Resource Center

Keep your finger on the pulse of the industry. From AI and VoC to EX and TX, here are some resources to inspire for the new year.   As customer care teams start planning for 2024, we’ve seen how easy it can be to get stuck in a rut. The quickest way to get re-inspired […]

(This is updated version of our most popular blogs: 52 RFP Questions (2013), 51 RFP Questions (2016), 60 RFP Questions (2020)) Every few years we update our recommended list of contact center RFP Questions. With every evolution in technology, workforce trends, and consumer expectations, the questions shift—which is testament to why generic, boilerplate RFPs never […]

The first mainstream mention of ESG as a concept came from the United Nations in 2004 in their report titled “Who Cares Wins.” The report urged stakeholders to consider environmental, social, and governance factors in their financial processes and investments. Simultaneously, worldwide attention on issues of sustainability and diversity began to take off and haven’t […]

When one in five of your customers speak something other than English as their first language, providing bilingual customer support is critical. Without it, you risk taking a hit to your CSat scores, your brand loyalty, and your bottom line. But what mix of live agents versus AI is best for your business? And how […]

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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]