The Evolution of Call Centres #4
Welcome to The Evolution of Call Centres where I round up some of the more interesting and appealing news stories from the world of Call Centres, Cloud Computing and Hosted Contact Centres, sometimes adding a little commentary but always grouping the stories together in easy to digest snippets of information, knowledge, insight and ideas.
What a way to kick start this Evolution of Call Centres than with a superb collection of advice, hints and tips from some of the leading call centre business minds, including our very own CEO Jonathan Gale on how to make your staff more productive.
There are some interesting hints and tips and as always, the topics of metrics and incentives is present in much of the advice. There's a balance to get when measuring performance using incentives and financial rewards. All metrics/measurements based incentives can in some way be "gamed" and are those measurements for the interest of the customer? Where did the measurements come from? Are they accurate? Do they really motivate people?
This paper here, although based around software development, still gives some superb insights in to the dangers of measurements and metrics.
And this video here, by Dan Pink, is a superb insight in to what really motivates people. This is a great video.
And of course, who can forget the classic book, How To Lie With Statistics?
All the above are good sources of some of the dangers of metrics for performance and measurement.
But that's not to say that measurements are wrong. Far from it, but used to measure and incentivize is a tricky strategy, unless you're sure you're measuring the right thing.
And on measuring the right thing, here is NewVoiceMedia's newly appointed Chief Science Officer, Brian Galvin talking about maximising the wealth of data call centres generate.
Customer Service
This is a great infographic on Customer Service - it shows some of the interesting findings from a recent survey by American Express. Interesting to see some the trends towards loyalty that these figures indicate.
I found this piece very interesting indeed, it's based around understanding what/who "Government Customers" are and how we might need to think a little broader on this whole topic.
Another short but sweet post on things you shouldn't say to your customers.
A slightly related article on the importance of mobile in the next few years.
I'm in danger of this blog becoming a Zappos fan-boy site but you can't help but love what they're doing over there.
Stack Them Like Planes
Great article here by our very own Charlie Cowan on why stacking calls in a queue and delivering them one at a time, in sequential order might not always be a good strategy. He draws an analogy with landing planes.
Science and Laboratories
As mentioned earlier, NewVoiceMedia have appointed Brian Galvin as Chief Science Officer. To give you some idea of what Brian will be up to then check out the news release here.
Enjoy.
