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.
Archive for the 'Call Centers' Category
CMI: Cross-Selling and Upselling - Translating Sales into Service
Posted by Ted Hopton on April 29, 2008
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
Posted in Call Center Management, Call Centers, Technology | No Comments »
First Contact Resolution Research Report
Posted by Ted Hopton on March 19, 2008
I’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 
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: ICMI, Call Centers, Call Center Management, Metrics, first call resolution, first contact resolution, KPI, ICMI Membership, FCR, research report, call center metrics | No Comments »
