In a 2010 survey by DMG noted on the Monet Software blog, call center managers rated what they thought to be the four tasks they consider their top call center workforce management challenges:
The need to schedule phone and non-phone activity.
The need to optimize the mix of full-time/part-time/flex workers.
Poor agent adherence.
The need to schedule multiple channels -- such as phone, email, chat.
Earlier this month TMC’s Susan J. Campbell wrote that the good news is that call center management throughout the industry have already discovered best practices to ease the process:
“While a schedule driven only by forecast and basic agent requirements as determined by call center management may work, it won’t help to boost performance or productivity. The development of the forecast and schedule needs to include agent needs, as well as breaks, multiple skill sets, training, time-off and a realistic buffer for shrinkage. Consider categorizing all activities according to your unique environment.”
Read more here.
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Monet Software runs one of the better industry blogs for call centers out there, and now they have a post up about employee motivation.
Spending years in CRM teaches one a few things, and probably the clearest correlation you can find when it comes to satisfied customers is motivated, satisfied employees. Get a list of the ten companies with the highest employee satisfaction rates and guaranteed most of them will be on the list of the ten companies with the most satisfied customers. Guaranteed.
And as the Monet blog says, especially when it comes to call centers, employee motivation is “probably most challenging management task -- and it has the biggest impact on the overall call center performance and success.”
Sorry, but there isn’t any silver bullet here, you’re pretty much responsible for finding what works for you -- tricks your fellow call center managers use to get dazzling results might fall flat for your call center. Things like the size of your center, the culture of your company and the people in your company do matter. Employee satisfaction isn’t a one-size-fits-all checklist.
That said, however, Monet does a good job setting out a few ideas for how you should be approaching things:
Read more here.
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Officials of information management company Ixxus announced the launch of its Social Content Platform for users of open source ECM provider Alfresco Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system.
The Ixxus Social Content Platform, according to company officials, integrates with existing social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. This lets users create a central repository based on Alfresco.
“Previously organizations may have had control over the content they published, but today’s social media channels are making this a much more difficult task,” said Paul Samuel, director at Ixxus, adding that companies are sometimes reduced to managing it in a siloed fashion with different tools and “little integration with their existing content management systems.”
Not the best way to ensure customer satisfaction, of course. Making it difficult to track social media interactions with customers is pretty much a recipe for missed contacts and disgruntled customers.
Read more here.
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Standard & Poor’s data center is greening and it’s largely due to the fact that the company – in an effort to reduce data center power consumption – will be using power generated by a “massive solar array being built at the New Jersey site owned by S&P’s parent company McGraw-Hill,” according to Data Center Dynamics piece.
NJR Clean Energy Ventures has agreed to invest $60 million to build a 14.4MW solar array on a 50-acre plot of McGraw-Hill’s property in East Windsor, which houses a 180,000 square foot data center. Data Center Dynamics reported that the system will be installed in two phases by Advanced Solar Products, a New Jersey firm: “The first phase will bring half of the total capacity online in December, and the remaining capacity is expected to be up and running in March 2012.”
Environmental Leader reported that the McGraw-Hill Companies and NJR Clean Energy Ventures project, if built according to plan, will be the nation’s largest privately-owned, net-metered solar project.
Data Center Dynamics mentioned a couple other high-profile examples of greening corporate headquarters. Network vendor Brocade has a 550kW solar system, data center infrastructure vendor Emerson launched a new corporate data center in St. Louis, with a 100kW solar array on its roof, and European colocation company Interxion announced that its data center in Belgium uses a combination of solar, wind and hydroelectric generation capacity for 100 percent of its energy needs.
Read more here.
