Workplace productivity is a significant concern in today’s competitive economy. To stay efficient and ensure profitability, companies need to do more with less—especially regarding time and money. One way to do this is by reducing the amount of time and money spent on training employees.

We built our platform to be put into the hands of a “Citizen Architect”, someone you probably already have in your organization. The persona of a Citizen Architect is going to be someone with an understanding of how processes work and the intricacies of the specific operating procedures. These resources do not need to be overly technical, however any grasp of HTML or Programming can certainly help relate some of the general concepts and best practices we recommend when using SpiceCSM. Many of our clients exclusively use non-technical resources to manage all their business process and content management while allowing technical resources to focus on the connections that push and pull data between those processes.

Typical decision trees like the ones you see in flow-charting applications are essentially step-by-step guides that walk a user through a process and provide them with the next best steps based on their selections. They sort complex processes into incremental steps so they are easier to follow, but that’s about the extent of the functionality for most decision tree implementations. There’s no intelligence or logic and the processes are contained in their own little boxes.

So you've decided to use cloud-based Help Desk / CRM software to provide your call center agents with a Guided Process Workflow with which to work from. The question written on the brick wall most people hit at this point is "Where do we go from here?" The answer to this question really depends on a number of characteristics about your organization, and how you will provide support to your customers. SpiceCSM is always a great place to start.

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.

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: