Benefits and Advantages of Recording and Archiving Calls Record keeping has become an indispensable part of our culture. As the number of daily transactions and interactions a business performs has gone up, so too has the burden of proof on all parties involved.
Consolidation 2.0: Consolidation Trends in Contact Center Technologies and Operations Consolidation 2.0 is the latest and most effective call center consolidation strategy. Its core concept is simple: to consolidate the many, diverse activities of the enterprise contact center on a single virtual platform that supports the global distribution of contact center agents.
How Empowering Customer-facing Employees Leads to Extraordinary Results: Empowerment as a Growth Strategy CRM must empower users to work above and beyond the traditional application boundaries and do the right thing for customers. Implementing a strict set of policies and procedures across all customer-facing functions often stifles the one element that enables companies to break away from the pack and grow profitably and consistently - employee-driven innovation.
Retail 101: Juggling POS with Mobility, Call Centers, BI and Security The retail industry is a fast-paced environment that relies on integration and accuracy above all else to maximize ability and profitability. Point of Sale (POS) is a key integration tool that influences customer satisfaction and assists in the management of business intelligence of sales cycles. This conglomerate is even more complicated when you add in mobile capabilities, security concerns and call center implementation.
Contact Center Intelligence Leveraging Performance Optimization to Help Achieve Corporate Objectives When contact centers align strategic business objectives with the goals of front-line employees, it is much more likely to achieve success. But the right tools won't make a difference in a contact center that isn't analyzing and evaluating the right metrics, or has not properly trained its agents. The real mark of a successful contact center is what happens after the agent is connected to the customer.
Delivering and Measuring Customer Service While industries vary greatly, the general methods used to evaluate employees are easily grouped into a few buckets including internal auditing, external shopping or the actual customer experience. Despite the evaluation method, it is critical to know how the customer perceived the service experience.
Echopass EchoSystem Simply put, the Echopass EchoSystem is the ultimate evolution of the call center. A totally customized service integration platform that can flexibly adapt, extend and scale to meet your changing call or contact center needs on demand, as you need it, today and into tomorrow.
Implementing a Hosted On-Demand Call Center When Outrigger Resorts and Hotels needed to upgrade its existing premise ACD, they chose instead to implement a hosted on-demand call center and add new types customer touch points and more agent flexibility. All critical metrics immediately improved, and Outrigger saved $100,000 in the first year. Outrigger is now able to incorporate work-at-home agents into their solution. Watch this 4 minute video to see their story, and feel free to forward to interested peers and colleagues.
Key Factors Driving Accelerated Growth of On Demand Contact Centers Over the past five years, IP hosted contact center applications with more robust feature sets and other inherent advantages including simple and rapid start-up cycles, and remote management and agent capabilities, have effectively leveled the playing field in the contact center marketplace.
Proactive Contact Center Management: A New Paradigm for Driving Continuous Improvement? Proactive Contact Center Management is a term we're just beginning to see in the market. Coined by some new players in the contact center management space, it's intended to differentiate management based on historical facts from management of the here-and-now. For companies that have made customer service their mantra, evolving the mission of their contact center from cheap to customer-pleasing, proactive management will become a must, and the new tools available to make this transformation a reality will need to be carefully considered.
Provident Bank Cuts Inbound Call Duration Times 40% Using Echopass Advanced Call Center Service Once The Provident Bank made the decision to work with Echopass, the two companies carefully reviewed the bank's call center data to assess call volumes and service requests. Based on the findings, Echopass customized the home screen for The Provident Bank agents to instantly provide them with the customer data and account information needed to answer the most frequently asked questions.
Top 4 Reasons to Implement Speech Self-service: A Call Center Imperative Despite the increase in Web interactions, Forrester states that the telephone continues to be the customer service channel of choice. However, opposing factors such as the size of the contact center and budget constraints make the hiring and supporting surplus staff impractical. Learn how to avoid the escalating costs of call centers while still providing customers with the fast service they expect.
Using Real-Time Information to Improve Contact Center Performance With every call center interaction, customers provide valuable insight that can be used to improve the customer experience and make the call center more profitable. The challenge is sifting through this information and analyzing it to make better decisions. There are tremendous benefits to capturing customer information in real-time or close to real-time, but many call centers fail to do so.
10 Outsourcing Predictions for 2008 (and One to Grow On) It's been a dynamic year in the information technology outsourcing industry. The Indian rupee rose to record levels while the U.S. dollar declined against most major currencies, impacting global IT service providers and customers alike. Merger and acquisition activity went into high gear (with the exception of poor Affiliated Computer Services, which tried—and failed— for the second time to go private). The consolidation activity was most notable for the inroads Indian providers made into the U.S. market by buying local providers. And Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services announced a $1.2 billion IT service deal with The Nielsen Company, technically the biggest offshore contract to date, hinting at the increasing maturation of the outsourcing market. Buyers of IT services also began to look beyond India to balance their offshore outsourcing portfolio, from Shanghai to São Paulo and more than a few spots in between.
India's Greenest Outsourcer? Indian IT services provider ITC Infotech is touting its carbon-neutral status as a selling point. And that corporate focus on sustainability has the potential to woo new IT outsourcing customers away from less green competitors.
Outsourcing Vendor Genpact Makes Mexico a Passage to India India-based outsourcer Genpact has greatly expanded its Mexican operations in the last year, focusing on lower-end business process outsourcing instead of IT services work. The former GE unit calls Mexico a gateway to India offshoring and a "nearshore" alternative for BPO and call center work.
Five Steps to Take If Your Outsourcing Service Provider Is Sold Merger activity is on the uptick among IT service providers and experts say the industry is ripe for more consolidation. Here's how to protect your company if your outsourcing provider is sold.
How to Make Offshore Outsourcing Deals Withstand Crisis Situations Globalization is suffering from economic, financial and political challenges. IT organizations can improve results and mitigate risks by revamping offshore strategies. Implementing globalization no longer creates automatic competitive cost advantage. While nearly all companies have globalization programs, most were created randomly and reactively without strategic consideration. To gain competitive advantage, companies must strategically engineer the integration and synergy from service providers.
The Next Wave of Globalization: Offshoring R&D to India and China The globalization of research and development is already under way. Two Harvard researchers explain what's going on, and why the research and development done in China and India is not all bad news for U.S.-based companies.
Offshore Outsourcing: Can This Captive Center Be Saved? Executives with captive centers in India are starting to wonder whether it's time to offload their offshore assets as GE did and Citigroup is reportedly doing. But Cliff Justice, an expert at EquaTerra, says that most captive data centers can be fixed.
Outsourcing Vendor Genpact Makes Mexico a Passage to India India-based outsourcer Genpact has greatly expanded its Mexican operations in the last year, focusing on lower-end business process outsourcing instead of IT services work. The former GE unit calls Mexico a gateway to India offshoring and a "nearshore" alternative for BPO and call center work.
Communication: The Holy Grail of Outsourcing It is striking how most everyone will insist that communication is a key activity to successful outsourcing. So why the heck can it be so darn hard to make people within an organization understand what is going on? And why is it so hard to have clear-cut communication between the outsourcer and the outsourced?
Security Secrets of Outsourcing Today, mitigating outsourcing security risks is more important than ever. Burton Group Analyst Diana Kelley offers tips on determining risk levels, monitoring your vendor and negotiating service level agreements.
What The World Is Flat Means to IT Outsourcing Nandan Nilekani, CEO of the outsourcing firm Infosys and the man who inspired the phrase “the world is flat,” is pushing a new mantra that could become just as universal. Relaxing on the couch in his Bangalore office, Nilekani points out that his own company has offices in 39 countries around the world. And it’s not alone. Wipro, another large India-based IT services company, has eight offices in Europe alone, and TCS, the IT services arm of the Indian conglomerate Tata, has 10 development centers and 10,000 consultants in the United States and Canada.
How to Create a Good Relationship with Your Indian Vendor Despite the threat of commercial ascendancy from China, Russia and others, India still leads the pack as an offshore outsourcing destination, and its global presence is only growing. You need your Indian vendors’ expertise, you entrust them with many of your company’s secrets, and you depend on them for profitability. A good relationship benefits you both. But relationships are tough to build in the best of circumstances, and when you bring cultural differences and distance into the mix, misunderstanding and frustration can arise on both sides. Here’s how to bridge the U.S.-India cultural divide.
How Many U.S. Jobs Are 'Offshorable'? Tomorrow's business leaders see tremendous potential in sending more U.S. jobs offshore -- and in keeping economic tasks on the march around the globe as national conditions change, according to research on the Harvard MBA class of 2009. "Increasingly, jobs are being viewed as groups of tasks that can be bundled, unbundled, and sent to different places," says Harvard professor Jan Rivkin, one of the faculty members directing the exercise.
'Boats in a Rising River': The Challenges of a Hypergrowth Economy That makes the task of companies in emerging economies easier in some ways, according to Levinthal. Since businesses are already well defined -- whether the business is a call center or steel plant in India or an automobile or footwear facility in China -- firms have the advantage of not having to start completely from scratch.
What's Next for India: Beyond the Back Office In December 2006, Mumbai-based Tech Mahindra won India's biggest outsourcing deal to date -- a five-year, $1 billion contract from British Telecom to provide technical support. Tech Mahindra, in which BT has a 35% stake, bettered a September 2005 deal in which three Indian IT services firms were among five international providers picked by Amsterdam-based financial services company ABN Amro for one of the biggest outsourcing contracts ever handed out. Infosys Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services and Patni Computer Systems share that $2.2 billion, five-year contract with IBM and Accenture. In another corner of India's outsourcing industry, a much smaller firm created a niche "spot market" for knowledge services. Yet another Indian outsourcing service provider built a platform of expertise to provide patent-related legal resolution support services -- several notches above the patent writing functions that were considered high-end assignments until recently.
Indian BPO Firms Step Out of the Back Office, toward Knowledge Process Outsourcing and Beyond At every juncture in the Indian outsourcing industry's growth curve, its players seem to be discovering a changing array of new frontiers, beyond merely scaling up in their familiar territories. Interviews with experts from Wharton, Boston Consulting Group and outsourcing companies reveal that the industry is moving well beyond transaction-intensive services like call-center support or check processing, and now seems to have achieved critical mass in its quest to provide knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) services -- where skills, judgment and discretion are the tools.
China or India: Which Is the Better Long-term Investment for Private Equity Firms? India and China are both vast countries just opening to development, filled with opportunity and risk for private equity investors. Inevitably, the two countries' rising economic fortunes invite debate over which offers the better climate for investment.
Getting Started with VoIP: A Practical Guide for Midsize Business IP communications is the key. It can help you lower costs by moving all your communications-voice and data-to a single manageable network supporting your existing systems and software. Begin by taking a good look at what your communications technology does for your business today and then see how much more you can do with VoIP.