Okay, I’ll look to deliver the best of the two primary blog objectives with this post — to educate and to entertain!

Let’s start with the education. "Hold please" are a couple of annoying words for any caller to hear when calling into a contact center. The way most contact centers attack the "hold" problem is by trying to reduce call times, freeing up agents to handle more calls. IMO, this is a pretty archaic and narrow approach. Instead, use technology to minimize the amount of times your customers have to wait on hold. These technology best practices include:

Design [...]

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending our annual EMEA Partner Conference in Budapest Hungary.  Ironically, one of the topics I spoke about was business continuity and crisis management in the contact center including an example from my past life in the travel industry.  Now, like so many other travelers, I am anxiously monitoring the news for updates on when the airspace over Europe will fully reopen after the impact of “the volcano” in Iceland (it’s almost surreal to even type that by the way) in hopes that my trip home won’t be too painful.    

The [...]