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Blogs

52 Contact Center RFP Questions to Ask Vendors

Are you in the middle of “contact center RFP season”? The RFP questions listed below provide you with a comprehensive guide on how you can structure the request and the actual questions you can add to your RFP. We segmented the questions into six key sections: Company Overview Agent Workforce Contact Center Reporting Project Management […]

Is Customer Support a Necessary Evil or a Core Differentiator?

If you have a business, you have customers – otherwise, you won’t stay in business very long. And if you have customers, they will inevitably need support. And that costs money. This leads some businesses to think of customer support as a necessary evil, something you’d rather not have to deal with but can’t avoid. […]

Beyond KPIs and Metrics: How to Measure Outsourced Call Center Performance

In the outsourced call center world, we measure everything in terms of percentages: minutes and seconds, dollars and cents. Measuring deep into the trenches of the contact center is an absolute must. The math provides us with insights on how to improve the customer experience and gain greater value for the client.  We’re constantly asking […]

Total Experience Strategy in the Contact Center: Everything Altogether All at Once

Customer experience strategy has been the star of the show in recent years as a differentiator in standout customer care programs. But it’s only one piece of the puzzle. We explore the introduction of total experience strategy, where CX converges with EX, UX, and MX. The fact that silos are the enemy of business success […]

The 5 Biggest Challenges Facing In-House Contact Centers. Is Outsourcing the Answer?

  For many organizations, in-house customer care feels like the right choice. It keeps you close to your customers and ready to serve them with your comprehensive knowledge of your products or services. But doing it all in-house also comes with its pain points, and, if customer care is looked at internally as just a […]

eBooks

You’re Asking the Wrong Questions: A Better Way to RFP for Outsourced Customer Care [eBook]

The RFP is the slog you need that 3rd cup of coffee to get through—especially when it’s an RFP for outsourced customer care. After all, we’re talking about a complex, customer-facing solution that needs to align seamlessly with your brand. In our experience, technology, attrition, and business continuity are the hot three areas of any […]

Your Guide to the Post-Pandemic Contact Center Is Here!

  Have you ever stopped and thought to yourself: “How will contact centers navigate the post-COVID world?” It’s a question we contemplate often here at Blue Ocean, and we’re glad to say we didn’t stop there. After much thought, deliberation, and research, we’ve come up with the quintessential guide for your post-pandemic contact center. And […]

Customer Care Outsourcing Amidst Uncertainty: A Pandemic Resource [eBook]

When the world turned upside down in February and March of 2020, no one could have guessed what was ahead. Many of us hit the pause button with the assumption things would return to normal soon. Soon never happened, and so we are left with the question of when and how to get back to […]

Is a Strategic Contact Center Partnership Even Possible? [eBook]

Your company is quick to outsource a handful of operational functions without a second thought – think: maintenance and cleaning crews, office supplies and equipment, and coffee and catering, among many others. But the people you hire to take care of those things aren’t really “partners” in the full sense of the word. They’re not […]

What Your Outsourcer Should Tell You About Managing Contact Center Agents: A Client’s Guide

Trusting an outsourced contact center with your brand takes more than a well-crafted RFP. Putting your customer service in the hands of unknown agents requires a thorough understanding of what goes on behind the scenes. More than just hiring and training them, you need to know how your outsourced partner is managing contact center agents […]

Infographics

It’s 2021. Are You Going to RFP for Your Contact Center This Year?

After a year flirting with the ever-present “pause” button, we’re seeing many more businesses hit the gas on their customer care program—in particular, seeking out the right outsourced partner. Sound like a familiar scenario? If so, the RFP is about to become the friend you love to hate. It’s a necessity—but it doesn’t have to […]

The Cost of In-House vs Outsourced Contact Centers: An Infographic

Maybe you’re a math person and love nothing more than a hefty Excel document to dig into for a few hours. Or maybe math isn’t your strong suit and you’re just looking for hard numbers to tell you what you need to know. Either way, we’ve put together this handy infographic to help you compare […]

The 10 Most Important Contact Center RFP Questions [Infographic]

The RFP is the friend you love to hate. The necessary evil. The document that will make or break your decision of which new outsourcer to partner-up with. A generic vendor RFP template may promise to make things easy, but when you’re about to hand over your customer interactions to an outsourced contact center, generic […]

How to Turn Contact Center Workforce Management into Champions

When you think of a call center, the last thing you’d associate it with is baseball. But for those of us who work in contact center workforce management (WFM), the connections are obvious. You might ask, what do baseball and WFM have in common? In short, it’s statistics. Predictive pattern analysis is essential to managing […]

Celebrating 1 Year in Roadside Assistance Customer Service [Infographic]

We like to refer to Roadside Assistance Customer Service teams as the special forces of customer service being able to ramp up for unpredictable and extreme peaks in volume And boy-oh-boy did the past year deliver extreme swings in volume due to record weather events and various polar vortexes. When we tallied up the team’s results, we […]