A new year always brings with it an opportunity to reset, reevaluate, reassess, or any other “re” word that might fit here. For contact centers this reexamination (I knew I could come up with another one) is no different. At the beginning of each of the last three years, I’ve teamed up with Art Schoeller from Forrester Research (BTW, Art is a really smart guy) to look at the hot trends in the contact center space and what those trends might mean for businesses who have deployed contact centers as a way to interact with their customers. The on-demand version [...]
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How important is mobility to your utility customers? Today, customers expect convenience, customization and self-service – wherever and whenever! Expectations have been set by other industries that this ease of access translates to mobile access. This will continue to be a market force in the utility industry that will challenge those without apps to deploy them – and those with apps to keep improving them. As an IT Manager at a utility, your objectives are many. In addition to improving the customer experience, you are also being tasked with building and maintaining theses mobile apps in a way that allows [...] Each morning, I visit a few of my favorite business sites online to see what’s taking shape in the world. While going through my rounds the other day, I came across an article about the impact of bad customer service and how it can end up costing you in the long-run. Novel concept I know! The article focused on a large media company and how years of bad service has cost the company many of its subscribers. Today, the company is undergoing a $50 million ad campaign in an attempt win back old customers and gain new ones, while trying to [...] If you were to ask your contact center this question, “Who’s got it better than us?!,” how would they respond? How about your customers? Would they enthusiastically shout, “Noooo-body!” like the San Francisco 49ers (American) football team that just played in the Super Bowl? I know, they got beat and you’re probably thinking, “The Baltimore Ravens have it better than the 49ers…” but did we really have to go there? Ha! While it’s a bit of a reach to think your contact center agents and customers will jump out of their seats and excitedly chant, “Noooo-body!,” perhaps it’s a worthwhile [...] Hi Folks! Before we get going on this — my first post here, by the way — I wanted to introduce myself. I am the founder of Bay Bridge Decision Technologies, recently acquired by Interactive Intelligence. My specialty is helping contact centers most effectively use forecasting, capacity planning, staff planning, and budgeting technology to reduce costs, increase operational efficiency, and ensure consistent customer service. This technology, which falls generally under the category of “capacity planning and analysis solutions,” helps contact centers more accurately project required staff and resources – anywhere from one week out, to eighteen months out. This is [...] For those of you responsible for utility outage communications, I ask you this: how confident are you in your ability to communicate with customers should such a crisis occur? With a growing body of evidence suggesting that storms will worsen – and in light of the recent devastation caused by hurricane Sandy – the time is ripe to re-evaluate your outage communications plan. And if you’re still in doubt, one only needs to point to the fall-out from Sandy when utility companies such as Long Island Power Authority were not prepared. So don’t be left in the dark or worse [...] The latest buzz regarding customer contact channels is mobile applications. How do you ensure success within this channel? I recently attended a webinar by Information Week Financial Services called Getting Answers from Mobile Initiatives where they discussed different applications for the insurance industry, metrics that indicate mobile success, and where companies are focusing their money for mobile applications. According to Forrester Research, the top 3 priorities/objectives for mobile applications are: Increasing customer engagement Improving customer satisfaction Appear as innovative I would like to examine the first two objectives, customer engagement and satisfaction. As a consultant, I have received the consistent [...] Last week I spent some time at an event on ‘big data’ in the insurance industry. The one-day seminar featured speakers from Gartner, IBM, and panelists from insurance technology providers and carriers. Throughout the sessions, interesting and innovative ideas were presented around the concept of making the most of the data and the business intelligence we have. With that said, I saw three main themes: How to use this data for predictive insight How to assess risk and fraudulent activity How to remain competitive and profitable What I found interesting was that of all these concepts, very few presenters spoke [...] 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 [...] The purpose of this checklist is to help you determine whether you should or should not make social media the next big channel of support in your customer service strategy. Is your business a BtoB or BtoC? If you are a business to consumer company, then the odds are much higher that you will need to support social media. Statistics show that consumers are the dominant user of social media over employees in a business. And the top two reasons are very straightforward – productivity and security. IT departments have been instructed to lock employees out of social networking [...] |
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