Contact centers have been a world unto themselves, a corner to themselves, and often located in communities far removed from regional offices and corporate headquarters, treated as expense drains rather than as revenue producers.

 

No more. Corporations are at last realizing that contact centers are the key to success with their customer service and sales mission: attracting, retaining and obtaining maximum value from customers. Internal departments and outside vendors alike significantly impact that success, too, for better or worse, with the supporting services they provide to contact centers.

Consequently, contact centers are attracting new managerial talent from outside of the center, including from other departments. To educate and train professionals in what contact centers do and how they operate, The Resource Center for Customer Service Professionals (RCCSP) has introduced a new course, Call Center Foundations.

 

“With contact centers becoming central to organizations’ success, it has never been more critical for new managers and non-contact center managers to understand how contact centers work and what they need to succeed,” explains Nina Kawalek, principal, RCCSP. “Call Center Foundations was designed to provide that insight, into call center human resource needs, call delivery technologies, alternative business models for minimizing costs, measures of performance and how organizational decisions will impact the outcomes.”

Call Center Foundations is designed for and aimed at managers new to the contact center industry or those in departments interface with contact centers such as HR, IT and marketing. It is also geared for managers of departments that handle storefront functions such as branches and clinics -- and stores where staff are increasingly being called on to handle overflow or escalated calls from the centers, enabled by new routing technologies.

The course presents the big picture and introduces attendees to the component parts, job roles, and performance factors that make up today's world-class call center. Participants will learn how call centers work, how they are put together, what leads to call center success, and all the terminology needed to communicate in this profession.

Attendees will be taught how calls flow into and are processed through the centers, and how their centers’ service product affects customers. They will find out how call centers are evaluated, the top six measures of performance, and the most commonly used metrics. They will learn how to use a balanced scorecard approach to reporting agent or overall call center performance, including where to look when things go right and when things go wrong.

 

Call Center Foundations is presented over two days, is priced at $1,795, and will be taught:

 

July 27-28                    Raleigh NC (Cardinal Club)

Aug.17-18                   Chicago, IL (Hyatt Lodge)

Aug. 31-Sept.1            Dallas, TX (Hilton Park Cities)

Sept.14-15                   Washington, DC (Westin Arlington Gateway (News - Alert))

Oct. 5-6                       New York, NY (Sheraton LaGuardia)

Oct.19-20                    Houston, TX (Omni)

Nov.16-17                   Atlanta, GA (Omni)

Dec.14-15                   Las Vegas, NV (Platinum Hotel)

 

For those professionals and analysts on a call center management learning path, there are three follow-on training courses: Call Center Supervisor Certification, Call Center Management Certification, and Call Center Engineering Certification.

 

“The Foundations training course is Call Center 101,” says Kawalek. “Any vendor salesperson, account manager, or technician shouldn’t set foot in a contact center without this basic level of knowledge and vocabulary. If you can’t talk the talk, or don’t know enough about the business to empathize with the client’s challenges, they’ll spot that right away.”