contact centers tag
8 result(s) displayed for contact centers (1 - 8 of 8):
How To Win Contact Center Agent Loyalty
Contact centers are better than most service businesses when it comes to that. Retail is notoriously terrible when it comes to spur-of-the-moment shift and hours changing; employees are often sent home if sales are slack. On the other hand there is little freedom and freedom to move careerwise in contact centers and the work itself commands little respect. Therefore to retain quality people extra care must be given to permit them to have meaningful lives.
Automation Dooming Indian Outsourced Contact Center Jobs?
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
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.
'Cowardly Callers' in U.S., Canada?
came across this excellent, insightful study of what I term 'cowardly callers' conducted by solutions firm Corizon and YouGov of abusive U.K. callers--the press release says " Contact Centre Rage: Corizon Survey Finds Scots, Men and the under-30s to Be the Worst Offenders" and it got me to thinking: has there been /can there be a similar study in the U.S. and Canada?
Oh Canada: eBay Closes B.C. Contact Center
In what cynics say is another death knell for nearshore contact centers in Canada, and one more piece of evidence that beneath globalization is headquarters nationalism, online auction giant eBay is closing its Canadian contact center, which is located in Burnaby, British Columbia; Burnaby is part of the Metro Vancouver area.
Yet this move is one more illustration why traditional bricks-and-mortar centers are obsolete.
For the future of contact centers is not in bricks-and-mortar facilities but in agents' homes where more can be accomplished for less: today's business mantra. Home agent programs i.e. telework can achieve gains of $10,000 to $20,000 per agent/year.
That may be the way forward for eBay, and for other companies caught up in the financial squeeze of both the downturn and a strong Canadian dollar. When Convergys shuttered operations in Alberta, it hired a number of the laid off staff as home-based agents.
eBay should do likewise, which may enable keeping some if not all of its Canadian workers while maintaining its presence in Canada. It can get help from TransLink, Metro Vancouver's transit agency whose buses and nearby rapid transit line serve the eBay site can help. It offers an online telework kit.
A College Education for Contact Center Work???
A two-or four-year degree just to answer and make calls and handle chats and e-mails in a contact center? Is this overkill or what?
Then again, given too many reports about how poor the American--and to a lesser extent the Canadian--public education system is, such employers may sadly be onto something. There are two options for contact centers: making sure that they locate their sites where there are good high schools whose graduates are not all college-bound, and, more likely, tearing down the bricks-and-mortar and going home-based. The latter is far more doable and likely than the former.
Study after study continue to demonstrate that home agents are the ideal contact center workforce because they have higher skills, better work ethic (they tend to be ages 40+), are more productive, and are not career minded. Because they know a little bit of the world unlike the fresh-out-of-college 20-somethings they can easily answer sales objections and solve problems. And they don't need the constant supervision nor require workplace socialization. They know how to work and have their own lives outside of work.
Good News/Bad News from United (and other airlines)
There has been some good news on the beleaguered U.S. domestic contact center front, courtesy of United Airlines.
The good news is that the air carrier will be opening 165 seats at its Chicago and Honolulu facilities, reports the Associated Press and carried in BusinessWeek, to handle written (e-mailed/letter mailed) customer commendations and complaints (CC&C): work that had been managed offshore in India. The bad news, from this writer's perspective, is that United is ending handling voice CC&Cs. It would stop publishing its customer relations phone number, which will be turned off altogether at the end of April.
