Donna Fluss
The Formula for Success: Improved Quality = Lower Costs and Higher Revenue
On August 27th, the Associated Press put out a short story about Sprint cutting 800 customer service jobs. Contact center job reductions are not exciting news, but the justification for these specific cuts is noteworthy. Sprint is quoted as saying, "As customer satisfaction improves...
Regulatory Requirements Wakes Up the Outbound Market
The outbound market is doing better in 2013 than it has since the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) introduced the Do Not Call legislation in 2003. This IT sector continues to be under great pressure to meet ever-changing and increasingly demanding regulations issued...
Net Promoter Score “Itis”
Surveying has gotten out of hand. Anytime people fly, stay at a hotel, shop, bank, call customer service, use a website, visit a hospital, or even go out to eat, they are asked to complete a survey. Asking for feedback is great, but only...
Transforming Your Contact Center Into an Essential Corporate Contributor
It's no longer enough to deliver an outstanding customer experience, something too few organizations do anyway. Contact centers that want to be relevant in the era of social media need to transform from slow-moving, reactive organizations into real-time and even proactive departments that are...
Planning is the Best Way to Minimize Disaster Impacts
As hurricane Sandy bears down on the East Coast, it reminds me of the importance of disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) planning, something that too many contact centers neglect. Most enterprise leaders agree that disaster recovery and business continuity planning is critical,...
Mobility is Making Customer Service Smart
Some aspects of customer service are never going to change – anyone asking for assistance expects to be helped by someone who is knowledgeable, pleasant, presents the answer from the caller's perspective, and is professional. There are other characteristics that callers prefer in their...
Contact Center Shopping List for 2012
Despite economic challenges, work must go on for customer service departments and contact centers. These organizations need to plan investments to improve their performance in the upcoming year. There is no choice. Every year, contact center leaders are asked to "do more with less,"...
Using Social Media for Customer Service – Best Practices for Doing it Right
There are so many misconceptions in the market about using social media for customer service, many of which are due to the newness and immaturity of the solutions. We all have seen and read vendor claims that make their solutions sound too good to...
Is CRM Dead?
I'm not sure if I should admit this, but I was one of the early thought leaders in the area of customer relationship management (CRM). I was an analyst at Gartner back in 1997 when we wrote and introduced one of the foundational definitions...
The “New” Chief Customer Officer
"What is the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) in charge of?" If your CCO can answer this question, he/she may have a fighting chance of surviving and possibly succeeding in this position. If your CCO can't answer that question, I suggest that it's time to...
Great Service is Driven by Corporate Culture
I recently had the pleasure of spending a few days in the contact center of a direct retailer. DMG was hired to help the retailer select a new PBX and ACD. Much to the pleasant surprise of the IT, operations and contact center managers,...
The Rise of Proactive Customer Care
Proactive customer care (PCC) is an exciting concept that, when done properly, delivers benefits to both enterprises and their customers. Customers want to hear from preferred retailers, healthcare providers, airlines, delivery companies, etc., as long as they consider the communicated information beneficial. The challenge...
Contact Center Goals for 2011
2011 is shaping up to be a great year for service organizations. Enterprises and contact centers are aligned on the top goal for the year: improving customer service/the customer experience. This is a good starting point and shows a strong appreciation for how important...
Making Speech Analytics Findings Actionable
The speech analytics technology sector continues to grow rapidly. Despite the recession, the number of seats grew by 48% between 2008 and 2009, and the momentum in 2010 has been very strong. Many companies that started with small pilots in 2007 and 2008 have...
Voice of the Customer in a Multi-Channel World
During the last year, barriers have been falling between the contact center and other business units within the enterprise. Organizations are beginning to realize the importance of having executives and employees in different parts of the enterprise respond to what customers have to say...
Who Should Own the Contact Center: The Business or IT?
The question of contact center "ownership" comes up every couple of years, often when Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are given increased authority and greater responsibility within their companies. Here's the situation: CIOs, understandably, want to manage as much of the enterprise technology as they...
Recovering from Failed CRM Projects
Fair or not, Siebel is often considered the "poster child" for failed customer relationship management (CRM) system implementations. I've heard dozens of "war stories" about over-aggressive and excessively large CRM implementations that did not come close to realizing their promised benefits and wasted a...
Innovation, Analytics, SaaS and Pricing Enhance WFO Landscape, Giving End Users Better Options and...
2009 was a surprisingly good year for the WFO market. The quality management/liability recording (WFO) market continued to deliver compelling solutions and results, despite the tough economy. For the first time since the year 2000, the WFO market did not beat its prior year...
Voice Self-Service is Essential for Achieving Top 2010 Enterprise and Contact Center Goals
A Q3 2009 survey asked 107 enterprise, contact center and IT executives and decision-makers from around the globe to identify their top goals and priorities for 2010. Surprisingly voice self-service solutions (also known as interactive voice response systems or IVRs) are expected to play...
Thriving in 2010: Top 5 Priorities for Contact Center Managers
Congratulations. You've survived 2009, the most challenging year for business since the Great Depression. DMG expects 2010 to be a better year, and the economic indicators show that the recession has bottomed out, but we don't expect significant improvement for contact centers until Q4...