Learn about improving contact centre customer service by exploring related blogs.

Young confident woman in super hero costume

Zero to Hero: Turning Agents into Customer Service Masters

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While the importance of good customer service has been well established, it’s a tough mountain to climb without properly trained agents to provide it.

What makes a great call centre agent? Is it the ability to stay calm under the pressure of a voice snapping in your ear with a dozen ringing phones around you? Or is it the persistence and dedication required to handle problem after problem in a field where agents are under-appreciated and battered relentlessly? According to a 2014 Customer Service report by Parature, 65 percent of consumers admitted that they’ve cut ties with a brand over a single poor customer service experience.  With numbers like that, knowing what makes a good customer service agent is as important as ever. Read more →

Crossing Out Reactive And Writing Proactive On A Blackboard.

Leading the Charge: Providing Proactive Customer Service

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Problem resolution is essential to good customer service, but what if you could take action to prevent problems from occurring at all?

Have your agents visualize how it feels to be a customer requesting a service. We may be confused, frustrated or fed up with waiting. We’ve all been there before, and after too many hours spent on the other end of the phone, it’s easy to forget the basic experiences that customers go through. Read more →

Tokens and dice next to the GO space in a Monopoly game board

Make a Game of It: How Gamification Can Help the Contact Centre

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How gamification in the contact centre can improve your customer service.

Ever experience one of those ‘aha’ moments when you realize that a tedious task can be way more fun if you make a game out of it? Gamification — a relatively new concept as applied to contact centres and customer service — does just that. By applying game principles to the contact centre experience, agents and customers alike may enjoy the customer service experience that much more — without the need to pass Go and collect $200. Read more →

Board Game With Color Pawns

Upgrade Your Customers: CRM Systems in the Call Centre

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The value of CRM in business has been well established, but how can gamification of CRM practices improve your customer service experience?

The value of CRM in the marketplace comes from the ability to make connections between investment and return. While it was once a prohibitively difficult metric to track, the advent of online analytics makes it easier than ever for businesses to build portfolios of customer data that provide comprehensive views of their clients. They can also provide statistics and trends concerning client satisfaction, average handle time and employee productivity. Knowing is half the battle, and effective CRM strategies can provide a wealth of information towards improving your customer experience. Read more →

Smartphone with finance and market icons and symbols concept

The Future of Customer Service: Contemporary Care for a Modern World

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Customer expectations are evolving, and centres that want to keep up had better make sure their service techniques evolve along with them.

Customer service used to be simple. You may remember an operator on the line, directing your call to the appropriate department, or a sales representative fumbling through manuals in front of you, trying to troubleshoot for you without having any idea how to solve the problem. Read more →

Help Them Help Themselves: How Self-Service Has Changed the Customer Care Formula

How Self-Service Has Changed the Customer Care Formula

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Self-service has paved the way for great change in customer service, both in ease of use as well as potential pitfalls that should be avoided.

With the advent of the Internet, customers have more ways to help themselves than ever before. Self-service is on the rise, and with it a changing landscape of customer service that relies more on the consumer rather than droves of agents and attendants on call.

While self-service can be an incredible tool to empower both your customers and your business, care must be taken to make sure you don’t lead them down the wrong path with misinformation. Read more →

Problems Crossed Out And Solutions Written Underneath On A Blackboard

Creating Effective Problem Resolution for Municipal Residents

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How to increase rates of effective problem resolution in your municipality.

Ever wonder how you can improve the quality of service offered by your municipal customer support contact centre? Are regular complaints, high call volumes and ineffective support bogging down your office? Does a lack of flexibility and customer engagement in the office keep municipal residents feeling distanced, unheard and undervalued? Read more →

Old 60s - 70s style black telephone with rotary dial. Isolated on white. Hand set off the hook and u

Top 10 Strategies for an Immediate Hold on Call Volume

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Get a hold of your call volume with these insider tips.

Call volume can be one of those unpredictable beasts in the contact centre. While there are certain times of the year when you can reasonably expect call volume to be higher-than-average, and prepare accordingly, such as around the holidays or surrounding a promotion, contact centres can also experience seemingly random spikes in volume, leaving agents unprepared and overwhelmed. Read more →

Stopwatch

4 Tips for a Winning Lower Handle Time Strategy

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How to reduce your call handle times for improved customer satisfaction and increased agent efficiency.

It’s the moment we all dread. We’re calling customer service, but before we get to hear even a single word from a trained agent, we’re stuck in a queue. Before you know it we’re sighing, checking our watches, and starting to question whether we’d be better off just hanging up. Read more →

Customer Service

Solutions to Common Customer Service Mistakes

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Learn how to prevent turning common customer service mistakes into full-blown eruptions by examining these five common mistakes.

Your team provided an excellent product. You delivered in a timely manner. Your customer’s needs were met. So why are they on the phone shouting themselves hoarse at your customer service agents?

Maybe you made a mistake and failed to deliver on a promise to them, or maybe they just finished putting out a grease fire in their kitchen while accidentally dumping their spaghetti down the drain. And wouldn’t you know it, that’s when they decide to give your contact centre a call and take their frustration out on somebody. Read more →