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In older versions of workforce management (WFM), once the forecasts and schedules were set based on historical data and expectation, the opportunity for change was extremely limited and restricted to moving agents between queues and tasks manually: more of an art than a science. Today, many WFM solutions support rapid changes driven by actual interaction…

It might seem a reasonable assumption that customers who reach out to a call centre should be able to expect politeness and friendliness from the agent that they are put in contact with – and of course, it is.  Indeed, research indicates that this is an especially high priority among many young customers who do…

Contact centres are key to an organisation’s success, primarily due to being the primary customer touchpoint.  When customers contact organisations, it is important that the organisation understands what customers most want and value during the interaction.  What customers want A recent survey of 1,000 UK customers for the new Exceeding UK Customer Expectations report produced…

Every organisation will have received complaints from customers, and they’re of course seen as being problematic.  However, customer complaints are also invaluable to businesses given the scope they provide for organisations to pinpoint where they may presently be going wrong, and what they might need to do in order to prevent a current customer from…

Given that any commercial organisation’s fundamental purpose is to extract maximum profit for its shareholders, with this being generally achieved through a combination of driving up revenue and lowering costs, it is instructive to consider the role that customer experience has in the realisation of these objectives in the 2020s.  Factors like widespread Internet access…

A potentially powerful tool for contact centres looking to make informed changes to their services in order to enhance the customer experience, is sentiment analysis.  Sentiment analysis provides a means by which customer and agent emotions within interactions can be quantified. This can relate to interactions that take place on the phone or through alternative…

According to recently released contact centre research, agents working at such sites saw major increases in their salaries over the course of 2022.  In the case of new agents, the rise was reportedly 9.7%, although an even higher increase of 11.3% was reported for the salaries of experienced agents.  It is believed that such increases…

Most people who have ever reached out to a contact centre in the UK will be highly familiar with web chat as a customer service channel.  Web chat sessions – also sometimes referred to as ‘instant messaging’, or IM – offer a live or automated assistance option to those who may be browsing a given…

It is fascinating and instructive to look over the findings of recent research into the strategic priorities of contact centers in the United States.  When such contact centers were asked to assign an importance score to various drivers for strategic contact center change – with a zero score indicating a “very unimportant” factor, and 100…

Organisations around the UK – and across all vertical market sectors – have had to deal with escalating pressures from various sources in recent times, and the evidence points to the situation with call centres being little different.  In particular, the latest call centre data analysis points to a lethal combination of climbing salaries and…