2011 Tip of the Week Archive

December 26 –   In some call centers, call volume can be very low on holidays. In addition to using holiday bids to staff on these days, here are several practices that act as a win-win for both the bottom line and the agents, and are great morale boosters. If you have more than one […]

December 19 –   It’s holiday time! In most call centers, that means you have lower call volume and need less staff. But how do you minimize your staffing without minimizing your service? There are a couple of ways to lower staffing without compromising your service. First, you can open up your Time Off availability […]

December 12 –   To reduce any attrition that could be related to scheduling, work in partnership with your HR Team and ensure lots of communication with your new hires right from the point of application for the position. We offer many types of schedules and have provided an Info Sheet for our recruiting team […]

December 5 –   Help them avoid service meltdowns. Just like you, nothing is worse for your boss than to get a “what happened” call from their boss. Your goal is to help anticipate all of the potential service issues before they happen and try and head them off. For example, if you see that […]

November 28 –   Most companies have an employee handbook. This includes most everything that HR would want to ensure an employee knew going into their new job. It also allows employees to know what to expect on all HR facing matters while providing management with a roadmap to processes. Have you ever been asked […]

November 21 –   Those of us in the workforce management field know that a good portion of our job is pure management in nature: managing the chaos inherent in large people-intensive operations, managing and monitoring performance to hit strict performance goals, and managing the expectations of the operations executives whose bonuses depend on us […]

November 14 –   In managing today’s contact center and distributing information to your agents, it is important to understand that different people gravitate to different mediums of communication. Some agents will read emails as soon as they hit their inbox, while others are more in tune with face to face communications. Intranet sites with […]

November 7 –   Many of the most important contact center decisions are made during budget season, such as: What are our service goals? How much training will we budget? Should we open or close centers? Which desktop technologies will we purchase? What reporting tools will we develop? How many agents will we hire? How […]

October 31 –   Predictable and reliable attendance is an essential function of a CSR’s job in a contact center.  Excessive absences and tardiness negatively impacts your business and places an additional burden on other team members.  It is critical that team members maintain a consistent level of reliable attendance and punctuality. We understand that […]

October 24 –   Seems like a pretty straight forward question, right?  It would be, if service were free.  But service is not free. At each service level goal, there is an implied cost.  And lowering cost is another of those goals.  So our two goals are: lower costs and provide service.  But those aren’t […]

October 17 –   Within the contact center industry we often talk of the Power of One — the impact that one agent can have on performance, quality, the rest of the contact center.  We know that one agent can be the difference between meeting metrics and not, but let’s take a look at the […]

October 10 –   Not all of our at home agents are equally tech savvy and even the ones who are sometimes have problems with their computer connections that they can’t fix themselves. In the last few years, our approach to tech support has evolved and expanded as the number of our at home agents […]