If you live anywhere in the Northern United States or Canada, one phrase you would love to have stricken from your vocabulary this past winter is “Polar Vortex.” In addition to being the coldest, bone-chilling temperatures ever recorded across hundreds of cities in North America, Mother Nature supplied multiple blizzards that crippled transit and travel […]
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To outside eyes, hiring customer service agents might seem like a straightforward order: hire people who are good at customer service… In fact, careful, nuanced hiring is the foundation of any successful customer support program. If you are engaged with an outsourced contact center partner, you want to have confidence that they are hiring the […]
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If you’re a growing company, it’s likely that at some point you will consider the strategic decision to partner with a customer service outsourcer. This process often begins with some informal conversations and then the more formal call center RFP process. Whether you’ve already chosen your customer service outsourcing partner or are in the process […]
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Good ‘ol fashioned customer feedback. Whether you run an in-house call center or outsource your call center to a trusted partner, agents are the key to harnessing customer feedback. They are privy to the good stuff – all of your customers’ unfiltered compliments, grievances, praise, product blessings, survey replies, and much, much more. In our […]
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When organizations look at social media as a communication channel with outbound elements (engagement related to brand building, marketing, and PR) and inbound elements (customer-generated support requests, information requests, and service issues), it is clear that your customer care team has a role to play in managing the channel. Can you leverage your outsourced call […]
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There are an estimated 4000 to 5000 outsourced contact centers in North America. Whittling down the list to a few potential partners that are the right outsourced contact center fit for your brand can be perplexing and frustrating if you’re unsure what you’re looking for. Of course, at a minimum you need to find a […]
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With contact centers spread around the globe, it’s inevitable that there will be unexpected external forces, from hurricanes to city strikes, which will impact call center operations. Yet, commerce must go on – deliveries are en route, orders hang in the midst, and customers affected by natural disasters require unique support. While there is nothing […]
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Buyers of Customer Service Outsourcing often look to outsourcers for the obvious ‘hard’ benefits including cost savings, enhanced profitability, and lower risk. It’s natural for many buyers to focus on the KPIs and end results. However, the end results can be tied back to ‘inputs’ put in place earlier in the process of managing a […]
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In the process of selecting the best outsourced contact center vendor to handle your customer support, and when you have your top contenders identified, it will be time to throw some hardball questions at them. In our two previous posts, we offered up guidelines for writing the contact center RFP and what subtle signs to […]
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Finding the best contact center to handle your outsourced customer care is a multidimensional process. In our last blog post, we offered up tips for streamlining the contact center RFP writing process. In this post, we look at some of the soft factors that can affect your decision-making process post-RFP. When it gets down to […]
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