Brendan Read : The Readerboard
Brendan Read
TMC
| Contact Center/CRM Views and Analysis

Call Center CRM

Thinking Twice About Loyalty Programs

December 14, 2009

Developing customer loyalty through card/membership programs is a good idea, in theory and for the meantime in practice. Yet is this a short-term gig, about as effective cash/gifts/other goodies-based performance incentives, with the same inherent flaw? If companies spent more time and resources on the latter--delivering rightpriced items and experiences--reinforced by quality customer care including easy-to-navigate web sites and IVR menus and well-trained and attentive contact center and in-person i.e. retail, ticket counter, checkin staff--at the right price than on gimmicks like the cards, cutting out the programs' expenses and profits to the middlepeople--they may amaze themselves in seeing how loyal customers can be.

Who Needs Telemarketers? Pay People To Tweet and Post Instead

November 23, 2009

Here's a budding new and potentially more profitable and much less costly option to those hated (and in turn heavily regulated) cold-call telemarketing callspaying people to pitch goodies from their social networks i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Want To Make Money? Shape Up Your Voice Self-Service

November 18, 2009

managers and execs, here's a winner of a tip to make money and not leave it on the table: clean up your automated voice a.k.a.

Make Customers Smile? Give Them Low Priced Half-Decent Products

November 13, 2009

A Nov.11 Los Angeles Times column by David Lazarus makes more kicks at the commonly stated (if not truly believed, and for good reason) assumption of organizations, their contact centers, and their suppliers that customers really give a rat's hindquarters about customer service especially in this tough economy.

Automation Dooming Indian Outsourced Contact Center Jobs?

November 9, 2009

Well thanks to technologies such as electronic order entry, improved IVR, speech recognition but more importantly web self-service and more recently outbound notifications there is a growing realization that automation could doom many jobs, such as in contact centers, even in India, long the land of low-cost offshore outsourcing.Does this mean that offshoring will end? Well...no. As India's companies and employees become more expert and proficient with technology, expect them to develop and refine automated solutions...at less cost than their North American counterparts.

Why Treat Contact Center (and Other Service) Employees Well In Tough Times

November 3, 2009

Ask anyone who works in the service sector: contact centers, hospitality, retail, and transportation especially, the one thing besides lousy supervisors and managers that drives them up the wall and that is wild scheduling--days, times, even locations worked changed on a moment's notice--resulting in fewer hours and less income. Having said that, and on the positive said there are a good many companies, including contact centers that do treat their people well. They get the message that in the service business your employees are your principal investment because it is they that interfaces with the end-customers i.e. the one who give you money. And, not surprisingly, these outfits have strong balance sheets, enabled by productivity-and-revenue enhancing loyalty.

Do We Need Contact Centers?

October 28, 2009

Are contact center agents, which are still known as 'operators' in the answering service world going the way of elevator operators? For every contact center opening and expansion heralded there have been the understandably less trumpeted closures and cutbacks thanks to automation.

Nortel's Poisoned Chalice?

September 16, 2009

Nortel has been the walking dead, its heroic and dedicated engineers like the still-vital organs struggling with weakening condition to produce and support IP-oriented quality products as they were drained with layoffs. Little wonder that in the contact center field at least, reported Interactive Intelligence's Joe Staples--whose firm has seen competitors like the 'old' Aspect, Davox, Rockwell et al disappear and many others fade into insignificance--Nortel's product line was aging with little new to get these buyers excited. Then again IP-from-the-ground-up companies like Aastra, Cisco, Fonality, Interactive Intelligence, and ShoreTel, to name but a few, didn't have the legacy TDM/PSTN baggage to lug with them. For these companies there is no need to 'migrate' customers to IP; they are already there.

Handling The Next Telemarketing Regulations

April 27, 2009

To ensure that the next set of regulations that will be coming down the pipeline from legislators are fair and effective the telemarketing industry needs to devise some solutions of their own, use their self-regulatory mechanisms to test them and build consensus and at the same time sit down with lawmakers to go over these issues. That the industry is already taking proactive steps to come up with answers that could offer them guidance acknowledges the pain the lawmakers are getting from their constituents, which gets them onside.

The Missed Lesson Of Outsourcing to India, and Ireland

April 23, 2009

One more company, this time Primus Telecommunications Canada is repatriating its customer care from an unnamed outsourcer in India back home. There is irony in this news. New Brunswick, and Ireland, helped begin the move to nearshore/offshore contact center operations from the U.S. and other countries like the U.K. by offering their communities as berths with plenty of willing, able, educated, and low-cost labor. Unfortunately, New Brunswick, and by extension much of Canada (and other countries) that sought out contact centers had missed the lesson of Ireland, and that is to aggressively capitalize on them as gateways to higher-value/higher-paid IT jobs, a lesson that India has learned well.
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