Call Centers – Cutting Waste

July 28, 2010 by Gail  
Filed under Six Sigma, call center

Call Centers – Cutting Waste

Call centers entail planning, staff scheduling, after call processing and reporting functions along with the major function of handling calls. But the major function of handling calls that many would argue couldn’t be standardized can be improved to ensure that no defects exist.

It may be inbound or the outbound calls – but any Six Sigma initiative to improve the process can mean a lot of improvement in customer satisfaction levels.

Typical Waste in a Call Center

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Maximizing Call Center Resource Utilization With Six Sigma

July 26, 2010 by Gail  
Filed under Six Sigma, call center

Maximizing Call Center Resource Utilization With Six Sigma

By Tony Jacowski

In the last few years, Six Sigma has achieved many new milestones, the most recent being its induction in the dynamic and fast-changing world of business process outsourcing. Six Sigma implementations in call centers and contact centers may be a relatively new phenomenon, but due to its unparalleled success, this trend is fast catching on and in the coming years, is expected to outdo conventional domains such as manufacturing.

How Does Six Sigma Help Call Centers?

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Trusted and Tried Tips to Reduce the Costs of Call Centers

July 26, 2010 by Gail  
Filed under Best Practices, call center

Trusted and Tried Tips to Reduce the Costs of Call Centers

By Maria Richards

Call center managers have wrecked their brains to save the money that kept draining out of the process. For them, it is an unending proposition that kept challenging them at every schedule and in each process.

However, in this write-up and with the help of experience and expertise gained over the years, let me try to sum up some of the points that can not only save the money that had been dripping down but transform the whole process also.

The cost-reducing steps for BPOs are:

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Top 4 Customer Service Skills For the Workplace

Top 4 Customer Service Skills For the Workplace

By Dave Vower

Having top notch customer service skills is the hallmark of a successful organization. Here are some of my favorite methods for improving customer service skills in your business or workplace.

1. Honesty. The most important issue thing to many customers when they deal with the people in your workplace is honesty. Can they trust you and your staff? If it’s found that the customer is unable to trust the people representing your company you’ll have all sorts of trouble dealing with them when trying to achieve any outcome.

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Three Uses of Call Center Analytics

July 21, 2010 by Gail  
Filed under Best Practices, call center

Three Uses of Call Center Analytics

By Jeremy P Stanfords

Running an efficient call center requires having good data on how the work is being processed. Call center analytics give managers the tools to oversee and optimize staffing and workflow. Analytics can be used in three basic ways, and for best results planning should encompass all three.

The Past

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First Call Resolution and Call Center Improvement

July 18, 2010 by Gail  
Filed under Best Practices

First Call Resolution and Call Center Improvement

By Navdeep Chandel

Improving first call resolution has been shown to improve other traditional contact center metrics such as customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, increase selling opportunities and reduce operating costs.

All of these metrics are tightly correlated with first call resolution. The average contact center can save up to $276,000 in operating costs per year just by improving first contact resolution by 1%. That might seem a little outrageous, but that one percent improvement can represent 500,000 fewer incoming calls per year, depending on how many calls your contact center receives.

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14 Things a Leader Must Do

June 30, 2010 by Gail  
Filed under Best Practices

By Gina Abudi

Below are 14 things that some of the most effective leaders in organizations do today to help their organization be successful.  These are not focused on managing the company’s finances, preparing for Board meetings, or planning strategy; but rather, in addition to those certainly important items (along with many others), these 14 key items help leaders to get in touch with their employees as well as their clients to help the company succeed.

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Overcome Your Overwhelm – 5 Practical Tips For Productivity

June 24, 2010 by Gail  
Filed under Best Practices

Overcome Your Overwhelm – 5 Practical Tips For Productivity

Do you ever find yourself challenged by the day-day lists of life projects, tasks, priorities and to-do’s? To-Do’s, finances, getting things done and feeling overwhelmed have become a common theme to many of my client’s.

Overwhelm will leave you feeling drained and feeling like you’ll never catch up. My own feeling of overwhelm shows up as tension in my shoulders, like I’m carrying a heavy knapsack of boulders on my back. And when it gets really bad I find I’m barely breathing and feel a little frantic.

Now, as a normal, busy, responsible person, you may have to accept that overwhelm is just a part of hectic life, but I’m here to sing you a new tune and offer a few tips to get you out of the doldrums and back into a bit more calm. Read on if you’re in need of some new options to dealing with your overwhelm.

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A Detailed Outline to Understand Call Center Outsourcing

May 12, 2010 by Gail  
Filed under Best Practices, call center

Call Centers have proved their salt and worth in every sphere of business. Be it launching a product or after sales services, their services are impeccable and cost effective. In these competitive times and volatile economic scenario, business owners struggle to keep up with the pace of ever changing market trends and latest technologies. One of the two ways they can survive is either to spend hefty amounts to continuously upgrade themselves or to Outsource Call Center Services.

Partnering with the ‘right’ BPO helps you to

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Value of Assessment Tools in Call Center Operations

The quality and pace of Call Center Operations are dominated and threatened by two visible hindrances which are agent turnover and agent productivity. The reasons for such challenges in a call center are poor handling of the resources and lack of skills for specific job positions.

The realm of call center operation is a specialized management field with its own hypothesis assessments and terminology. A complete and well- bred understanding of these tools is necessary to satisfy customers and to accomplish organizational objectives.

Selection criterions and performance screening tools can be vital tools to reroute the performance map of a call center on the track of success. These tools directly correlate to productivity, performance and agent retention within the organization. These measure the performance on the basis of candidate data such as:

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