What makes a great contact center agent isn’t as easy to define as you might expect. Yes, they need to be great communicators and they need to have the chops to be able to navigate call center systems and software with unconscious competence, but the best skills and personality traits differ from agent to agent, […]
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Humor us for a moment and set down that mug of steaming coffee before you keep reading. You know as well as we do that no amount of caffeine will perk you up if you’re feeling sleep deprived. Whether it’s late night work, midnight Netflix bingeing, a crying baby, or snoring partner, stress, or any […]
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Put your hand up if you grew up wanting to be a call center agent. No? Nobody? We get it… Our industry has gotten a bad rap from some true horror stories and the stigma sticks to all of us in some way or another. We’ve seen and cringed at the stereotypical windowless dungeons filled […]
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One of our most popular blog posts focuses on which contact center predictions from the past few years have come true in the world of outsourced customer service. In this post, we thought we’d take a look into the metaphorical crystal ball ourselves and try to identify some major shifts coming our way over the […]
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Let’s just be real here. The majority of us set New Year’s resolutions, knowing all along that we will more than likely quit just weeks, if not days, after January 1st. We do it year after year, and we watch the people around us do the same thing. So what is it about human nature […]
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Whether you’re running your own in-house call center or working closely with an outsourced contact center to manage the load, chances are your workforce management team and your HR teams have had the occasional struggle to understand one another. As the senior vice president of corporate services at Blue Ocean, both our workforce team and […]
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In mapping the customer journey, the contact center is unquestionably a critical customer touch point, essential to carrying the brand promise and delivering a positive customer experience, placing an emphasis on effective recruiting for your contact center. The challenge, of course, is in determining which characteristics best enable an agent to make that real human connection. […]
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The National Retail Foundation is forecasting that Americans will spend $600 billion this holiday season. This annual mad rush to prepare the contact center for the holiday season inevitably presents a challenge for contact centers nationwide. Massive spikes in demand mean massive potential for interruption to customer service operations. Unquestionably, holiday madness can also impact […]
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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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Experts in the contact center space often discuss the topic of empowering call center agents, but rarely is it looked at through the lens of the agents themselves. So, we decided to do just that. In this post, we highlight three keys to empowering agents that set the stage to delight customers and keep agents […]
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