The Service Level Group write a blog entry that they called “Don’t Try To Over Optimize Your Call Center Staff“. It has some excellent points … the big one that they make is this:
“Lost in the cost-focused and efficiency-focused conversation are two critical elements for providing customer service in a call center: 1) the […]

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“I believe that an over reliance on metrics plague the call center industry at the expense of the customer experience.” (Metrics-Schmetrics « rich mclafferty’s customer experience weblog)
Rich has an interesting point. Although I only partially agree, the fact is that metrics alone is not the way to measure your call center. Measure your center […]

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If you run a customer service organization and you have heard “the system won’t let me” from your agents, think about whether you’ve given your agents enough empowerment and/or whether the systems are what are keeping you down.
Service Untitled » The system won’t let me. - customer service and customer service experience blog
The writer of […]

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Sparked by: The Contact Center Blog
Music on hold has always been a controversial topic — not in the sense of whether something should exist, but what should be said to your customers while they wait for your call center to pick up. 
The definitive NO is simple: Don’t just have dead air.  This is annoying even […]

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At first, I thought it was an April Fool’s joke, but after reading a bit more into it and seeing all the various press releases, this is either real or a very elaborate, time consuming and possibly costly joke — I’m inclined to say that it is real, so here goes nothing! I’ll retract if […]

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“Do your calibration sessions have you ducking for cover? Are you so afraid of what calibration might unearth that you’re afraid to even start calibrating your QA team?” That’s the pitch that Tom Vander Well has for his webinar on calibration.  They’re free and scheduled for April 17th, 2008 and April 22nd, 2008.
Here’s the specifics:
Avtex has […]

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Definition: 

ASA - Also called Average Seconds to Answer or Average Time to Answer (ATA). The average of the amount of time that has been taken to answer all calls in a given period (e.g. the last 15 minutes, today, this month). It is the total amount of time all calls waited to be answered divided […]

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I’m posting this one out of the standard “weekly” list because the Service Untitled blog wrote about it yesterday. I read it and was stunned.
First, what is a positive escalation? “Positive escalations are situations in which a customer asks to speak to a manger because of a particularly good experience.”
Great. We have a baseline now.  […]

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