Social Media has been adopted, by and large. Whether or not you’re an avid tweeter or adding to your Instagram story daily, it’s safe to say social media is here to stay. What does this mean for businesses? Well, most companies today have embraced social media platforms for marketing purposes, and that’s great! But, if your business fails to acknowledge social media as more than a promotional platform, you may really want to reconsider. 

At The Call Center School, we are seeing more of our clients turning to support their customers on social media platforms every day. And it’s no wonder why, with social media outlets just a click away, customers have more power and influence than ever before. With this power, many would prefer to add a quick post on your company’s Facebook page than wait on hold to talk to someone in your service center. What’s more, is the public nature of these social platforms and the impact one negative post can have on your company’s image.

Part 3: Intraday Management Skills

If you’ve been following along in this series you know the skills required to produce an accurate forecast and optimized schedules, but without effective intraday management your efforts towards these first two steps of the WFM process will be lost. Therefore, you must take the proper steps to ensure the plan is working. This is the art and science of intraday management.

• It’s tracking and analyzing all the individual components that drive service to determine what’s worrisome and what’s not.
• It’s communicating any relevant impact of service to the necessary stakeholders.
• It’s creating strategies for reacting where necessary and managing all the various sorts of activities that take agents off the phone throughout the day.

From elevated productivity to increased morale, better performance, and heightened engagement, the benefits of successful call center coaching are plentiful. And yet, coaching in contact centers is often times executed ineffectively or neglected.

In this article, we’ll outline 5 principle elements of coaching success to help make coaching in your contact center more effective. We’ll start with building trust and credibility and I’ll provide you with guidelines for when you should be training and alternatively, when you should be coaching. We’ll emphasize the positive impact of involving the agent in the coaching process and provide you with techniques in order to do so more constructively. We’ll remind you that coaching needs to be regularly prioritized in order to be most effective and that coaching to celebrate is just as important as coaching to correct.

Employee training, anyone who has had a job has gone through it and ask a handful of people about their experience with employee training and you’re likely to get a negative recollection of how boring it was. 

But it’s easier than you think to make courses more focused, engage learners, and positively influence behaviors. And employees who are engaged in their training will retain more information, are more likely to pay close attention to their work, ensure that all procedures and processes are being properly followed and that they are performing to the best of their abilities.

In this article we’ll provide you with a step by step guide to create high-quality, engaging training courses that employees can reminisce about fondly. We'll cover establishing your learning aims and objectives, designing your training session, and preparing the content. We'll define what learning aims and objectives are while differentiating the two. We'll go over method of delivery, how to put your objectives into logical order and structure your training session, how to choose your content, resources and activities.

Does your contact center do all of its training internally? Have you considered outsourcing some of it, but you're not sure if you should? Do your options seem overwhelming and you’re not sure where to start? Worried about cost?

There may seem to be many factors to consider when deciding to outsource your training, but generally they all boil down to cost, quality, and capacity.

Foundational QA techniques that stood the test of time

The contact center industry is constantly evolving by supporting new channels and implementing the newest contact center technology. Also in the world of quality assurance there are always new challenges that arise that need to be handled. Over the years, however, we have learned that regardless of trends or innovative developments, there will always be timeless best practices that can make any quality monitoring program a success.

In this blog post we'll share 6 foundational quality assurance best practices that are just as relevant today as they were a decade ago.

High agent turnover is a problem shared across the contact center space. On average, attrition rates in contact centers are between 30-50%. In extreme cases, centers experience more than 100% attrition. In comparison to all other industries, this is exceptionally high where the national average hovers around just 15%.

As you are probably aware, this is a very expensive problem. When considering recruiting, hiring, and training, research by the Everest Group indicates an estimated direct cost to contact centers between $3,100 and $5,100, to replace a single lost employee. What’s more, is that because of a temporary drop in productivity, companies miss out on revenue, which is estimated at an additional $2,000 - $3,000 per lost employee.

How one agent can make a substantial difference

Research has shown that the main reason customers choose not to return is not because of pricing or product issues. Most customers don't return due to poor service. Your frontline agents can make all the difference. They can give every single customer a reason to return.

Sound like a lot of power? Well, it is.

One of the most critical steps in making and receiving customer calls is deciding not just how many staff are required, but what type of staffing solution your business will utilize. Since about three-fourths of call center costs are related to labor costs, the decision is fundamental to the operation of your business.

No call center is perfect when it comes to forecasting and scheduling. Even with advanced technology, statistics, and Workforce Management software there are too many uncertainties that impact the call center on an interval level. The goal of any forecaster or planner is to strive to be as accurate as possible in their forecast of requirements and scheduling their associates. Carelessness in doing so can result in heavy costs for the company. Although it may seem obvious how understaffing can negatively affect the call center, there’s a high cost in overstaffing as well.