Contact Centers

Customer Retention: Keep ’Em And Hold ’Em
December 1, 2006

Beyond death, taxes and postal rate hikes, most catalogers’ primary worry in life is retaining customers. Aside from continuously offering appealing products and services, there are a number of effective approaches you need to take to keep your customers happy and doing repeat business with you. Naturally, the question is, “What methods can I try that I haven’t already tried 10 times?” For a few possible answers and techniques for you to test in different departments, consider the strategies offered by several catalog experts. Customer Service Good customer service starts with the first interaction you have with customers. And if your call center

Editor’s Take: How Dell (May Have) Lost Me
November 1, 2006

At press time, I had nearly completed this column when a rather unforgettable customer experience caused me to drop what I was doing. I wound up ripping up the old column and wrote this. Hopefully, there will be a lesson to be learned by all — at least by computer giant Dell on how not to handle a valued customer. My wife, Donna, bought a Dell Inspiron 6000 notebook computer in July 2005. Naturally, it worked fine for her; that is, up until the day after press time when the battery apparently died. She and I figured we’d call Dell and have what was

Contact Centers: Two Ways to Improve Sales and Customer Service
October 24, 2006

Although more sales continue to migrate online, the contact center remains an important touchpoint between catalogers and customers. To ensure that your customer service reps (CSRs) provide the best possible experience to your customers while driving sales, Best Practices, a benchmarking strategies provider, offers the following a couple of key pointers in its recent whitepaper, “Transforming Contact Centers into High-Performing Sales Channels.” * Use on-screen prompts to provide real-time coaching and expertise to CSRs. While product information aids and popups aren’t new, the whitepaper’s authors note that the various uses for prompts these days is quite diverse. Their research reveals prompts that do the

Contact Centers: Calibrate! Calibrate! Calibrate!
October 1, 2006

Tune up your contact center. A contact center without calibration is like a car without a tune-up: The car still runs, but not at peak performance. Calibrations are an opportunity to gather your team, tune in to your customers’ experience, and make sure everyone shares the same expectations of your representatives. Calibrations are a contact center’s tune-up. Calibration sessions ensure your team connects the vision with the reality. While quality assurance should lead the discussions, all frontline supervisors, floor leads and representatives should be included. Input from reps is critical, since they can help contact center managers understand why boardroom strategies fall short when implemented.

Customer Service: How Employee Recognition Programs Can Keep CSRs Happy
September 19, 2006

Theoretically, keeping your customer service reps (CSRs) happy has much to do with keeping your customers happy. Happy and motivated employees will do a better job selling -- both cross-selling and upselling offers over the phone. Plus, tightening labor markets mean you have to provide a competitive advantage over other area employers that prospective employees will be drawn to, according to “Rewards & Recognition Best Practices,” a recently released whitepaper from customer service consultancy The Ascent Group. Following are tips and strategies offered in the whitepaper: * Look for appropriate behavior. “Management must have a process in place so managers and supervisors are actively looking

Contact Centers: Four Best Practices to Improve Interactive Voice Response
September 5, 2006

More than 25 percent of companies using interactive voice response (IVR) in their call centers said increasing customer acceptance and usage of the system is the biggest challenge to using IVR, according to a recent benchmarking study by The Ascent Group, a customer service operations consultancy. In the same study, The Ascent Group established a set of strategies used by companies that are achieving a high customer satisfaction rate and high IVR use. Some of these best practices are: 1. Conduct extensive consumer research before making changes to your call center. Companies that use IVR successfully employ customer focus groups, usability labs or customer

Order Entry System Reduces Shipping Errors
September 1, 2006

Problem: The order entry system for My Grandma’s of New England routinely transposed data from one order to another, causing shipping errors and other assorted problems. Solution: The company implemented a new order entry system. Results: Shipping errors were virtually eliminated. My Grandma’s of New England had an order entry system (OES) that was wildly unstable, often causing data errors that resulted in shipping methods from one order being applied to another order, disappearing entirely or customer greetings placed on an order to end up on the wrong order. So last November, the company implemented Morse Data’s InOrder OES to reduce shipping errors caused by its legacy

Contact Centers: Readying the Call Center for Next Season
April 25, 2006

As you analyze the results from your last busy season, have you discovered what you need to know in order to improve your contact center for the next spike in calls? Contact center managers from Omaha Steaks and Orvis offered several ideas to improve the ramping up process for your next peak season in a session during the recent NCOF in Orlando, Fla. Cheryl Holtzen, Omaha Steaks’ customer care manager, recommended the following strategies for catalogers to implement shortly after their peak season: -hold post-mortem sessions; -get front-line employees involved because they know who your customers are; -immediately identify improvements that need to be made; -categorize projects; -look at the

Contact Center: Measure Effectiveness by Sales, Not Calls, Per Hour
April 18, 2006

When evaluating your contact center staff, you’ll likely want to establish a performance standard, but what standard works best? In an NCOF session last week, Tim Holody, chief operating officer with jewelry cataloger Seta Corp. (Palm Beach Jewelry), made a case for catalogers to get away from old measurements of calls per hour in the call center. Instead, he suggested that call centers adopt a sales revenue per hour metric. “We’d probably like reps to take eight calls per hour,” he said. “Multiply that by (Seta’s average order of) $150, and we’d want reps to generate $1,250 in sales per hour.” On the other hand, Holody

Contact Centers: How Interactive Voice Response Can Increase Customer Satisfaction& Retention
April 11, 2006

As the cost of acquiring customers continues to rise, holding on to the customers who already are loyal has become paramount to multichannel marketing efforts. Keep the customer happy and she’ll be more likely to stick around. Derrell Knight, president of Message Technologies, an outsourced call center and interactive voice response (IVR) developer and host, explains how IVR allows you to optimize your customer service reps’ workloads and keep your customers satisfied. Catalog Success Idea Factory: How can IVR contribute positively to customer retention? Derrell Knight: Customers often call you because there’s a problem they’re trying to resolve. And most of those requests are repetitive, meaning