August 19, 2008 | Author: Andy Green The Pop-Tart Factor It’s well known that Walmart keeps a massive amount of data on customer purchases. Walmart is also a leader in analyzing that data. Before Hurricane Ivan hit in 2004, intuition might have suggested that Walmart’s Florida stores should stock up on generators and bottled water. But the IT gurus crunched the numbers and discovered that…Pop-Tarts were most likely to sell out. Some of the same techniques used by Walmart have bottom-line benefits for customer-agent interactions. More >> Permalink | Comment Now >>
August 01, 2008 | Author: Andy Green Voice, Web, Mobile Entering data with most cell phone keypads is a quick path to finger cramping—iPhone and Blackberry users excluded. Speech recognition and search engine technology should therefore be the right ingredients for a potent application in the mobile world. One neat app I recently spotted sends a condensed Web page response to a voice query, eliminating long-winded IVR menus. It’s a glimpse into what’s ahead for contact center interactions. More >> Permalink | Comment Now >>
You know this because kids use it all the time to chat with their friends and you hear the techies at the office go on endlessly about it.
You also know it’s cool because your parents think it’s all really very nice but aren’t especially sure what they’d do with it. So it must be cool.
Unlike consumers, where being “cool” is often king, companies will only adopt new technology when it is able to demonstrate real tangible business value. So, for them, it has to be “useful” too.
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July 17, 2008 | Author: Andy Green Back to Cost Displacement Basics Easiest cost-saving measure to justify: replacing a manual process with a computerized system. Next easiest: upgrading software and hardware to increase scalability and performance. While it’s generally understood (with one notable objection!) that IT investments boost productivity, you won’t need complicated ROI models to justify remote agent software for your contact center.
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July 10, 2008 | Author: Andy Green Crowd vs. Agent One of the underpinnings of crowdsourcing – the reason why it has triggered a thundering herd of start-ups – is the power of the crowd to take on tasks not well suited for computerization. Another fascinating aspect of crowdsourcing is that it can also beat the computer on its home turf of number crunching and data analysis. More >> Permalink | Comments (2)
July 02, 2008 | Author: Gordon Loader The Power of Communications-Enabled Service Relaxing on vacation in Spain a few months ago, I was struck by the way exceptional customer service still has the power to "Wow!" the customer. Now, this wow factor wasn't anything to do with the service provided by the hotel staff, although this was faultless, it had to do with the activities of an organisation based thousands of miles away, in a different time zone, in a different land. More >> Permalink | Comments (1)
June 27, 2008 | Author: Vickie McGovern When the Economy Turns, Turn Up Customer Service Gasoline prices are at an all-time high. Food prices are also on the rise. In fact, we feel the impact of a stressed economy every day. For businesses, this means competing for consumers’ ever-shrinking wallets.
So what do you do? How do you keep consumers from passing on your business? Exceptional customer service is the answer. More >> Permalink | Comments (1)
June 26, 2008 | Author: Andy Green Customer Service Economics I took a peek at the US technology spending numbers for 1Q08. Not to worry, it’s ahead about 7% from last year at this time. Overall, analysts predict annual information communications technology spending will expand around 4% year-to-year, down from 2007. Not a great performance, but, as you may have heard, we are in a slowdown. More >> Permalink | Comment Now >>
June 25, 2008 | Author: Zack Taylor Back at Ya Andy Andy, as an avid reader of your blog, I was very interested in your post regarding the challenges of random call arrival and random resource arrival in contact center operations. These well-known issues have been the bane of contact center managers’ existence since the first ACD was installed in 1974. Add multi-channel multi-segments and multiple sites, and you have big issues on your hands. More >> Permalink | Comment Now >>
June 18, 2008 | Author: Andy Green Taming Contact Center Variability, Part 1 Most discussions on variability start from the unpleasant fact that we have to live with randomness. We want uniformity for business efficiency, but the world throws us variation.
In the contact center, variability comes into play at every step of the interaction—when customers call or make contact, what they ask for, and how effectively agents deliver services. While we can’t eliminate variation, there are ways to manage it.
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June 09, 2008 | Author: Andy Green FYI: iPhone 3G At today’s WWDC event, Apple made good on its promise. They’ve closed the deal on delivering a 3G version of iPhone with GPS. A more detailed live-post of the event can be found here. The takeaways: spiffy location-based services, continuing follow through on push-based, more enterprise apps, and a 3G chip that will support high-speed access just about anywhere in the world.
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June 03, 2008 | Author: Andy Green One more thing….location If the rumors hold true, then the new iPhone will be sprouting a GPS antenna. Location information is already available in a crude form on the iPhone, and many other cell phones have GPS chips.
But with all the excitement surrounding iPhone 2.0, there is renewed interest in location-based applications and services. There are obvious advantages to having precise geo-coordinates in emergency, medical, and public safety oriented contact centers. But there’s another application of location data that makes sense. More >> Permalink | Comments (3)
May 23, 2008 | Author: Andy Green VoIP Ascendance Remember VoIP? It’s the fundamental technology behind many of the interesting contact center applications we’ve been writing about. An analyst report confirms a trend we all knew was happening in theory - digital connections from VoIP service providers are rapidly replacing consumer phone lines. Since 2005, cable and Internet providers added almost 15 million new subscribers. What does this mean for contact centers?
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