Press

SpiceCSM recently attended Gateways to Careers, hosted by Clarkson University. The event brings together local businesses, government and colleges for a career event to prepare local high school students for interviews. All together there was over 50 businesses and 1,100 students from 19 school districts in the area. The event is hosted every year towards the end of the school year to prepare high school seniors for real life interview scenarios. The sit down interviews including resume critiquing and feedback from local businesses on the students interview results. Also, some students can express interest in positions with local companies. The interview critique included professionalism, dress attire, resume design and functionality as well as overall performance. After the event was over they brought all of the businesses, government and local school superintendents together for lunch and a meeting to discuss the results and feedback for next year’s event.  We are looking forward to

The Problem: A rural telephone company, serving approximately 3,600 DSL subscribers, suffered from a high support volume and incident rate that ran well above what is typically seen for residential ISPs. The Telco did not realize this was occurring and, even if it did, wouldn’t have had the time or tools to identify the problem. The Solution: Luckily, the Telco chose SpiceCSM. As part of its regular oversight of client support activity, the Client reviewed their call volume, incident rates, first call resolution and customer satisfaction of all the ISPs that they support. They observed the high trends associated with this ISP’s subscriber base and notified their client immediately. Then, the client poured over report data, looking for clues as to what was driving the higher than expected rates. Because the Client’s agents are highly

There are many reasons that companies move or are thinking about moving to the cloud. I am going to describe the five main reasons that outweigh the rest. Is your organization thinking about making the switch? Have you already? Do any of these fit your current needs or future plans? 1.) Low Costs- Moving to the cloud is really simple when you look at the rate of return. There is usually a very low one time setup fee associated. Simply put, once you are up and running the recurring fees are very low compared to most premise based systems. You only need to educate people on the use. This requires lower IT needs and potentially teams of people to implement and keep these systems updated. Instead of pricy equipment and upgrades this is actually hosted and kept somewhere else. The cloud based providers remove this headache for you. 2.) Scalability- Are you

Offering your customers more is definitely a value add. Many outsourced call centers can actually offer more than just answering the phone and troubleshooting a customer’s issue. Why not give your clients a value-add by being a trusted consultative partner? How do you do this you ask? One way of being a valued partner is providing in depth analytics. By showing that your agents are actually gathering data while troubleshooting the issue you are adding value. By taking the extra step and providing them a portal to log in and review reports, listen to calls and look at cases it should be a no brainer. So why do so many call centers hide this data? Is it hiding or lacking the tools to share it with you? A resolution, setup issue typing for your clients by using an in house help desk application to track why people are contacting you, by

I just read an article in Customer Interaction Solutions, “Five Things Customer Service Operations Need to Improve” written by Erik Linask. He explains that there are five things that in 2012 contact centers need to be thinking about. There have been many changes in the CRM industry including social media and how companies need to be thinking about these five things. The number five thing that they need to improve on was “Escalation Coaching”. He explains that “agents simply need to understand when to escalate situations to the next level of support”. I agree that agents do not always know when to do this. That is why contact center should deploy programs that can clearly define the end of the process and allow the system to automate the next steps. This can be done via a warm transfer of the caller or simply sending the case to the