Resource Center

Heading out of the office this holiday to grab some eggnog and enjoy the lights? While so many of us are off celebrating the festive season for days at a time, there are scores of people on the frontlines working to keep everything running smoothly in industries ranging from health care, to transportation, to broadcasting […]

As the holiday season unfolds, we wanted to share the amazing words of gratitude that flow every day from our clients’ customers to our agents.  Below you’ll find the best customer service kudos of 2019 (so far!) with quotes directly from the mouths of customers we interact with. MVP Agent. MVP Customer Kudos. This is […]

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 […]

Redundancy. Business Continuity. Those are major check boxes in every RFP we’ve ever responded to. Boxes to be checked on both sides of the equation – the buyer asked: “What’s your plan in case of disaster?” The bidders answered: “Here’s our plan in case of disaster….” Well, as the saying goes, humans plan and the […]

It’s late February, 2020. Place: Your office. Situation: You’re tasked with choosing a new outsourced partner for your organization’s customer care program. You have nine months to run a procurement process and get the program launched, and you’re ready to get your hands dirty. Three months later – May, 2020. Place: Your living room couch. […]

If one thing’s for certain in these most uncertain times, it’s that humans are resilient. There have been comparisons of the coronavirus pandemic to an earthquake, where the initial quake shakes us to the core, but the aftershocks continue to reshape the world for months and years to come. Even after the immediate threat is […]

Choosing an outsourced customer care partner might just be one of the most complex procurement scenarios out there. After all, this is a partner who will hold your brand and reputation in their hands, interfacing with your loyal (and often concerned) customers day in and day out. No boilerplate RFP document will do the job. […]

We talk a lot about the need to align your corporate culture with your outsourcer’s, but we know it’s a lot easier to say than it is to do – after all, it’s not a particularly quantifiable element. And it’s not totally subjective, either. In the same way that there are specific personality types – […]

Redundancy. Business Continuity. Those are major check boxes in every RFP we’ve ever responded to. Boxes to be checked on both sides of the equation – the buyer asked: “What’s your plan in case of disaster?” The bidders answered: “Here’s our plan in case of disaster….” Well, as the saying goes, humans plan and the […]

Choosing an outsourced customer care partner might just be one of the most complex procurement scenarios out there. After all, this is a partner who will hold your brand and reputation in their hands, interfacing with your loyal (and often concerned) customers day in and day out. No boilerplate RFP document will do the job. […]

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, […]

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 […]

If one thing’s for certain in these most uncertain times, it’s that humans are resilient. There have been comparisons of the coronavirus pandemic to an earthquake, where the initial quake shakes us to the core, but the aftershocks continue to reshape the world for months and years to come. Even after the immediate threat is […]

You know we’ve always got your back, dear Reader. We’re continually exploring, expanding, reading, learning, asking questions, and sharing our insights. Trends are gonna trend and we’ll be here to bring you up to speed, challenge the status quo, and let you know what you need to know! With that mission in mind, we’re sharing […]

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 […]

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 […]