Kate Leggett

Empowering customer service agents with relevant, complete and accurate answers to customer questions remains one of the major challenges in contact centers today. The last 10 years have seen efficiency and productivity gains squeezed out of the mechanics of routing and queueing a call to the right agent pool, screen-popping the customer information to the agent’s desktop, case management and workforce optimization. Less attention has been placed on allowing agents to access information and informally collaborate with one another. Its no wonder that over 70% of an  average call time is spent on locating the right information for the customer.

In many contact centers, content is created by groups of authors who are disconnected from day-to-day conversations that agents are having with customers, and who are unfamiliar with the language and terms that customers use. All content follows the same basic create-edit-publish cycle irrespective of its usefulness in answering...

Eighty-six percent of customer service decision-makers say that a good customer experience is one of their top strategic priorities. Sixty-three percent say that they want their customer experience to be the best in their industry. Yet few companies deliver a good customer experience.

In our recent survey, just over one-third of the 160 large North American brands questioned were found to provide a positive customer experience—a number that hasn’t significantly moved for the last five years.

We know that a bad service experience has quantifiable negative impacts, as measured by monitoring the wallet share of each customer over their engagement lifetime with a brand. But when is a service experience good enough? A recent Harvard Business Review blog says that “delighting your customers is a waste of time and energy, and exceeding customer expectations has a negligible impact on customer loyalty. Customers just want...

Outsourcing contact center operations helps organizations deliver better customer service. In Forrester’s recent survey of 304 North American and European network and telecommunications decision-makers, we found that nearly 20% have already outsourced some or all of their contact center seats or are very interested in doing so. Choosing to outsource should not be based on cost-considerations alone. Select an outsourcer carefully. Outsourcers need to provide an environment that delivers quality customer service in a cost-effective manner. When looking for providers, evaluate their capability to:

In an conversation with Alex Bard, CEO of Assistly (now desk.com  of SalesForce.com), I learned a couple of interesting things about customer service solutions for small to mid-sized businesses (SMB). They are: (1) Companies can be too small to have customer service organizations; (2) The main competition of vendors of SMB customer service solutions is not each other, but post-it notes and gmail and; (3) the service that the SMB customer demands is exactly like the service that enterprise customers demand.

So, what do each of these points mean?