Is there a critical part missing from your call center orientation and training program?

 Most call center training programs focus primarily on equipping the agent with the knowledge and skills to accomplish the “transaction” part of the call with most of the time devoted to system navigation .  Some will also include an overview of

It’s Fall 2011 Back-to-School time!  Plan to sharpen your knowledge and skills this fall with a special Back-to-School offer from The Call Center School.   To provide you with a flexible learning plan this fall, you can purchase any web seminar (or group of seminars) and get the accompanying e-learning program at no additional charge

Many workforce planners and contact center executives believe and run their businesses with three  basic personnel assumptions that may be costing the call center much needless expense as well as negatively impacting employee satisfaction.  Here are the three workforce assumptions that need to be carefully reviewed as you plan your contact center staffing budget: The

The biggest challenge about successful telephone selling may not be convincing the customer to buy. The biggest obstacle is sometimes getting frontline staff on board with the program.  Many people don’t view themselves as being salespeople and have little confidence about selling. Overcoming this belief and building confidence in the selling process is the first

The three biggest complaints from customers about email communications point to the speed at which the email is returned, the accuracy of the response, and the personalization of the message.  Speed of response is directly related to how many people are staffed to handle the emails and accuracy has to do with product knowledge and

Don’t miss out on next week’s Virtual Symposium on Quality Assurance and Speech Analytics – brought to you by CRMxchange and QATC (Quality Assurance and Training Connection).   In this virtual, online conference, you’ll have the opportunity to participate in a dozen different seminars and workshops — jam-packed with information about how to make the

How many times do you hear your frontline staff reminding a customer, “You’ll have to reboot your system” or “You must send in the signed documents“?  While these steps may indeed be necessary as a next step in the process, sometimes the way we communicate these instructions seems much more like unwanted homework than helpful

One of the toughest things about managing a contact center is matching up the workforce (the people) to the workload (the incoming calls).  There are always going to be peaks and valleys of calls whether it’s a variation within the day or a day-of-week pattern with one or two days much busier than others. Staffing

One of the hottest topics today in the call center industry is the discussion surrounding the opportunity to have many functions like call distribution or workforce management provided “in the cloud” rather than via traditional premise-based hardware and software solutions. There are many benefits of these new offerings, but one of the biggest potential advantages