John Miller

Ok, so you are extremely busy, moving from one meeting to another, from one project to another, checking on the status of this system and that process.  You have barely had a chance to breathe throughout your hectic day.  Ahhhh, just another business day in the life of a call center manager.

But amidst the normal hectic nature of your day-to-day routine in call center management, you know there are important concerns and issues that are falling through the cracks. You understand that there are things that you should be doing to enhance the effectiveness of your team, their interactions with customers and, of course, the excellent customer service skills that you and your team have been tasked with executing.

How can you find the time to pay attention to the...

Another season of March Madness is upon us!  For the next three weeks, sports fans throughout the United States will be tuned into the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament and basketball fever will be in full swing.  Games and tournament brackets (and wagers) will be closely monitored.  Favorite teams will be cheered on.  The road to the Final Four is grueling, and only the teams that have the most grit, determination, planning and talent will make it that far.

There are actually a lot of similarities between tournament championships, whether it’s basketball or any number of other sports, and providing ...

The goal of any professional sports team is always to win the ultimate prize.  As many of us saw this past weekend, in American football, the ultimate prize is the Super Bowl.  In European football, it’s the World Cup.  In baseball, it’s the World Series.

To the casual observer, it may seem as if the top prize is earned by the athletes who happen to prevail over their opponents in the final contest – just sheer competition on the field of play.  Anyone knowledgeable about professional sports, however, knows that winning a championship requires the focused commitment and hard work of an entire organization made up of people who engage in the sport itself and others who labor tirelessly behind the scenes.  Managers, coaches, scouts, logistics workers, PR representatives, front office personnel, travel planners, team accountants, equipment managers … the list goes on and on.

Why can some professional sports organizations, often those with...

I have read several blogs and articles lately that seem to be into dissing customer satisfaction as a legitimate call service center metric.  Some of the authors of these articles go to great lengths to point out the reality that satisfied customers are consistently bolting from one product to the next.

We must move beyond customer satisfaction, as the thinking goes, and find a more meaningful measure to help us develop effective strategies for customer retention and profit optimization.  What happens then is a big push to abandon satisfaction in favor of ...