The most successful contact center teams continually review and reassess how they do things and the results they are achieving. What can be improved? What should be scrapped? What assumptions no longer make sense? What can be done differently? They would agree with the advice of management consultant Dr. Ichak Adizes, who reminds us, “You don’t know what you don’t …
Rewind the clock about ten years, and you’d find top level managers in many organizations, along with most industry pundits, predicting that front line managers (a.k.a. supervisors) would become less important in contact centers, and that their numbers would begin to dwindle. The usual rationale, couched in discussions of flattened hierarchies and team-oriented structures, was that because agents and teams …
“Is the Single Customer View a realistic ambition or just a pipe dream talked about at conferences?” That’s the question asked in the latest CCE Board of Experts “ask the experts” article by Hannah Brewer. It can be viewed here: http://www.callcentre.co.uk/data-and-the-single-customer-view/
Successful contact center leaders design an organizational structure that facilitates collaboration among and across job roles and business units. They tap into the principles of good organizational design and revisit their structure often. They continually work on identifying positions they need and defining the responsibilities that go along with each. They gauge whether agent-to-supervisor and supervisor-to- manager ratios are working …
Recently, I was reminded about a report that OneReach put together in October. They asked 63 customer service influencers to answer the question “What’s the best way to improve customer service?” The resulting report provides food for thought from multiple angles. It was a privilege to be asked to contribute to the report. You can download the full report here.
Here’s an idea: If you’re a consumer-facing service operation and want to stand out from the crowd, be there for your customers on weekends. That’s when many are checking accounts, kicking around options for the renovation, paying utility bills, and booking that trip to see Aunt Mae. I’ve had a number of clients see workloads increase on weekends in recent …
