Resource Center

We’ve said it before and we’re not afraid to repeat it until the cows come home: using a boilerplate RFP in the process to find a new customer care outsourcer is a quick road to failure. You’re looking for a strategic partner who will interface with your customers day in and day out. That requires […]

We had another member of the wonderful ONQ family on the podcast: Sean Hammerle, who is the company’s Chief Operating Officer and an award-winning motivational leader and speaker. I first met Sean back in June of 2022 when he was awarded the title of Best Contact Center Executive at The Contact Center World Awards in […]

What if you could learn about a new technology just by directly asking it questions? That’s not always an option, but in the case of ChatGPT, the AI chatbot taking the world by storm, it made all the sense in the world. So with this concept in mind, we decided to approximate a podcast interview […]

Talk of ChatGPT is everywhere from your LinkedIn feed to the evening news to, yes, this blog. For many, the buzz about ChatGPT is evoking the same exploratory wonder they once experienced when the Internet itself first debuted. Like most people in the customer care sector, we are diving deep into where ChatGPT fits, or […]

Attrition seems like it should be an easy enough term to define, and determining which bidders’ attrition results best match your own requirements should be easy enough in a contact center RFP. In this article, we are making the case that it’s not always so straightforward. Not all attrition is created equal, and there are […]

  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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

You already know that the quality of your customer service depends heavily upon the quality of your customer service agents. But it’s easy to imagine that you can solve that problem by building a robust agent profile and a strong hiring strategy. Spoiler alert: It’s not that easy. When you’re outsourcing your contact center, the […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]