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Natural evolution is governed by survival of the fittest. Planned, effective and increasingly urgent structural change is required to ensure business success for the UK outsourcing industry through 2010 and beyond.
Yogen Patel, VP market and product strategy for Convergys Corporation discusses how the relationship between customers and companies has changed with the power shifted towards the consumer, and operators now needing to provide products and services that customers wanted.
Communications technology costs are a necessary, but represent a considerable financial drain. By unifying communications these costs can reduced
says Simon McCalla, director of information technology at Nominet.
Sandeep Aggarwal, executive vice president of Intelenet discusses the lessons learnt from the recent recession to ensure the business world does not end up in a similar state again.
All businesses need to make sure they have a robust business continuity plan in place to mitigate against the risk of operational downtime that could be caused not just by swine flu but also by a variety of scenarios such as power cuts or floods.
An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman all phone a contact centre... Marlon Bowser, CEO of HTK, discusses how treating every customer the same, opportunities and profit will be lost.
According to John Sylvester, executive director of P&MM Motivation, employee engagement is too broad and general.
In a recent UK survey it emerged that six out of ten people had switched companies because of a poor level of customer service. Radical call centre experts Stuart Corrigan and Ron Skea believe these grim statistics have actually been created by the very measures that call centres put in place to improve their performance.
Training, like dealing with a customer query, should not be static, formulaic or learnt by rote. It should be personable, adaptable and continuous, providing an agent with rolling feedback that develops raw skills in to valuable business tools.
Mark Smith of Convergys presents
a number of tips that businesses should consider when developing a training programme for contact centre agents.
With the prediction that the economy is seeing signs of recovery and the UK still facing turbulent times and the competition as companies bounce back will be fierce, Duncan Graham answers to important questions: What should marketers do to protect themselves? How can they maintain loyalty and ensure that customers don’t switch service providers?
Matthew Haines, European managing director of nGenera CIM, discusses the five essential components that make a successful online chat strategy.
Communicating is all about the message being received and understood not just about sending it. So with the explosion in digital media over recent years how can we be sure that our messages are getting through to everyone? John Sylvester, executive director at P&MM discusses.
Christian Rogan, business development director at Alcatel-Lucent discusses how many companies are not considering the risks and consequences associated with failing to protect sensitive information – from breaching government regulations and financial penalties to brand damage.
Contact centres have had an important role to play in the development of Scotland’s Central Belt and over the last decade the area has become home for a number of financial companies running large-scale telephony operations.
Andy Turner, practice head — workforce management, ProtoCall One, explores why adherence management should be a core metric for every contact centre.
Frank Sherlock, senior vice president, International, Convergys Corporation discusses how demographic changes and the proliferation of personal technology are bringing shifts in the way customers interact with brands, with young people in particular favouring channels such as the web and text messaging.
The term ‘sympathetic personalisation’ has been used to describe the technique by which call handlers can supposedly present customers with a more human and personal experience, through the use of a range of phrases and expressions, designed to soften the conversation and generate an empathetic relationship.
Have those companies who’ve let go of their staff been foolish? Before taking any drastic action, they should have asked for an external opinion of how they were performing, and where they can improve without shrinking staff numbers. How? By hiring some independent facilitators and coaches.
John Curtis, director of Milner Curtis Ltd, tells us how call centres and companies that don’t adapt to changing customer needs and prepare for the upturn now will face the wrath of their customers.
With a difficult trading environment putting pressure on businesses to reduce expenditure, customer contact outsourcing is proving to be an increasingly popular option. Steve Norman, business development director of Garlands Call Centres presents some of the reasons why.
The customer is always right is a mantra for more than a century of business practice. But has it gone to far? Perhaps it’s time for customers to hold up their end of the bargain, says Carl Adkins
Paul Blunden, ceo of customer experience consultancy Foviance, discusses the value of a new breed of virtual agents as customer-facing tools for the modern online business.
During tough times, we are all asked to take a close look at the bottom line. However, cost-cutting alone won’t by itself see an organisation survive the downturn in a healthy state.
Read how customer experience analytics helps businesses get a handle on customer behaviour, according to Myles Rose, vice president EMEA, ClickFox.
Improving operational efficiency and the customer experience in the contact centre is in many ways a question of data security, argues Jim Casey.
Exchanges between call centre and customer offer the chance of insight in to what is motivating the customer’s immediate request. Put simply, think about asking the customer ‘why?’, suggests Chris Hancock.
Dave Paulding, Regional Sales Manager for UK and Africa at Interactive Intelligence explains why security is such a pressing issue in the contact centre and how Unified Communications solutions can help to alleviate some of the concerns.
The face of customer service is changing. Customers are more demanding and businesses now have an added pressure to deliver fast, effective service. Gordon Loader, senior manager of EMEA Avaya, explains.
CRM is failing to deliver on its promises, argues Greg Anderson, global general manager of Goldmine.
Not necessarily, argues Sean Canning, UK Operations Director, Firstsource Solutions.
Today’s contact centres are developing into communication hubs operating across multiple channels, argues James Le Roth from Eclipse Marketing. So, where can outsourcing fit into these new strategies?
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