Today’s best-in-class organizations know that delivering world-class customer service is no longer a value-add, but a must. After all, it’s impossible for a company to survive without its customers. Still, some believe that great service is just too costly, so they do the bare minimum. But, what these businesses fail to understand is that poor customer service actually costs more. How much more exactly? According to data aggregated from KISSmetrics, globally, the average value of a lost customer is $243. Is it even more costly for your organization?

I've recently purchased a new software application for my business. The tool has been helpful in making our team and myself more productive. There is of course a bit of a learning curve and a few areas where I've struggled to figure things out but not enough to contact the provider’s help desk or customer service line.

Many contact centers have a goal of completing a number of quality evaluations per agent per month. What is less often talked about is the timeliness of those evaluations and how long after a call agents typically receive feedback.   

Is your Quality Monitoring program the right fit for the Knowledge Workers in your contact center?  

With advances in technology, previously disparate teams of Knowledge Workers are now often working together as part of a contact center that was traditionally comprised of the Task Worker. 

Recently I ordered a product online. The experience was safe, easy, price competitive and the item was delivered right to my door step.  It occurred to me how many things had to go right to create this great customer experience.  Their website had to function well in various browsers. Their payment portal had to work properly. They needed to have my item in stock and be able to ship it by the promised date. Every step of the order and fulfillment process had to be perfect to produce a happy customer. Miss even one step and a customer would be disappointed.

No matter what type of contact center, we all have agents with different levels of tenure, skill and motivation that inevitably leads to a bell curve of agent performance and effectiveness. We all desire our agents move to the upper end of the curve where that magic combination of high productivity and quality exists.

Have you ever had a coach or manager offer such helpful, or not so helpful, advice? Did it make you want to jump right in to the conversation and ask for guidance or did you, as most of us do, get defensive and try to explain your actions?

When contact center agents are hired, they typically go through fairly comprehensive training before ever interacting with a live customer. Thinking on the fly, solving problems on the spot and dealing with customers of varying temperaments is not an easy task, so managers need to be sure customer service representatives are fully prepared before they send them into action.

If you’re looking to improve your contact center operations, hiring qualified agents and deploying a top-of-the-line customer relationship management solution are certainly steps in the right direction. These measures, however, are not the only pieces to the contact center puzzle. If you want to truly maximum your contact center’s value by transforming it from just a service hub to an ROI generator, you are going to have to go a bit further:

Create New Opportunities Using Big Data

Every interaction your employees have with customers generates information, and this information, taken as a whole, is commonly referred to as big data. If you don’t have the ability to collect and analyze information efficiently in your contact center right now, you are missing out on a whole sea of readily available business intelligence that you could be using to improve processes across your entire company.

For instance, with contact center software that can identify trending words and topics from all conversations and display them on a screen in real time, a manager would be able to recognize immediately when many consumers are calling to ask about a specific product. That information could be shared with the marketing department, which could create a special promotion—such as a “2 for 1”—giving customers an opportunity to save money on a purchase and helping your company boost sales. In the past, marketing would have had to track sales numbers for days or weeks to come up with a special offer; with real-time analytics, it can be accomplished almost immediately.