Resource Center

Quick, is Gen Z old enough to work yet? No checking Wikipedia… Answer: Yes. While there is a bit of a gray area between where exactly Millennials stop and Gen Z starts, demographers pretty much agree that the starting birth years for Gen Z are in the late 90s. So, with the oldest of the […]

Quick, how many services or memberships do you subscribe to? One? Two? Twenty? You know your wallet is stuffed with membership cards (roadside assistance, your local gym, and Costco) and your front porch welcomes monthly subscription boxes (Blue Apron, Trunk Club, and Honest Essentials), while your go-to entertainment is no longer cable TV but subscription-based […]

The oldest Millennials are now hitting their late 30s (gulp… really?) They make up more than 30% of the workforce with a cohort that consists of 75 million people. What does that mean for outsourced contact center employers? In our opinion, it means we better be doing a good job setting up an employment experience […]

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 […]

The procurement process for seeking an outsourced contact center is naturally focused on the tangible functionalities, capacities, competencies and capabilities of a potential vendor. A buyer is looking for a partner who can deliver cost savings, improved profitability, and lower risk, not to mention exceptional customer service. These factors are essential, of course, but they […]

What Does Content and Ad Review Have in Common with Customer Service? Content review is a topical subject these days. We have witnessed Mark Z. in the hot seat being held accountable for content review standards and practices. But the requirement for content review extends beyond the major social media players: from not-for-profit social activism […]

It’s a question we get asked a lot, and it’s one of the hardest ones to answer because it’s rare and challenging to determine a true apples-to-apples comparison, especially when there are intangible impacts like damage to brand when things go sideways. That said, we know you’re trying to make a business case here, and […]

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 […]

Cost Factors in Major Urban Centers  In the past 18 months, we have seen more and more interest from companies looking for alternatives to operating customer care centers in or close to their headquarters in major urban centers like Toronto, Vancouver, New York, and San Francisco. Economists have several arguments as to why different cities […]

Running an effective and efficient procurement process for a contact center partner is easier said than done – even for seasoned indirect sourcing professionals and folks in the C suite. It’s not unusual for the process to take 12 to 18 months from discovery to go-live with significant time and budget required along the way. […]

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 […]

Picture this: You’re in the RFP process for a new contact center partner. You have a short list of participants. You give them a couple of weeks to return their answers, and then you spend a few more weeks poring through those answers with your team to eliminate the deal-breakers and discern the winner. Finally, […]

It’s 2019, which means contact center metrics from 1999 are almost old enough for their first legal beer (and already knocking them back in Canada.) Those metrics were born in an era when customer service was a race, where whoever got to the finish line first (i.e. off the phone) – upsetting the least number […]

You’ve got your game face on. You’re prepared for the future of customer service. And you’re ready for your outsourced customer service RFP to hit the road and bring you some stellar options for a new contact center partner. But are you asking the right questions about artificial intelligence? While AI capabilities in the contact […]

You’ve got your game face on. You’re prepared for the future of customer service. And you’re ready for your outsourced customer service RFP to hit the road and bring you some stellar options for a new contact center partner. But are you asking the right questions about artificial intelligence? While AI capabilities in the contact […]

Did you know that 32% of customers worldwide will quit doing business with a brand – even if they love it – because of just one bad experience? This statistic from a PwC survey is an eye-opener for any organization that interfaces with customers on a regular basis. But what constitutes a bad experience? Although […]

Say hello to the future: the robots are right here. Artificial intelligence is flipping all kinds of traditional business models on their heads. In the customer support space, AI is changing the customer experience for better or for worse depending on the elegance of your deployment. And the new world of AI is creating out-of-this-world […]

Siri, Alexa, and OK Google… these are the virtual interactions that Sci-Fi movies have portrayed for decades past. The future is, it seems, here at our fingertips. These technologies are sparking new expectations in today’s consumers on an almost daily basis. We want intelligent interactions that are personalized to our own situations and we want […]

The Client This multinational communications, electronics and IT corporation has a health solutions arm delivering connected devices for which Blue Ocean provides both sales support and customer service support. The Challenge For both types of customer calls – sales and support – the client was using an IVR system which directed calls, by type, to […]

Admit it, you love it when you’re handed that Starbucks beverage with your name spelled neatly and correctly on the side. Maybe that’s where it all started: that innocent coffee cup with the green mermaid staring back at you. The trend of personalized customer experience has since transformed almost every industry as we know it. […]

We don’t want to ruin your good mood, but humor us for a moment and think back to a time when a company made you angry. Specifically, remember that moment you contacted customer service because of some error, mishap, or malfunction, only to hang up the phone feeling even more irritated. Perhaps you were on […]

Think back, for a moment, to a time when you made a purchase of a product, service, or membership that has, for any number of reasons, caused you stress.  Maybe the payment didn’t go through, maybe something was broken or malfunctioning, maybe it’s just not what you expected. Perhaps you check the troubleshooting manual or […]

Remember those sandcastles you built as a kid? Constructing sandy towers and driftwood drawbridges was a blast. That is, until a powerful, unexpected wave swept the beach and water flooded that little kingdom. Only those prepared with a deep and expansive moat remained safe. For everyone else, all of that hard work would be undone. […]

Ever try to predict the outcome of anything? It’s no easy feat. Sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke said predictions about the future can be a “discouraging, hazardous occupation.” Either you sound believable, but are proved pitifully shortsighted or you sound loony, and are proven right too late. For prediction-makers, it’s often lose-lose. But we’ve been […]

If enhancing your customer experience is a strategic priority over the next 12 months, you might be looking at putting out a contact center RFP or RFI early in the new year. Because the partnership you have with a contact center is core to your customers’ journey with you, it’s a relationship that matters more […]

A GPS unit that provides a general sense of direction based on landmarks (“turn left at the train station, head South after the statue of the town mascot”) could feasibly get you from point A to point B. But if you want to cut the confusion, speed up your journey and create an overall less […]

Don’t we all wish that customers came with a lifetime guarantee? They’d make their first purchase and be irrevocably smitten for life? In that perfect world, customer retention would be at 100% and customer turnover would be zero. Since that’s not the world we live in, customers need to experience prompt and dedicated attention at […]

“My goal is that our reporting is concise, honest, accurate, and actionable.” – Reporting Coordinator, Blue Ocean Contact Centers Many company leaders share that same goal. However, aligning your contact center reporting strategy to your goals is no simple stroll in the park. It starts by questioning everything. Is the data valuable? Is the data […]

In the ground transportation reservations business, accuracy is critical. Any small error could result in a customer being stranded in transit or missing flights. For our executive ground transportation client, we have an SLA requirement to meet certain measures on incident rates attributed to Blue Ocean as a percentage of cases. While we were operating […]