Carnival of Call Centres #2
Welcome to the Carnival of Call Centres where I round up some of the more interesting and appealing news stories from the world of Call Centres, Cloud Computing and Hosted Contact Centres, sometimes adding a little commentary but always grouping the stories together in easy to digest snippets of information, knowledge, insight and ideas.
Customer Excellence
I'm going to start this roundup on Customer Service. It seems no matter where we look there are stories of good customer service, and bad customer service. It's all relative, but some companies have a better reputation than others.
The obvious solution for under performing call centres would be to add some Zappos customer excellence to your team. Or check out some great advice on what it takes to succeed as a customer service representative. Great post here from Forrester about the misconception that good Customer Service can be bought by technology. It's about more than that, it's about ecosystems of people, tech and context.
Another good article along the same lines on why all of our staff need to know how their actions affect our overall customer experience. <-- Another article from the team at Forrester.
All of this talk about customer service brings me back to a nice set of 7 steps to Customer Service Improvement by the Performance in People team.
Social communication and the silver bullet
There's a lot of buzz about adding social media channels to many call centres, which no doubt will broaden communication channels, yet many are seeing this Social Media adoption as the Silver Bullet solution to their Customer Service problems.
Thankfully there are many who are taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture. Adding more "touch points" or channels to your Call Centre might not actually bring about improvement; this is especially true when the problem is not the channel but the mindset, methodology and culture. Brilliantly level headed article on the dangers of adding more channels to your call centre.
Gamification
Our very own Channel Director Charlie Cowan on buzzword or business strategy.
Chrome is growing
On a techie note, there are musings that Chrome is set to become more popular than Firefox. Especially interesting post for those of us operating in the cloud based arena providing a service for multiple browsers.
This may not affect many call centres, but those operating in certain markets and with a particular audience in mind should be aware that 60% of teenagers now own smartphones. Very interesting fact as businesses aim to offer interesting ways to engage with their audience on the most appropriate channel.
Easy
Nice article on why customers prefer Easy rather than Exceptional by Debra Ellis from Wilson and Ellis Consulting.
Outsource it
They're in Newcastle, but they should move to Mumbai - interesting comments by Goverment Ministers over job losses in the UK.
Regulation
Regulating the Cloud...by the FBI.
On the shop floor
Have Senior Management talked to their call centre staff....Good article with loads of wonderful links to great content.
60% of people knew that
Quality Monitoring metrics brought under the spotlight - Brilliant eBook that is guarded by a registration wall (with follow up emails) that's worth scaling. Are we measuring the wrong things in our call centres? Are the metrics telling us the true story?
Bigger. Better. Stronger.
Is a growing call centre really a sign of success?
Lightning Strikes
Our very own CTO Ashley Unitt on why the Cloud worked during lightning strikes.
Enjoy.
