ac2: The Next Generation Workforce Management

CUSTOMER INTER@CTION SOLUTIONS — April 2011

ac2: The Next Generation Workforce Management

If agents represent the contact center planet, then its core is workforce management (WFM)-forecasting, staffing and scheduling, strategic planning and performance optimization. The ability of WFM to predict and assign the right…

Feature Articles

Call Center Technology

The Cloud Ascendancy
A growing range of increasingly sophisticated applications are ascending to the cloud. Among this ever-growing list are business intelligence, call recording, CRM, CTI, customer support, hiring and training, IVR/speech recognition, recording, routing and predictive dialing, unified communications (UC) and workforce management.

CRM, BPO & TELESERVICES

The BI Formula
The interface allows users to ask questions in three parts: "what am I measuring, how do I want to organize and group the information and what filters do I want to apply?" This tool permits analysts to be used for more productive endeavors like diving into the data at a deeper level to better understand the "whys" - why are the results what they are and how can they be improved if they are not satisfactory.

Operations and Management

Making Homes for Contact Centers
Chad Lyne, director of corporate strategy at Alpine Access echoes this, based on his firm's experience and on anecdotal evidence from Fortune 500 companies. He points to research by Datamonitor that estimates home agent growth at over 20 percent annually, while his firm grew over 90 percent in the fourth quarter 2010 alone.

Awards and Recognition

Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine's 26th Annual Top 50 Outbound Teleservices Agency Ranking
Our "Top 50" rankings are based on extensive detail gleaned from an exhaustive application process, in which outbound teleservices vendors quantify their service delivery in terms of minutes usage in their various call center locations. Through more than a quarter century of consistency in processing and evaluating applications, the Top 50 ranking has become the benchmark for businesses seeking high-capacity teleservices agencies.

Columns

Publisher’s Outlook

Noble Systems Launches Noble Messenger EC
Outbound broadcast messaging such as for credit card fraud, class changes, emergencies, flight delays and outages has become a key contact center tool…

Logout

Demolish The Call/Contact Center?
I must confess to never hearing or using the term "call centers"-now multichannel contact centers-when I first started covering them in the mid-1990s…

HIGH PRIORITY!

What's the Best Time for Customer Surveys?
There is no question customer surveys are a fantastic means of collecting information and evaluating service levels and overall customer satisfaction - and we all know customer satisfaction drives business success. Consider the retail space. Customer surveys are a fantastic mechanism for improving facilities, enhancing service levels, and determining overall satisfaction levels. The question, though, is how to best implement them in order to solicit the highest response levels.

Ask the Experts

Hosted Contact Center Solutions: Setting the Record Straight
Hosted contact center infrastructure solutions, also referred to as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS), are steadily gaining ground in enterprises of all sizes and in a variety of public and corporate verticals. Hosted solutions are reaching unprecedented levels of customer satisfaction because of the minimal cash outlay required, quick deployments, rapid and quantifiable return on investment, scalability and agility, ongoing investment protection, a reduced maintenance burden, and the opportunity to "try before you buy." Vendors also continue to expand functionality through product enhancements and improved deployment and integration models.

Innovation Solutions: Knowlagent

Call Center Survey Reveals Shrinkage Impact
Knowlagent recently conducted a survey to answer some important questions about contact center shrinkage. The intent was to determine how much time call center agents spend in shrinkage across different types of centers and to understand what activities contribute to this type of loss.

Special Focus

Reducing Churn: The Fast Route to Profitability
Shrinking customer churn is arguably the key concern of today's businesses, and for good reason: it costs less to keep customers and to acquire new ones. Yet it is a lesson that too many firms, especially those in the wireless industry-which is a key business bellwether-required a painful economic downturn to learn.

Case Study

Serving the Social Customer
Customers have always been "social" for they-we as human beings-are social creatures, relying on each of us for vital information to help us survive and prosper. We have asked and have listened to our peers, and have passed the information we gleaned on to them. When we have items to offer, customers listen to us and then consult others and we do the same in turn when we are buyers.