Overview

The biggest challenge to embracing Social Media in the contact center

Posted on 29 October 2010 by

Over this past year, I’ve presented to a variety of audiences in a variety of countries on how they can bring social media in the contact center. In each of those presentations, I’ve asked the question, "How many of you have a Facebook page or a Twitter handle?" Typically, the majority of the hands go up.

However, when I ask them, "How many of you with your hand raised are being blocked from those sites by your IT department at work?" Most all hands stay up. I found it fascinating that those same people who are currently using social [...]

Category: Contact Center, Industry Trends and news | One comment

Thinking of Social Media in the Contact Center in a New Way

Posted on 26 October 2010 by

When we say “Social Media in the Contact Center,” most think of customer care professionals plugging into to the electronic social world of their customers and other publically active fans and foes.   However, a recent remote agent study revealed there is another profound way social media is impacting the contact center – internal social networks are being deployed to improve agent and customer satisfaction.

One of the greatest challenges with the remote worker model is the feeling of isolation.  To address this, one IT executive we spoke with commissioned a developer to look at sites such as Facebook and [...]

Category: Best Practices, Contact Center, Industry Trends and news | Leave a comment

Communications as a Service: Who Owns the Responsibility?

Posted on 21 October 2010 by

I presented this week at Gartner’s Symposium/IT Expo (what an awesome event! 6500 attendees and nearly 2000 CIOs). I presented along with Erwin Thomas of Philips Healthcare on the subject of moving communications to the cloud. During my part of the presentation I covered some to the reasons that are compelling companies to switch from premised-based communication systems and move to communications as a service (CaaS) offerings. One of the reasons I gave was worded something like this:

"A migration to CaaS allows companies to push the IT responsibility to a third party and better focus on their core business." After [...]

Category: Best Practices, Contact Center, Enterprise IP Telephony, Industry Trends and news | 2 comments

Good Customer Service Can Erase A Bad Customer Experience

Posted on 21 October 2010 by

Recently my family took a short weekend road trip. There was an event in a nearby city that we wanted to get an early start on, so it made sense for us to drive there the night before and get a hotel room. We decided to use a prominent and aptly-named internet service to help us book said room, and found a reasonable rate within about 30 miles of our destination.

We hit the road late that night and arrived at the hotel just after midnight to find several other patrons standing in the lobby looking tired. It was [...]

Category: Customer Experience | Leave a comment

Agent Appreciation? Sorry… We’re All Out!

Posted on 8 October 2010 by

As we wrap-up Customer Service Week across the contact center industry, I thought it would be appropriate to blog about employee appreciation and engagement.  I have many friends and colleagues in the industry and thanks to facebook; I get up to the minute updates from all of them.  One friend who works in a contact center posted multiple status updates about the “lame attempts” his leadership team made for customer service appreciation week.  These included daily reports on how many slices of pizza and bags of chips he got instead of things that might actually make him feel appreciated.   As I read some [...]

Category: Best Practices, Contact Center | Leave a comment