsing job boards, there’s a great chance you’ll come across adverts for real-time managers, much like the ad I found: […]

Discover how intraday management can empower you with the tools and insight you need to take control of the customer experience. No Forecast Is Ever Right Despite the best efforts of planners, your call centre will never see a day when your forecast is exactly the same as reality. As Murphy's law says: everything that [...]

Forecasting and scheduling are crucial components of call centre operation, but the reality of day-to-day performance can wreak havoc with even perfect planning. Thankfully, a solution is at hand: intraday management. The Problem with Forecasts: They're Wrong In many call centres, workload forecasts are completed months in advance. Schedules are created based on those forecasts [...]

Call centre dashboards are often crowded with dozens of performance metrics. Crucially though, not all metrics are created equal. In the pursuit of meaningful performance improvements, it’s essential for your call centre to develop a balanced scorecard of metrics. First Contact Resolution (also known as First Call Resolution, or FCR) is one of the most [...]

Suffering from low customer satisfaction scores in your call centre? You aren’t alone. To help your call centre improve this crucial performance metric, we’re looking at 7 actionable strategies for improving the customer experience. From changing service level targets, to deploying ESAT scores in your call centre, these techniques are designed to improve every aspect of the customer experience – and overhaul your CSAT scores in the process. […]

We’ve compiled a short reading list of essential call centre resources, with the goal of helping managers to improve all aspects of performance. From agent engagement and retention, through to metrics and KPIs, the 6 books covered here offer a ton of helpful advice for all call centre managers to benefit from. 1) The Call [...]

With the cost of losing a single call centre agent comfortably clocking-in at over £50,000, employee turnover and agent attrition is a serious problem. If the traditional approach of increasing salaries or juggling shift patterns hasn’t worked, it’s time to take a more pro-active approach to the problem – with these 3 effective strategies for [...]

Agent satisfaction plays a vital role in all areas of call centre performance. The customer experience relies upon the skill, patience and attitude of the call centre’s agents; and it only takes a handful of negative experiences, caused by tired and stressed agents, for your call centre’s reputation to be dragged through the mud. Worse [...]

Queuing is a part of everyday life. Whenever you walk into a shop, bank or post office, there’s a chance you’ll have to endure a wait before you can purchase your shopping, talk to a teller or send your parcel. In the majority of cases, we’ll be willing to bear a short wait. After all, most people appreciate that businesses operate in a competitive environment, with limited resources; and queuing can be an effective way of ensuring everybody gets served. If the queue looks too long, we can make the decision to turn around, walk out, and come back at a different time. Unfortunately, many call centres don’t offer the same visibility into queuing that your local post office branch does. Instead of arming their customers with the knowledge to know how long their wait is expected to be, they leave them in the dark, unable to work out whether they’ll be served in 5 minutes, or 50. […]

Variants of the performance management cycle are used by managers throughout the contact centre industry. Typically, they’re used as a tool for structuring agent training and up-skilling, and reviewing the efficacy of the training process. Though there are myriad versions of the performance management cycle (or PMC), they typically follow the same cyclical process: Agree [...]

You're worried that your 80/20 service level target isn't the right choice for your call centre. Chances are, you're right. However, new service level targets shouldn't be taken lightly. Your service level can have huge implications for customer service, agent experience, and of course, profitability. Assessing cost is the first step in choosing a new [...]