Feature Articles

News surrounding the call center industry tends to focus on the latest technology, key performance metrics, moving operations to the cloud and the benefits associated with the virtual workforce. At the top of the list of important topics, however, is the customer experience. To maintain a competitive advantage, the company operating the call center must ensure optimal service delivered on each interaction to produce the greatest possible percentage of satisfied customers.

While we often take it for granted that a properly functioning contact center has integrated all its customer contact channels – telephone, Web, e-mail, brick-and-mortar store and others such as social media – this isn't necessarily the case. As anyone who has ever had a teeth-grinding exchange with a company who doesn't seem to know you (in any channel!) can attest, many companies still lack this critical integration of channel.

An online Forex and CFD broker, Forex-Metal has expanded its customer support team with the addition of Japanese-speaking customer support representatives. This new customer support team will offer its services to the Japanese-speaking people via traditional media, including telephone and e-mails, new online tools like Skype, and via social media channels like Facebook.

Fonolo is a cloud-based call-back service that lets companies deliver a better call center experience. Its goal is to solve the top three complaints people have about the call center: waiting on hold, navigating phone menus, and repeating information to agents.

The broadening use of social media is challenging many companies. These are organizations that struggled with providing excellent multichannel customer support even before the advent and widespread use of social media. Now, many of these companies are simply over their heads.

The work-from-home model provides a number of business benefits including improved agility, better access to superior talent, decreased capital expenditures, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). In fact, experts at ITAC have calculated as much as a $25,000 annual savings for each at-home agent as compared to a traditional call center resource. Yet despite the advantages, instances of fraud and identity theft are still causing executives to be wary of outsourcing customer service to a solution that utilizes a distributed, work-from-home network.

For those who utilize social media for commercial purposes, social media management solutions provider HootSuite Media is broadening your Twitter options: specifically, paid advertising.

One of the ways you can tell that a company is having some real success, no matter what sector of the business world they operate in, is whether or not they are able to successfully operate their contact centers.