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Archive for the 'Call Centers' Category


CMI: Cross-Selling and Upselling - Translating Sales into Service

Posted by Ted Hopton on April 29, 2008

Making a successful service-to-sales transition requires cultural and process changes — from hiring the right agents to providing effective training and offering motivating rewards.

read more | digg story

Posted in Call Center Management, Customer Service, Sales | No Comments »

CMI: The Science of Call Center Agent Selection

Posted by Ted Hopton on April 29, 2008

Facing a tightening economy, nearly all business operations — including call centers — are looking for ways to cut costs. Companies that are working new assessment tools into their hiring strategies are seeing a significant dent in the cost associated with agent turnover, as well as improved quality and performance.

read more | digg story

Posted in Call Center Management | No Comments »

CMI: Creativity — the Key to Success for Small Call Centers

Posted by Ted Hopton on April 29, 2008

Good ideas for managing a small contact center. Provides an overview and specific steps to take.

Leaders of small call centers must not only master the fundamentals of running call centers, but they must also develop creative ways to do those things just a little differently.

read more | digg story

Posted in Call Center Management | No Comments »

A Virtual Travel Agent With All the Answers

Posted by Ted Hopton on April 19, 2008

Alaska Airlines introduces a surprisingly pleasant virtual assistant on its Web site.

read more | digg story

Posted in Call Centers, Customer Service, Technology | No Comments »

Customer backlash against bad service

Posted by Ted Hopton on April 19, 2008

In the annals of customer service, 2007 will go down as the year fed-up consumers finally dropped the hammer. In August a 76-year-old retired nurse named Mona Shaw smashed up a keyboard and a telephone in a Manassas, Va., Comcast office after she says the cable operator failed to install her service properly.

read more | digg story

Posted in Call Centers, Customer Sat, Customer Service, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Sprint to Pesky Customers: “Scram”

Posted by Ted Hopton on April 19, 2008

See the original image at bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Sprint dumped 1000 customers who were calling 40 to 50 times more than other customers, specifically about issues that could not be resolved (e.g., billing disputes). Did the company do the right thing?

read more | digg story

Posted in Call Centers, Customer Sat, Customer Service, Management, Media | No Comments »

Bits: E-Mail Verizon and, Surprise, It’ll Write Back

Posted by Ted Hopton on April 19, 2008

Yes, it is the phone company. But Verizon is investing to actually have people who can read e-mails from customers and respond to their service requests.

read more | digg story

Posted in Call Center Management, Call Centers, Customer Service, Technology | No Comments »

Having Fun and Gaining Insight in the Call Center

Posted by Ted Hopton on April 19, 2008

Affinity’s vice president of customer relations, Scott Willey, says post-call surveys have helped the Ventura, CA-based company improve call handling and the customer experience it delivers.

read more | digg story

Posted in Call Center Management, Call Centers, Customer Sat, Customer Service, Technology | No Comments »

Helping the Help Desk, the Intel Way

Posted by Ted Hopton on April 19, 2008

A web 2.0 and heavy community-building campaign that is scheduled to begin on Monday presents the Intel Corporation as the problem-solver for the people who solve the computer network problems for others.

read more | digg story

Posted in Call Center Management, Call Centers, Technology | No Comments »

First Contact Resolution Research Report

Posted by Ted Hopton on March 19, 2008

FCR_coverI’ve already written about how difficult it is to walk the talk when it comes to First Contact Resolution (FCR) — see, First Call Resolution: Great Principle, Hard to Apply.

So if you’re struggling with First Call Resolution in your center — whether to implement FCR, how to implement FCR, how to make sure what you track as FCR is meaningful — then you should be interested in ICMI’s latest Member Research Report on First Contact Resolution.

It’s free for ICMI Members. Whether you are an ICMI Member or not, you can download it right now. You’ll learn what your peers (298 call center professionals surveyed in January 200 8) are doing with FCR for Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Call Center Management, Call Centers, Customer Service, ICMI, ICMI Membership, ICMI Publications, Metrics, Research, Statistics, Trends | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »