Because what you don't record can hurt you Making sure your call centre monitoring solution is working properly is an ongoing challenge. Whether it's legal, healthcare, or financial services, large organizations need recordings to satisfy compliance requirements and to resolve legal disputes with customers. Financial institutions, which I'll focus on for the sake of this blog post, greatly depend on having all interactions recorded accurately and stored in an easily accessible manner. Contracts ...

The holiday rush is just around the corner!  Your companies contact centre is bracing themselves for the deluge of traffic in the lead up to the end of the year and the busiest shopping period on the planet. It is the mad rush before the holiday Seasons. Even with the most sophisticated planning and science around expected peak traffic and sustained loads, there will always be that one scenario you could not foresee ... OR COULD YOU? What if you had the ability to accurately simulate the wa...

IVR. In many customers’ minds, this three-letter acronym is a four-letter word. It’s not uncommon for callers to mutter a diverse range of other forbidden words whenever interacting – or trying to interact – with a contact center’s IVR system. But IVR is not deserving of such hatred. IVR systems are not inherently flawed or evil, nor are the companies that use an IVR to front-end their contact centers. The reason why the general public’s perception of IVR is so negative is that so few of the sys...

In the eyes of many customers, self-service is not a compound word but rather a four-letter one. It’s not that there’s anything inherently bad about IVR or web self-service applications – it’s that there’s something bad about most contact centers’ efforts to make such apps good. Relatively few contact centers extend their quality assurance (QA) practices to self-service applications. Most centers tend to monitor and evaluate only those contacts that involve an interaction with a live agent – i.e...

Business is a fluid thing; the past 30 years have seen innovation after innovation and with it, a shift in culture. The 1980s saw a focus on quality products. The 1990s illustrated enterprises centered on branding. In the 2000s what differentiates companies? Customer Service. Customer service has climbed the list of priorities, and today one can see companies putting money where their mouths are by investing in a quality customer experience. Russ Zilles, CEO of IQ Services took some time to talk...

The convergence of voice, web, social media and video means that solution providers are coming up with exciting and sophisticated ways to allow users to take more control of their customer service experience. Customers want to decide how they communicate with your company, and how your company communicates with them. Two of the challenges facing contact centres today are “multichannel” and “multimodal” technologies. This article will explore these terms and introduce some ways to ensure that the...

Providing Contact Centres with Reliable, End-to-End Performance Metrics Many people believe they are best served by real people, not by voice robots. That’s the rationale behind GetHuman.com. But the economics and utility of self-service as an alternative to live agent interactions are so compelling that self-service solutions are here to stay. Providing multiple touch-points is a huge technology investment. Technology is great, but you can’t just diligently manage the implementation process and...

In the world of computing technology and communications solutions, the last twenty years have been one revolution after another. Faster processes, niftier appliances, smarter phones, and virtualized services are everywhere. Contact centers have grown from hunt groups and operator consoles to full-blown CRM solutions riding on top of evolving, complex technologies. Many of us are excited to use the new technologies because of three potentially significant benefits: generate cost savings facilitat...

Whether in the product business, or in services, a company’s brand image is shaped by how customers feel about interacting with the company. The impression they take away from a call to the business’s support or contact center has a lasting impact that can be either good or bad. Customer facing operations are crucial. As a business grows or undergoes other strategic changes, it may require updating its contact center operations as well. Signaling Change Arnab Mishra is Senior VP, Products and So...