By Sam O’Brien, Ring Central   Customers have always expected quick, competent customer service. It used to be enough to have call agents operating in business hours. Now, there’s an expectation for digital customer service, often across multiple platforms. Having an omnichannel strategy is the best way of handling this – and here are ten […]

Companies looking to approach the marketplace from a position of preparedness aim to align their offerings with consumers’ collective desires. Doing so requires that those in charge either consult a crystal ball or implement a precise customer analytics strategy. Customer analytics bridge the wide gap between a business’s assumptions and their target demographic’s actual preferences. […]

Employee departures can be tough to handle in the fast-paced environment of a call center. However, even in agent turnover, opportunities to improve your organization’s efficiency and profitability abound. Exit interviews allow lost talent to tell you what went wrong and what aspects of your call center’s operations could stand to be updated. Read on […]

The revolutionary potential for machine learning to shift growth strategies in the business world is tough to overstate. As new projects have gained notoriety through their use of this emerging technology, its many strengths and uses have become self-evident. For more information on the uses of AI in business development, download our white paper, How […]

Hidden in plain sight, valuable insights into consumer perspectives, product performance and other invaluable findings lie in wait for companies to discover. The catch – this information is largely unstructured, at least by business intelligence standards, making it difficult to organize and interpret. This is precisely where sophisticated text analytics solutions come into play. Text […]

Average handle time, or AHT, is an important call center metric. In the simplest terms, AHT is the average time it takes to handle a call or transaction from start to finish – from call initiation, to hold time, to talk time, and all the way through to any related tasks an agent must perform […]

Call centers are increasingly making use of innovative technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, speech analytics, and other data analytics tools to provide more comprehensive support, improve the customer experience, and boost agent productivity and efficiency. Predictive analytics is one such technology leveraged by a growing number of call centers to support data-driven decision-making on […]

According to new report from CFI Group, customer satisfaction levels have experienced a slight decline over the past year. Data compiled from consumers across various sectors reflects a customer satisfaction score of 68 (out of 100), a four-point decline from the previous year. This year’s reading is the lowest score since the report was first […]

Call centers and contact centers operate within the same general field of customer support and outreach. However, the two are not exactly the same. Call centers came first, focusing employees on handling large streams of customer calls at once. More modern contact centers effectively do the same while incorporating a few key differences to better […]

At the heart of every growing organization are its employees. The very people who keep businesses functioning and evolving are all too often overlooked to primarily focus on satisfying paying customers. However, it is of critical importance that every employee’s experience with your company be taken seriously. Maximizing the value your employees derive from their […]

Operating a growing call center operation involves logging and assessing myriad moving elements at once. It can be close to impossible to manage these critical success factors without help from specialized software. At the heart of most technological optimizations implemented within a successful call center are fine-tuned metrics. Keeping tabs on the right metrics can […]

Call centers around the world are faced with the ever-intensifying challenge of meeting consumers’ expectations. As calls flood the lines during peak periods, such centers need powerful tool sets to handle them all. Call center software offers a wide variety of optimizations for such organizations to choose from; however, paralysis by analysis can keep company […]

When employees exhibit disgruntled behavior, it’s concerning for managers. Not only are managers concerned for their employee’s well-being and happiness, but disgruntled employees can contribute to a stressful working environment for the whole team. Ultimately, disgruntled employees can even have a negative impact on the customer experience, as unhappy employees are less likely to go […]

Given the often-hectic nature of call-based customer support, it is not at all uncommon for conflicts to arise with confused or otherwise frustrated customers. Companies that have effective strategies for handling these situations and skilled customer service agents capable of diffusing tension-filled interactions can turn difficult customer interactions into opportunities to exceed expectations, influence the […]

Defining the body of experiences your customers have with your company can prove highly beneficial in facilitating the overall improvement of your market offerings. Customer journey mapping highlights the many points of contact a customer encounters with your business as they work their way towards a specific outcome or goal. In addition to specifying such […]

As recent research shows, the U.S. call center industry is alive and well.  According to the data, the industry saw a total of 32,000 new positions added in Q1 2019, with several major companies expanding their call center operations. What this means is there’s an imperative for call centers to drive operational performance excellence in order […]

As businesses race to define customer needs in ever greater detail while aligning their own market offerings to better cater to them, the importance of gathering intelligence from customers grows significantly. Voice of the Customer  or “VOC” is a technological approach to gaining insight into consumers’ collective interests. More specifically, through the use of Voice […]

The role of a call center manager is complex and challenging. Call center managers may be involved with hiring and training call center agents, monitoring call center metrics tied to agent performance, using speech analytics tools for ongoing quality monitoring, providing ongoing feedback and coaching, and more. Call center leadership has a significant impact on […]

The volume of data that companies deal with today is absolutely vast. In fact, 90% of all data has been created within the last two years. However, only about 0.5% of that data is ever analyzed. Big Data represents a major opportunity for companies to turn all this readily available data into business intelligence and […]

Business Process Outsourcing has come quite a long way in the last few years, allowing companies to achieve unheard of levels of sophistication in their market offerings without adding the strain of a vast assortment of new disciplines onto their internal teams. In this article, we discuss BPO as a flexible tool for businesses to […]