Altitude, Contact Center Software

What is the purpose of your call center - part 2

2005-12-02T09:58:00.000+01:00

Three questions remained open from the previous blog, namely "How do you manage your call center on a macro and micro level?", "How do you turn your agents into knowledge workers?" and "How to improve their performance and morale?" To recap, a summary of the previous blog. If your call center does not have a precise defined purpose, you will never be able to optimize it. You need a

What is the purpose of your call center

2005-10-05T15:56:00.000+02:00

A good question. Have you ever asked yourself this question? And did you came up with a satisfying answer? I mean, an answer, more specific than "helping our customers" or "selling products"? If you can't define the purpose of your call center how can you measure the performance of your call center? How can you improve? In other words - if you don't know where you are going how do you know

Why are some call centers a success and do others drag along?

2005-09-27T15:14:00.000+02:00

A good question, isn't it - why are some call centers a success and do others drag along? I have seen many a call center and it seems that some of them are a big hit - highly visible in the company, wildly successful, and loved by their customers, while others are terrible - bad stats, disgruntled agents and customers running away, screaming. Let us explore some of the challenges that

Have you ever thought about how the customer thought about you?

2005-09-23T16:06:00.000+02:00

What do your customers think of you(r call center)? You don't know? Well, why don't you ask them? What do you say, you don't want to spend resources on that? Silly you - you don't need to spend valuable people on that. Listen to me and learn a method on how to ask your customers about the quality (or the lack thereof) your call center and have them answer honestly. It is very important

Contact Center Service Level Agreement Violations

2005-05-18T14:44:00.000+02:00

I keep on wondering whether some contact centers actually measure their Service Level Agreement Violations. Or whether they actually have Service Level Agreements and with whom? Not with me I think. Take the following very real live example of the ING bank. For some reasons that will stay undisclosed here, I was not so happy with their service and

Microsoft is launching themselves into the Call Center arena

2005-05-06T10:54:00.000+02:00

Look here Microsoft is trying to conquer the Call Center arena. Will this work? I don't know. Let's have a look at their white paper. On screen, it looks good. Until you see the number of servers you need... This will not be for smaller size call centers, from what I read you need at least three or four servers to serve your call center. We will see what happens. My feelings are that

Hmm, eyecandy

2004-11-08T18:41:00.000+01:00

Some days ago I saw a web demo of a scripting language for call centers. Very impressive. Everything was configurable, every item had tons of properties, methods. It looked incredibly smooth. Perhaps even better than Visual Basic. But would I choose it for my scripting environment if I were a contact center? I don't think so. Why not? Allow me to explain. All these features take time.

Out of the box or not, that is the question

2004-11-06T17:04:00.000+01:00

Is it? Several contact center vendors provide an out of the box contact center solution. Are you ready to buy it? Well, I don't buy it. Since when does one size fits all? Are you betting your contact center (that is the basis of your valuable contacts with your clients) on an IKEA style application? Now, nothing wrong with IKEA furniture, but applications in this type of industry need

Santa Claus - or how do I drive my customers away

2004-11-03T22:23:00.000+01:00

Recently I received a promotional e-mail with a picture of Santa Claus in it. Or better, it was the Dutch variant - Sinterklaas, who will come on the 5th of December with all kinds of presents. I found the appearance of Santa Claus in e-mails rather early, so I decided to make a remark. I replied to the marketing e-mail, saying that this is way too early, and that I didn't appreciated it

A call center morphing its way into the 21st century

2004-10-29T21:51:00.000+02:00

A few days ago I spoke with a business consultant. He was doing consultancy for a well known company. A very well known company, I must say - nation wide, lots of visibility (in our little country). And he told me the story of restructuring their current call center into a full fledged contact center with knowledge base, workforce management, fax, e-mail handling, e-learning, business

Inbound Contact Centers - a cost or a profit?

2004-10-22T15:05:00.000+02:00

Frequently, inbound contact centers are viewed by your management as a cost center, not as a profit center. And thus an easy target for cost cutting. How is this possible? We partially have to blame ourselves. Most of the KPI's that we use to measure our contact center are only focussing on cost: Average Talk Time, Longest Call In Queue, Backlog, Abandonment Rate. All these numbers say

What are the advantages of SMS integrations in your contact center

2004-10-19T11:35:00.000+02:00

Do you use SMS? I mean personally? Probably you do. And your kids, they certainly will use it. SMS (Short Messaging Service) has exploded in the last couple of years. Guess how much SMS messages are send? Over 2 billion! And this is not per year. Not per month. Not per week. It is per day! Which is slightly less than 25,000 messages every second. Amazing, isn't it, for a service that

Outbound dialers - a bit more technical

2004-10-18T14:50:00.000+02:00

There is a lot of terminology regarding outbound dialers. Let's see if we can make it a bit more clear by explaining the different possibilities. In all cases the contacts are pushed to the agent, but the way the dial is done is different. Let's explore these different ways. Preview dialThe script starts at the agents' workstation, and he or she can assess the situation at ease.

Are you spamming?

2004-10-15T13:33:00.000+02:00

As a contact center you are probably doing outbound calling. Do you also do outbound e-mailing? Then be sure that you don't spam! Although e-mails are inexpensive to send, spam does have a bad name with customers, perhaps even worse than the cold-calling telemarketeers. Spam e-mails are perhaps less intrusive, but (because of the low cost) many of

Different types of outbound

2004-10-13T15:27:00.000+02:00

What types of outbound are you handling in your contact center. What do you mean you don't know that there were different types of outbound? Of course there are. And I'm not talking technically. I'm talking business-wise. You have debt collections telemarketing - cold calls telemarketing - warm calls customer care calls advisory calling inbound / outbound

Outbound in the contact center

2004-10-12T13:13:00.000+02:00

Many of the contact centers started out as a telemarketing-based outbound call-center. This is where the general public got the wrong idea from call centers. "You know, the guys that ennoy you in the middle of the night, asking whether you want something you absolutly don't need." But, face it - it is true. A lot of contact centers started like this - get a large database and start calling.

Some thoughts on e-mail in the contact center

2004-10-11T16:53:00.000+02:00

Do you have an e-mail account? What a stoopid question! Of course you do. Everyone and their dog has at least three to four e-mail accounts. Let's count. I have a gmail, yahoo, hotmail, ADSL-provider and work account. And I'm checking them regularly. They all serve a different purpose. So e-mail is very, very popular. Right? Well, yes, but not in the contact center. Yet. How come? Let

Self-service in the contact center

2004-10-10T13:03:00.000+02:00

Self service is the dream of every call center manager. It costs less and it is available 24 hours, 7 days a week. But does it work? First, let us define what self service is. Everyone is talking about self-service. But what is it? Self-service is when customers interact directly with systems of the company, without any interaction of its employees. Some examples: via telephone,

How to avoid IVR Hell

2004-10-10T12:53:00.000+02:00

Have you ever been in IVR hell? Ring-ring - Click! Welcome to our beautiful company. Press 1 for annoying elevator music, press 2 to talk to an agent that don't know anything and will transfer you to another agent where you can explain your problem again, press 3 to get into another menu with another 17 options, press 4 to participate in a customer service enquete, press 5

How do you measure the quality of your blended contact center?

2004-10-07T11:13:00.000+02:00

A little followup to the previous story "How do you blend telephone, e-mail, web and chat in your contact center?" The success of your inbound contact center has normally been measured by metrics based on call throughput such as average speed of answer call duration queue size abandoned calls Et cetera. You could easily get these key figures from the ACD of your

How do you blend telephone, e-mail, web and chat in your contact center?

2004-10-06T14:51:00.000+02:00

Historically, contact centers delt only with telephone, hence the name call center. Since a couple of years there is a trend to blend other channels into there. Because your customers communicate with you in different ways. They call you of course, but they also send you e-mails. They visit your web site. And they might visit you face to face. Faxes, SMS, MMS; more and

Text chat - what works, what doesn't?

2004-10-04T14:44:00.000+02:00

There is a discussion going on regarding text chat here

Altitude Software

2004-10-02T22:22:00.000+02:00

This is a blog about Altitude Software. And about me. I work there. And in this blog I will tell you what I do on a working day with our software. I will write about the difficulties and success stories encountered in setting up call centers and contact centers, things I can and can't do with our software. Let's start at the beginning then. Altitude Software is a Portugese company who writes