We have entered the age of Big Data where massive amounts of data are being collected and stored. With the ever increasing pace of technology the amount of data being collected will also expand exponentially. However, this data is often housed in multiple locations. How do you get it to all work together and better still how do you get to the data you really need in a quick and effective manner?

Writing repeated memos to customer service / contact center agents every time a business process changes can be stressful. Did they read the email in time? Did you state everything clearly so the process is followed correctly? Where did that one email go again? These are common problems when you can't change the process your contact center agents follow dynamically, in one spot, for every employee. Think of it this way: If your organization is going to experience a large amount of call volume for one particular reason or another, a way to efficiently distribute information about the incoming calls can be very useful to reduce call and queue times, increase first call resolution, and vastly improve customer satisfaction from not having your agents fumbling.

Every day, more human workers are displaced by robots, computers, and other cost or labor saving devices that make business process more efficient while also reducing opportunity for human error. Despite this automation, many companies end up investing more time and labor to fix an automated process than they may have spent by just continuing to employ our friends and neighbors. I would say that the most beneficial, efficient, and cost effective automated processes can be directly attributed to a mastery of the process at hand by the human workers that are being displaced.

SpiceCSM is proud to be a bronze level sponsor of the 2011 inContact User Conference. While we are attending this action packed event our CEO, Michael Ryan will be on the agenda to deliver a stunning presentation about “service level differentiation”. This will be done in coordination with two other speakers from other companies.

In a perfect world it makes complete and logical sense that a billing, provisioning, and scheduling system all work and communicate together as each one holds data (and/or triggers events) that is used by the other. Unfortunately, it is also vary common that these systems remain as individual silo's of information within the same organization, requiring multiple manual interactions to transfer information from one system to another. Through the use of SpiceCSM and it's Cross Application Integrations with each system, you can remove much of the manual activity and allow each external application to "communicate" with each other.

On the topic of outsourcing, ComputerWorld UK (March 2010) states: "Companies expressed frustration with the quality of work being provided, according to a survey, but most businesses still said they chose the cheapest outsourcing option instead of the best quality. Nearly all businesses - ninety-four percent - admitted that the focus on cost was increasing the likelihood of their projects failing." It is our belief that when companies search for an outsourced help desk, they are willing to sacrifice quality of support for low pricing, resulting in serious negative impact on customer satisfaction and retention. With that said, we are also firm believers in the power of an outsourced help desk solution. The key, as with many other functions of a fine-tuned organization, is to do your homework first. Here are three important topics (not directly related to cost) for you to think about when selecting an outsourced customer service or support help desk provider:

Welcome to the first installment of the SpiceCSM Blog, designed to deliver best practices, tips, tricks and industry news to all contact center and call center professionals.