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!

On December 10, the NECCF (North East Contact Center Forum) held its annual Winter Forum and holiday reception at the Henderson House in Weston, MA. I was lucky to attend the sold-out conference and was able to network with professionals across the call center industry in a wide range of businesses from LEGO to Prudential. The morning presenters, Amanda Marschall from LEGO and Matthew Storm from NICE, focused on effective and unconventional agent training methods and ways to get closer to your customers through multiple channels and technologies. All-in-all it was very informative and kept the audience intrigued.

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.

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.

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.