Setting an appropriate service level goal within your contact centre is a tricky proposition. For ‘live’ channels like phone or webchat, you need to consider what level of service is likely to delight your customers, what level they will simply not tolerate and what level your cost model will allow you to support. Historical data, [...]
Recently, I’ve been delving through the internet looking for what the contact centre industry actually understands by ‘real-time management’. This one from Contact Centre World, is fairly representative of what I found; "Using queue levels to judge staff numbers and manipulate scheduling. This technique can be utilised to maximise profitability and efficiency of the organisation." [...]
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been ‘on tour’ around the UK, attending all four of The Forum’s Regional Challenge Workshops. As the UK’s go-to community for best practice and professional development in customer contact it has given me an opportunity to hear first-hand the challenges that Planning teams around the UK are facing. I’ve [...]
Many companies have a continuous struggle between the real-time monitoring team and operations. Whilst adherence updates stream throughout the day, ops often do not consult the real-time team when taking agents off a queue to give them a break or to do training. Without the visibility of what the forecasted workload looks like, the result [...]
Multichannel contact, or Omnichannel as it is sometimes known, is a great way to do business and has been at the heart of developments in the contact centre industry over the past few years. Customers can pick and choose the way that they want to contact you, dependant on their personal preference – younger people [...]
Deploying WFM was a step change for the contact centre industry when it was first launched 30 years ago. It’s still a critical element in the planning process to gain efficiencies. But what’s next? Where is the next critical application that will bring about another step change in contact centre productivity? Research has shown [...]
I’ve read the top 3 wishes that customers have are; That their problems are understood and resolved quickly and easily That they have personal interaction with a human agent That the agent they contact has the skills required to resolve their issue No-one should be overly surprised to find problem resolution at the very top [...]
Do you have the good intentions of getting through your agents’ annual training programmes, but never seem to get there? By December you know you’re just not going to make it. Every long-term strategic plan, mid-term staffing projection and short-term staffing view has a provision for training built into it. Whether this is to create [...]
On Tuesday QStory enjoyed catching up with familiar faces and meeting new people in Eastwood at The Forum’s National Planning Conference. The Forum events always promise to be an opportunity to gain useful insight into organisations’ progress in improving their contact centre’s performance. Once again Tuesday did not disappoint. There was a full day of [...]
An estimated 58% of contact centre organisations currently employ home working agents, according to the 2016 UK HomeAgent survey. In 2015 the proportion of contact centres using home workers almost doubled since 2008, with the overall number of remote agents increasing by 300% since 2010. With the commercial and technical pressures of an increasingly globalised world, and [...]
When you have valuable high net worth customers, can it really be “top service at any cost?” Looking after high net worth customers happens in sectors of the finance industry and often in the mobile phone sector. For these organisations client experience is everything, often their contact centres are “high-touch” environments so it’s critical [...]
In the US it’s been reported that customers spend 43 days of their lives on hold waiting for a service agent to answer their call [1]. That equates to between 10 to 20 minutes EACH WEEK they spend listening to a recorded voice telling them that “your call is important to us”. But not so [...]
