With the expansion of Analytics, each sector is trying to utilize it to the fullest. By implementing analytics, the managers are able to identify the behaviors that lead to positive outcomes and also identify the problematic areas. Therefore, organizations must develop the best practices that can streamline the work. By applying this to the calls, customers can analyze the customer - agent interactions. So they can identify the most important factors and can even reduce the volume in maximum traffic hours. The advance speech analytics software not only means, evaluates and presents audio and textual data, but also collects information regarding reasons for calls, emotional nuances in a customer's voice and how well agents are addressing a customer's needs and expectations. This even helps them keep a check on their marketing strategies so that it can be altered for the better. These generate very meaningful insights for why a customer needs to contact the support centers and thus exposing the root cause. So this helps in decreasing the average call time and monitoring the resources spent. Read more at : http://customerthink.com/top-5-benefits-of-call-center-speech-analytics-why-your-call-centers-success-depends-on-speech-analytics-solutions/

Companies who want to save money for their call center, employ at-home workers. But, they should also take into consideration about the security aspect of the company. A cloud-based call center will combat security concerns. To know more about call center security, follow: http://www.blogher.com/ins-and-outs-call-center-security?wrap=blogher-topics/news-politics/technology&crumb=29

Attrition is often seen as a health check for any business. If a high number of people are leaving then something is wrong. The question is what, and what can be done to improve it. Micah Solomon (CONTRIBUTOR), in his article writes about the ways improvement can be done. They are: 1. Optimize recruiting and hiring

2. Enhance training programs

3. Enhance customer satisfaction focused monitoring

4. Establish clear communication channels

5. Enhance recognition and rewards programs

6. Coaching culture

7. Provide skill development programs

8. Offer continuous opportunities for promotion

9. Provide excellent software and tools

10. Improve work conditions

Read more here- http://www.forbes.com/sites/micahsolomon/2015/02/22/improving-customer-service-by-reducing-contact-center-agent-stress-and-attrition/

The atmosphere in an organization has a huge impact on the creativity and productivity of its employees. The kind of work culture you choose as an entrepreneur or businessman will determine whether your employees are loving the job or diminishing their efficiency under the immense pressure presumably being put on them. The importance of creativity and innovation is crucial for a company to grow out of the box and possibly become the next billion dollar company. In order to know more about the approaches to work, and their relevance and impact, click on the following link: 

http://www.callcentertimes.com/Articles/tabid/59/ctl/NewsArticle/mid/407/CategoryID/1/NewsID/1010/Default.aspx

Text data is the best answer in understanding customer feedback. It is best for answering the why and what questions. Text Analytics is becoming mainstream as interest is pouring in. Sources include call center notes, email messages, social media etc. Following Fern Halper's TDWI article, 5 fundamentals include: 1. Text analytics involves analyzing unstructured data to extract relevant information.
2. Extracting various information in the form of keywords, entities, concepts and sentiments
3. Considering taxonomy, while dealing with specific vocabularies.
4. Integrating text data with traditional data, depends on the kind of data
5. Text data is not as accurate as statistical techniques
To know more http://tdwi.org/Articles/2015/06/23/5-Text-Analytics-Fundamentals.aspx?Page=2

AdvaTel, an Australian software company, developed BestTime, a product which improves productivity and also enhances customer experience. With the help of BestTime, potential callers can choose to receive a reminder via SMS or web page notification when the call waiting time is lower and it also helps in better management of a call center. Read more at: http://www.contactcenterworld.com/view/contact-center-news/totally-new-concept-in-call-center-management.aspx

According to Brian Cantor (Managing Editor and community Director of IQPC's Customer Management IQ), businesses develop and put into operation strategies without truly trying to understand who their customers are and what they want, thus producing suboptimal customer experiences. The question is does a customer actually want to engage in long, personalized calls to identify and resolve a business issue?  A customer may not be supportive in all cases.  But a business that ignores the desires of their customers cannot be called customer-centric. Being alert of this problem, the author discussed this situation and was exposed to some of the factors that "normal people" value when it comes to customer service.  They are as follows: availability of full service 24/7 and quick resolution-because time is money and effort is money.  Read more at: http://www.callcenter-iq.com/customer-experience/articles/what-normal-people-think-about-customer-service/

The most recently developed modern call center has emerged with so much of technology usage from cloud to Customer Relationship Management and Integrated Voice Response with new phrases catching up on people’s minds. It can be compared to an Oxford dictionary which gets 1000 new words added almost every year. There is always a need of new word to describe an innovation, idea or technology. These new words lead to puzzling communication. Thus the need of the hour is a jargon busting guide. Some examples are COLO which stands for Colocation. It refers to the service where data can be stored by a host company in a third party data center. For access to the whole guide visit: http://www.newvoicemedia.com/blog/understanding-the-modern-call-centre-our-jargon-busting-guide/#colo

In a white paper submitted by Pronexus (telephony, speech and database integration company), we come to know about the basics of voice user interface design. This white paper outlines many minute things that one should keep in mind before designing a voice user interface. He also describes what voice user interface is and what the design issues related with it are.

For more information please visit:-

In a blog written by Irv Shapiro (CEO and head coach ifbyphone), we come to know the basic differences between proactive call optimization and reactive call tracking analytics. In his blog he explains how a VBMA suite has state of art technologies to deal with many impending problems that today's business organizations face with respect to call tracking etc. VBMA is used to route the call to a proper agent. The technology should be easy to use and not complex in its handling.

For more information please visit:-

In a blog written by Dr Jodie Monger, a pioneer in customer satisfaction research for the contact center industry, explains how problem arises in collecting multiple customer comments from post call IVR survey. He also explains what the problems are and how to solve those problems. 

For more information please visit:-

According to Forrester's "Customer Experience Index," 80% of companies say they deliver "superior" customer service, while 8% of people say the same companies actually deliver "superior" customer service. This disconnect has a significant impact on brand impression and retention - making this a key issue that CMOs are now finding imperative to address. CMOs all over the world had spent $100 billion in 2013 to drive brands through online advertising, and for measuring the success of campaigns using agencies, analytics and marketing automation. Still businesses get nearly 45 billion calls from customers and prospects. These infarctions' remain invisible to CMOs. Hence it is the time for the CMO, marketers and call center leaders to work together and improve the customers' experiences. By integrating call center employees with the content marketing strategy, organizations can actually take the right communication strategy. For more details please visit: http://www.nojitter.com/post/240168198/marketing-is-eating-it--get-ready

If you are a call center provider, then you must know that performance is an important parameter. Every day, large volume of management information is produced from different call center systems where each center is given a business target to achieve. This target is then fragmented into smaller ones to team levels where individuals have to work in order to meet it. Apart from this, you have to take into account different generic measures like volume of total calls answered, percentage of calls abandoned, and average call duration, turnover and percentage of absenteeism of your staff, etc. Together, this will tell you how efficiently your call center is operating.

To make your task easy, there are different performance management solutions that you can put to use to know various aspects – out of which you can make out areas of improvements. But for this, you have to know how to use your performance management solution. Read more at: http://www.callcentrehelper.com/trade-secrets-getting-the-best-from-your-performance-management-solution-60462.htm to know the secrets and increase your profit.

Customer contact centers fulfil different functions according to the organization they serve and the industry that they function in. Regardless of their objectives, the focus should be on the customer - meeting expectations, enhancing service levels and improving satisfaction. Contact centers are finding it necessary to add more communication channels to their platforms in order to get in touch as easily as possible. Customer satisfaction and performance levels remain among the most important tenets of any call center and the market is changing to address customer communication needs. Technologies like unified communications will be playing a greater role in going forward.

 To know more about this aspect, read the article by Mike England, content director of Imago Techmedia, follow http://www.callcentrehelper.com/customers-driving-unified-communications-55759.htm

One important call center metric is that you should pay attention to abandon rates. An abandon rate is the percentage of calls that people disconnects before an agent can take a call. To keep your customers satisfied with your service, it is important that you should keep your abandon rate to as low as possible because, if a customer hangs up a lot, they may not like the speed of your service. The longer it takes to answer a call, the higher is the abandon rate. High abandon rate can cause a much bigger problem - they can inflate future call volumes which resonates to even higher call abandon rates. Inflating call volume means that the same caller tries to call your call center agent for second or third time.

So, how will you progress to reduce your call abandon rates? Read at http://www.callcentrehelper.com/how-to-bring-down-your-call-abandon-rates-50805.htm  to get some guidelines.

Handling phone calls to serve your customers is definitely important for your company. But, have you ever calculated how much it costs you? A research by ContactBabel, shows that for making a live agent call, it costs you £ 3.87 in average!

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) can be effective in reducing this cost. According to the report, it can bring down your operational costs by 6 times. Also, with increasing usage of smartphones, a new type of IVR menus can be provided known as Visual IVR, where a caller can navigate a visual IVR menu between 4 and 5 times faster than a traditional audio IVR menu. The direct impact will be enhanced customer experience.

Read at http://www.callcentrehelper.com/ivr-self-service-costs-6-times-less-than-a-phone-call-59403.htm for more research findings on how IVR can help you reducing your costs.

Making your customers happy over calls is an arduous task, but it is the most important thing you should look over. A survey done by Five9, a call center software provider, shows that to get their service seventy percent of U.S. adults use phone as their first choice to contact a company. But, if they receive bad support eighty five percent of the aggrieved customers resort to take inverse actions. Of them, forty nine percent do the worst thing – they prefer to stop dealing with the company. Not only that, if the customers are within the age group of 18 to 34 years, they do not hesitate to create adverse publicity about the company in the social network. Now surely, you do not want your call center business to be tarnished in this way.

So, what are the ways you should follow to ensure that your customers do not have a harrowing experience? Transera, a customer engagement software provider gives you some tips on how to prepare for customer service disasters before they actually take place. Read more at: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6164-call-center-tips.html .

Outsourcing has turned up as the most competent business strategy for getting non-core business functions taken care of by experts. India has captured the position of unchallenged outsourcing hub of the world. Some of the reasons behind the increasing demand are:

1. Low cost solution

2. More profits for businesses

3. Availability of talented resources

4. Favourable government policies

To gather more insight on each of the reasons visit http://www.callcentersindia.com/displaynews.php?idnews=319_Why_Outsourcing_Call_Centers_To_India_Is_In_Demand

Nowadays businesses are adopting cloud computing technology to enhance customer satisfaction in call centers. This technology helps the employees by providing updated information about the customers which allow them to easily manage customer needs. A cloud based call center also offers better return on investment. The employees can access the cloud from anywhere with an internet connection which helps in reducing costly on-site installations.
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For more information follow

https://www.fonality.com/industry-news/what-are-benefits-moving-call-center-cloud

Laura Noonan, Marketing team lead at CallFinder, talks about how important  it is to monitor the call center agents for providing customer satisfaction. She also emphasized that the companies must also provide equal priority to employees, ensuring the satisfaction with their role. She also speaks about the different advantages of monitoring calls between the customers and agents.

For more information follow

http://www.callcentertimes.com/Home/tabid/37/ctl/NewsArticle/mid/395/CategoryID/1/NewsID/723/Default.aspx