Archive
Call Centers Are Hidden Hiring Gems
EXCERPT:
Economic-development agencies are beginning to realize they need to focus on contact centers to get people employed rapidly. As opposed to manufacturing, any office building with sufficient broadband can serve as a contact center location. In addition, you can get a call center up and running in a matter of months — not one-plus years.
Throughout past recessions, call centers picked up the slack and hired what amounted to millions of Americans to make and take calls. From 1990 onward, economic development agencies worldwide began to court contact centers to help them solve their job loss problems. Typically they recruited outsourcers from the TMC Top 50 Teleservices list as well as smaller, faster-growing companies
LINK: http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=002000002RYG
Contact Centers: Performing (and Exceeding) Expectations
EXCERPT:
Managing contact center performance has never been more challenging. Not only are operations facing even more pressure to cut costs amidst a difficult economy, but are often also being asked to maintain service levels and to cross sell/upsell to retain customers and grow revenues. Many of the solutions to these needs lie in the data contact centers collect. It can be used to identify problems from customer information such as spikes in calls, find out what is going on, then report issues to prevent or limit rising costs and customer churn. It can also help improve sales and collections. The insights that can be gleaned from them can help justify existing [budgets] and possibly budget increases and investments in new solutions.
The sources of this data are in the vast amounts of reports: from ACDs to call recording, CRM 
, CTI, predictive and progress dialers, and workforce management (WFM) that contact centers receive. Yet these sources are too often rarely if ever consolidated to give that clear picture.
“You can’t understand what is going on if you’ve got 25 reports sitting on your desk,” explains Jim Davies, a research director with Gartner. “You need to have that single view so that you can then start to dig into data and look for trends, patterns, and correlations between the different applications and data streams.”
LINK: http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=00200076GWHW&page=1
SpeechCycle, Jingle Networks Team to Empower Contact Centers
EXCERPT:
SpeechCycle and Jingle Networks have announced a new partnership to help contact centers embed contextually relevant sponsored messaging within the caller experience. The companies said that this will monetize contact center interactions while also improving customer loyalty. As per this latest agreement, Jingle Networks (News – Alert) and SpeechCycle will provide interoperability between SpeechCycle’s RPA OnDemand platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and the JingleConnect audio advertising network.
The call centers are not dying
Article from Businessmirror.com: http://businessmirror.com.ph/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6180:the-call-centers-are-not-dying&catid=28:opinion&Itemid=64
Excerpt:
“LOOKING back to 2005, a column titled “Are the Call Centers Dying?” filled this spot. Back then, I was not as bullish on the outsourcing industry for the Philippines as I am now.
Unfortunately, I was listening to too many “experts,” then saying things like “The economic benefits of outsourcing customer service are grossly overstated”. That was from a senior partner of an Australian consulting firm, Niels Kjellerup. I wonder what his job is now, since he certainly cannot be advising corporations on the benefits of outsourcing. Another, one Alexa Bona said then, “During the next three years, up to 60 percent of companies will encounter customer defections that will either cancel or outweigh any perceived savings”. Those two are probably now working together or are unemployed together.
And here we are three short years later with Oscar Sanez, chief executive officer of the Business Processing Association of the Philippines, saying that outsourcing will create 100,000 more new jobs this year in the Philippines. Revenues for this industry hit $6.5 billion in 2008, with a 2009 expected growth rate of 20 percent. That would put revenues to the Philippines to nearly $8 billion, about one-half of total overseas remittances.”
TV show tackles call center life
New call center show on HBO: http://www.bworldonline.com/BW022409/content.php?id=165
Telus Call Center to Hire 1,000 Employees in Las Vegas
Telus is opening a new call center in Las Vegas:
http://www.lasvegasnow.com/Global/story.asp?S=9795880&nav=168Y
Will SaleForce.com’s new ‘Service Cloud’ Revolutionize Customer Service & the Call Center Industry?
SalesForce.com has launched a new product called ‘Service Cloud’. It compiles customer service information about a company from different sources from all over the Internet which can then be used in the contact center environment.
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Timothy |Tim| Peters [.ca] 