July 15, 2014

Deployment of any new CSM, CRM, or other customer management or call center software can be a stressful experience for everyone involved. New software leads to challenges on every level of an organization - Support representatives or other employees on the "front lines" will have to adapt to new processes on the fly, with only the prior skills/knowledge they have and the training they were given to fall back on. Management and Supervisor groups will have a similar struggle when dealing with reporting of KPIs and other metrics, as well as the stress placed on the entire organization during the 'cutover' to a new system.

I like experiments...in fact I love them. That's kind of how I got involved with Fused Solutions and SpiceCSM. Having grown up in Northern NY and having attended Clarkson University, I wanted to help revitalize an economy that hadn't weathered the transition from agrarian and smoke stack to technology very well. Its a long story but suffice it to say the last several years have been an interesting and fulfilling ride. But that is for a different day back to the experiment of sorts.

Last week, four team members from SpiceCSM traveled to Las Vegas, Nevada to attend the much anticipated ICUC 2013 (inContact User Conference). As a silver sponsor, SpiceCSM was able to take full advantage of the event as an inContact partner. The Spice booth was back, seated next to new partner, ClearView, and our sales team sparked a lot of interest by providing live demonstrations. Between the hilarious and inspiring keynotes, informative sessions, and Arabian Nights Awards Dinner and after party, our team came back to Massachusetts with new ideas, tons of leads, and great stories to tell. This was only SpiceCSM’s second time attending the conference, but it will not be the last!

New hire call center training represents a significant investment for many contact centers with typical training times ranging from two to six weeks or even more. Fortunately, there are ways to train new hires faster and improve their on-the-job performance.

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.

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.