Dealing with medical issues is generally unpleasant—inconvenient and anxiety-producing. Often these issues require repeated visits or phone calls to doctors’ offices and hospitals, which, in and of themselves, are time-consuming and nerve-wracking, nevermind the pain or discomfort the patient is feeling from his or her health concern.

Therefore, due to the “side effects” of their medical condition, patients may be more on edge than the average contact center customer when calling for assistance; after all, these are not your typical contact center inquiries about appliances or tech devices. The gravity of these issues makes customer satisfaction in healthcare a bigger challenge than in other, less personal, industries.

Chances are your sales department uses customer relationship management (CRM) software to manage critical customer data and to streamline business processes. Now think of what CRM can do for your contact center agents when integrated with your existing contact center software. The possibilities are endless.

Once upon a time, when a call center agent had resolved a customer’s issue, the caller was typically asked to answer a series of short questions about his or her experience on a 1 to5 ranking scale. Contact center managers could then manually compile those answers and try to evaluate agent performance and construct best practices using the responses as a road map. Still, without meaningful insight into what was behind those numerical rankings, improving customer satisfaction was a difficult chore.

Fortunately, contemporary contact centers have the opportunity to implement technology that facilitates more in-depth data collection and examination. Today’s best-in-class contact center software gathers information derived from phone, email, chat or any other channel available to the customer and helps break it into smaller chunks of actionable data. That information then becomes the foundation on which contact center managers build customer service best practices.

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.

Right now, business leaders everywhere are looking for ways to improve customer service without spending a lot of money or overhauling current infrastructure. Now, thanks to recent innovations in workforce optimization software, this is possible.

As an executive, nothing excites you more than signing up a new client. The satisfaction you get from knowing a customer is putting his or her trust in you is exhilarating, and the positive financial impact is always welcome.

Rapid growth is the ultimate dream for any small business manager, especially in today’s competitive marketplace, where 80 percent of entrepreneurs who start a new business fail within the first 18 months, according to research from Bloomberg.

Almost any blog you read on the topic of customer service will tell you the same thing: customer care (i.e. retention, loyalty, quality of service, diminished churn) must be a top priority for organizations. A sea of related statistics and market research corroborates this sentiment. For example, according to aggregated research from HR consulting firm Adecco, 15 percent of customers will abandon a company due to poor customer service; meanwhile, loyalty from one customer can be worth 10 times as much as one-time purchase.