Trend watch columns:Call center
Call center
Learn about trends in the call center market from Donna Fluss, a thought leader and innovator in call center and real-time analytics with more than 23 years of experience. In Donna's monthly column for SearchCRM.com, she covers all aspects of call center and real-time analytics. Catch up on recent columns here.
New in this guide
- The ROI of speech analytics for the call center (Trend: Speech analytics)
- Quality management and recording suites capitalizing on shifting contact center market (Trend: Quality management)
- The executive's guide to contact center technology planning (Trend: Speech analytics)
-
Trend: Speech analytics
Because speech analytics is new and relatively unknown both within the call center and across the enterprise, it can be perceived as a risky investment. But early adopters have found that speech analytics has a rapid three- to 12-month payback, high net present value (NPV) and high internal rate of return (IRR), according to Donna Fluss. In her latest column, read more about the benefits of speech analytics and how to build a business case for speech analytics technology.
-
Trend: Remote call center agents
Many organizations are embracing the concept of remote call center agents, but the most significant concern is how to manage these agents without personal contact from the call center supervisor. In her latest column, Donna Fluss outlines best practices for hiring and managing remote staff in the call center.
-
Trend: Customer centricity
A major impediment to building a customer-centric organization is the conflicting goals of the primary customer-facing departments: sales, marketing and service. Somehow, in the drive to achieve goals, each department loses sight of customers as people and sees them only as "objects" that need to be optimized. In her latest column, Donna Fluss outlines the most successful way to approach customer centricity.
-
Trend: Customer surveying
When real-time customer surveying tools are used properly, they improve customer satisfaction, increase revenue, decrease customer attrition, reduce operating expenses and improve agent satisfaction and retention. Read advice from Donna Fluss on how to use customer surveys to optimize your contact center.
-
Trend: VoIP call center
Today it's clear that IP can vastly reduce operating expenses, simplify management overhead, provide geographic flexibility and improve quality, particularly for multi-site contact center operations, says Donna Fluss in this call center trends column. Learn the benefits that IP technology can offer and why it might be the right choice for your call center in this column.
-
Trend: Call center outsourcing
While companies that effectively outsource offshore can achieve a great deal of savings, outsourcing is not the only solution, nor is it the best way to improve the return from a call center. Within five to 10 years, call centers will become one of the most important revenue generating departments in most enterprises. Some enterprises have begun to try to figure out how to improve their customer experience while keeping costs down. Read advice from Donna Fluss on how to make your call center more profitable.
-
Trend: Self service
Learn about self-service applications based on the Web and interactive voice response (IVR) and how this technology can optimize the call center. In this section, read Donna Fluss's take on the drawbacks of traditional self-service applications and how these applications can offer cost savings and much more if they are deployed correctly.
-
Trend: SaaS
Learn about hosted call center offerings and how they are expanding call center options in this section from Donna Fluss, a recognized thought leader and innovator in contact center and real-time analytics with more than 23 years of experience.
-
Trend: Quality management
Winning quality management (QM) vendors sell applications that facilitate this transition, have a rapid ROI, a low total cost of ownership (TCO) and improve the customer experience, says Donna Fluss. In this section, learn more about quality management and recording suites in the shifting contact center market.
-
Trend: Performance management
Performance management started to penetrate contact centers in the early 2000s, but 2006 is the first year of significant adoption. According to Donna Fluss, the lack of consensus on the definition and purpose of these applications has created a major adoption issue. Learn about the benefits of performance management for the contact center in this column.