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Staying Ahead of the Curve
The role of customer care in the contact center has never been more pivotal to a company’s success. As a result, contact center leaders continuously strive to develop innovative ways to improve service, increase productivity, and integrate the contact center with the rest of the organization.
At last week’s IQPC’s Call Center Week, 500 contact center professionals gathered to share ideas about what has brought them success in their centers. Here are some trends that I noticed:
• Managers want to use e-learning modules for training, but are torn about taking agents off the phones to train.
• There’s a need for bilingual capabilities, but confusion about how to implement them.
• Getting all departments in the enterprise, from R&D to marketing, to give all necessary information to the contact center for agent training purposes.
• Department heads and executives need to spend more time in the contact center listening and learning.
• Some contact centers are partnering agent training with recruiting.
• Daycare workers (college educated moms) and retirees are becoming the hot new workforce in contact centers.
• Agents are getting coached about how to hear and manage a lifecycle change on a customer call.
The customer experience has taken on new meaning relative to company differentiation—with commoditization occurring faster than ever before—so contact center leaders are charged with constantly keeping ahead of the curve.
How are you staying ahead of the curve? If you have advice or trends of your own, post your comments here.
I have noticed the same trends - thanks for posting those. I actually have a pit in my stomach lately about customer service -and how I hope companies step it up. I think that with our economy in the situation it is in now, people will continue to use companies they have had good experiences with - and drop all the others. I really hope that my company is ahead of the curve - I have all my employees take this online survey that is posted by the company called Mindshare. After the survey we discuss it - and every discussion great points are brought up. Sorry this post is so long - I just think you made some great points!!