Bill Price
Being “Fast + Simple” for Our Customers: Eliminate the “Dumb Things”
For years, companies have been creating more and more innovative products and services for a demanding customer base, but they've made it harder and harder to do business with those same customers. They've adopted an unfriendly demeanor, worried, perhaps, about Sarbanes-Oxley regulation for accounting...
Taking Customer Contact Offshore: Know What and When to Export
Today's contact center operators face a dizzying array of site location options, the most confusing (and challenging) being going offshore from their home country—away from known hiring and management practices, native language speakers, familiar systems vendors, practiced legal and tax approaches and comfortable surroundings....
Move Agents Into Their Homes for a Double-Win
A company I'll simply call "Star" found that its best customer service agents walked out the door in an 18- to 24-month period, and because they were the best agents, with the highest productivity, the company had to replace each of them with two...
Skip Ahead a Year To See How 2006 Turned Tumult Into Customer Satisfaction
It's 2007, and it's hard to believe all the changes in contact centers this past year. In 2005, the industry faced some heavy challenges, and it wasn't clear it could get out of the hole. But 2006 turned out to be a banner year...
For a Driving-Force Metric, Consider CPX
In the beginning, there were ... lots and lots of easy-to-obtain operational metrics such as "average speed of answer" (ASA) and "average handle time" (AHT), and some pundits crudely and erroneously associated them with strategic importance, even quality. Even though these are well-known contact...
Select Service Providers With Listening in Mind
Selecting a service provider should be more like a business merger or acquisition or even someone seeking a lifelong soul mate, instead of the arms-length, hard-nosed, knock-down drag-out situations we too often see (or are called in to change). I once addressed a group of...
Improving the Supply Chain: Focus on the Best Agents
Here are two typical conversations I've had when consulting with contact centers. Exchange No. 1 Consultant: Hi, we'd like to spend the next half day sitting next to your best customer service agent, double-jacking into their calls with your customers or observing how they do…