Novacroft's Contact Center, Streamlining Customer Onboarding, OnHold Music, Are Offices Shrinking?

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Novacroft's Contact Center, Streamlining Customer Onboarding, OnHold Music, Are Offices Shrinking?

GMT Corporation officials report the company has been selected by Novacroft to optimize its 100-seat contact center in Northampton, England.

Novacroft, which designs, develops and manages end-to-end smart ticketing products for the concessionary bus and rail industries, has selected GMT Planet to “improve agent productivity and better manage agent labor costs.”

According to GMT Planet officials, within four months of implementation, “Novacroft improved agent usage by more than 25 percent, consistently achieved employee satisfaction levels of greater than 98 percent and increased revenues and conversion rates.”

In late 2009, Novacroft officials say, they knew that as its contact center grew, it was not running as efficiently as it could be. In particular, Novacroft “found it increasingly difficult to forecast customer demand and create meaningful schedules with its legacy spreadsheet-based system. This resulted in inflated and unnecessary staff costs and under-used agents.”

Read more here.

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On-boarding bottlenecks -- i.e. “failures” -- are often experienced in contact centers, point-of-sale locations such as retail banks, or back offices that process large volumes of customer information.

So say officials of OpenSpan, who in a recent study, “Streamlining Customer On-Boarding Processes with OpenSpan,” look at what they consider the OpenSpan platform alleviates this. It’s “not another additional application,” company officials say. “Instead, OpenSpan helps organizations improve the performance and productivity of customer-facing staff and other knowledge workers using the applications and systems already in place.”

Some ways company officials say it does this:

Fully automating back-office processes. Front office tasks, such as an agent or teller taking

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If you thought your office was getting smaller -- you were right. It is.

Space maximization is as important as ever, not only on the call center floor, but in the back offices as well.  According to a study reported on Gawker “offices have experienced a drastic reduction in per-worker size over the past few years. According to experts, we can blame this on two most blameworthy things: the recession, and the youngs.”

The recession we understand. According to an LA Times article, “the average office has gone from 500-700 square feet per employee in the 1970s to 200 square feet per employee today. This is quite a reduction, especially considering the average employee has probably increased in girth by about the same proportion over that time.”

Yes, companies are a bit poorer, but the article also points the finger at "collaboration" and "teamwork.”

As the LA Times says, “many companies are emphasizing teamwork, and younger employees accustomed to working anywhere but at a desk are turning up their noses at the hierarchical formality of traditional offices. In addition, familiar technologies such as laptop computers, cellphones and videoconferencing are finally beginning to affect the way offices are laid out.”

Read more here.

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Yes, it’s bad enough having to sit on hold when you call a company. It’s even worse when they play bad music. Don’t they know that you’re already listening to your own music?

A good end-of-year piece at OnHold, Inc. runs down some of the better observations from customers of this curious practice.

“Due to the popularity of our daily rant from customers who are complaining (when will these companies listen up and treat their callers right?) and tweeting about poor on hold music, we will soon launch the official youronholdmusicsucks.com site,” company officials say. If that means posting more of these wisecracks, well, let’s hope it’s soon. Here are some of my own personal on-hold experiences:

On hold with Bank of America: Music skipping.

On hold with AT&T: They just gave me a reminder not to text and drive. On a side note: Vodafone doesn’t have the best on hold music.

On hold with Citibank: Music from Sting playing – how appropriate!

On hold with Groupon: Dead silence.

Read more here.

 



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