Improve
Operational Efficiency Of Call Centers While Meeting Business Strategies
By Al Baker, Siemens Global eCRM Solutions
When call centers first came onto the business scene more than 20 years
ago, their purpose in the enterprise was simply to process customer calls as
fast as possible and as economically as possible. Their only strategic value
for the enterprise was telephony cost-cutting and human resource economy of
scale. Call centers provided a method and means to drive random, uninitiated
and expensive customer telephone calls into a highly managed operations
framework.
Improving Your
Performance By Creating A Dynamic Learning Environment
By Bill Byron Concevitch, Witness
Systems
As the pace of today's contact centers continues to
accelerate, the need for immediate knowledge and skill transfer becomes
increasingly important. As customer service representatives are challenged
with more complexity, supervisors and call center managers are charged with
doing more with less. Agents are handling more sophisticated problems and
questions, requiring continual training and education.
Sound
Strategy? Outsourcing In Today's Economy
By LeeAnn McCoy-Tomlin, The Telvista Company
In today's tough economy, a number of key operational metrics have
combined to create one of the more challenging business environments in
recent memory. As a result, many firms find themselves continually stuck
in a seemingly never-ending cycle where they spend the first six months of
the year negotiating for a budget that will be spent in the last six
months. Hardly is the process completed before it starts all over again;
all too often, the end result is a 'wait and see' atmosphere that disrupts
business continuity while reducing productivity.
RE:
LOCATIONS:
Yakima,
Washington
By James Beatty, NCS International, Inc.
Let's say I need a place to locate a 500-person customer service center.
Where should I look? Offshore, where labor costs are lower than the U.S.?
Maybe I should look at the larger MSAs with a population of at least
500,000 to 1 million. Perhaps I'll look in the Southeast, where call
centers have been multiplying at astounding growth rates. Or maybe I'll
look Northeast, where customer service centers have been successful.
There's still the Midwest, where the industry was born and is now at a
mature age. What about the West coast, which has millions of people
available?
The CEO Spotlight
This month, the CEO Spotlight focuses on two people: APAC Customer Services'
chairman and CEO Ted Schwartz, and SER Solutions' CEO Carl Mergele.
|
DEPARTMENTS
Publisher's Outlook
By Nadji Tehrani
Over the last six months, we have been the
only industry publication to continuously and exclusively cover the vital
legislative issues confronting our industry, namely the FTC regulations
pertaining to do-not-call lists, and the Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR),
predictive dialer restrictions, etc. Even though we have covered this
matter extensively, the very nature of the regulations passed is extremely
confusing and difficult to interpret, to say the least.
High Priority!
By Rich Tehrani
It's no secret that I like looking at new and exciting technologies. I'm
normally like a kid in a candy store at trade shows. That said, I was a
bit disappointed with the exhibits at the International Call Center
Management (ICCM) show this August in Chicago. There just weren't that
many announcements about new products that interested me.
INDUSTRY NEWS
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