Scott Thomas

Scott O. Thomas is the Senior Partner with Tamer Partners Corporation. Scott Thomas works with organizations to increase productivity and profits by helping them deliver the highest level of service at the lowest possible cost by synchronizing strategies and actions with customer needs and wants. Beginning as an agent more than 18 years ago, Scott understands all the interesting facets of the contact center industry.

Rewarding Contact Center Employees When the Budget is Tight

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Posted on 2012-05-18

Sometimes reward and recognition programs take a hit in a downturn economy. We make the assumption that movie tickets or other chachkies are the only viable options for rewarding our employees.

Here are 5 employee reward and recognition ideas that are budget friendly!

1. Serve in the Community – What better way to promote a service driven culture than to allow your employees to serve in the community and represent your organization. Your organization may already have existing relationships with charities in your area. Allowing an employee to build a house with Habitat for Humanity, or serve in a hospital or food pantry organization, are amazing ways to recognize an employee while supporting your local communities.

2. Cross Training – Allowing an employee to learn a new skill while meeting new coworkers in other departments, is a great reward and recognition option. This career development idea is not only easy...

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Voice of the Customer as a Leadership Resource

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Posted on 2012-05-04

Do you currently have a VOC (Voice of the Customer) program in your organization? Are you or your marketing department conducting surveys on a regular basis? If you are, what kind of data are you receiving? Customer Satisfaction Scores? Net Promoter? Brand Awareness? Product Satisfaction?

All great data, but too often contact center leaders overlook the value a VOC program can bring to leaders. In fact, it can be one of the most powerful tools to help improve employee performance, improve morale, improve turnover, and increase manager efficiencies.

First lets review the 3 basic employee segments you have in your organization.

1. Top Performers. Your rockstar agents!
2. Average Performers. They do good work everyday.
3. Poor Performers: These are the people you wish you could give back to the community!

Here is a typical snapshot of how these employees are...

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4 8 15 16 23 42 – Are You LOST in your contact center?

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Posted on 2012-04-13

I will admit it. I watched ABC’s hit series Lost. It had some great moments, especially in the first 3 or 4 seasons, but once it was all said and done, I still felt lost with Lost!

Because I have spent a lot of time in contact centers, I was most intrigued by the numbers that kept popping up and taunting various characters in the show. Contact centers love numbers!

The numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 frequently recurred in Lost. If you missed the show, I won’t bore you with the details of the various things the numbers represented… Like how each corresponded with a character that was identified as a candidate to replace Jacob as protector of the Island, or that the numbers also formed the coefficients in an equation that predicted mankind’s extinction. Instead I’ll share my favorite role the numbers played in the show and how it translates to what happens in many contact centers today.

During the second season of Lost, the survivors discovered a computer inside...

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‘Twas the Night Before Christmas in the Call Center 2011

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Posted on 2011-12-14

I can’t believe it’s December 2011 and as I post this, it’s only 10 days, 9 hours, and 55 minutes until Christmas! I thought I would share some holiday cheer in the form of a poem I wrote a few years back…

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the center

Not a creature was stirring, not even a printer;

The headsets were hung by the cubicles with care,

In hopes that not too many calls would be there.

Each manager was nestled all snug in their chair,

While visions of call volume made them each stare;

And I was alone, with a 10 page report,

With too many columns for my poor brain to sort!

When up on the reader board there displayed such a...

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How Does Your Contact Center Garden Grow?

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Posted on 2011-10-10

How Does Your Contact Center Garden Grow? Hopefully with an Employee Engagement Plan!

I have the opportunity to speak with one of my clients this week (Amas Tenumah – Teleflora, VP, Operations) at Call Center Demo & Conference is produced by ICMI. You can find more details here : Session details.

We wrote a brief article about our session and I thought I would share it with you here…

Close your eyes and think for a moment about the employees in your organization that speak to hundreds of customers each day. These frontline sales and service professionals will probably speak to more customers in a day than most executives will in a year. Are there some employees in this diverse workgroup that you hope speak to more customers than others? Maybe a few that you hope get the “easy”...

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The Four Steps to Changing Employee Behavior

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Posted on 2011-08-24

One of the primary goals of any leader is to continually develop their staff. Improving employee performance typically requires some sort of sustainable change in behavior. If someone lacks empathy with their customers, they have to purposefully change their actions and statements to successfully close this performance gap. I’ve outlined four key steps to changing employee behavior.

Step 1: Individual Discovery
The first step is Individual Discovery. Every employee has a unique set of strengths, and areas that need improvement. When assessing a team of sales and service employees, quantifiable data is key to identifying individual performance gaps. Typically an assessment can be accomplished in 30 days through observation, or collaborative observations, to identify consistent patterns of employee behavior. This allows you to see the areas where an employee truly shines, their comfort zones, and also the gaps in performance. Time is one of the largest...

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One Step Beyond Listening to the Voice of the Customer (VOC)

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Posted on 2011-07-15

Why should we understand our customer’s needs and wants? Because thats the most cost effective way to run an organization. The formula is simple:
Customers Needs & Wants
+
Company Actions & Strategies
=
Highest Level of Services at the Lowest Cost Possible

Determining what you should STOP doing for your customers is sometimes the most profitable decision you can make.

My company helps create customer collaboration, and as a result we are able to involve the customers in many aspects of service delivery. We help you put your customers to work coaching and quality monitoring your employees. Who better to provide a QM score than the actual customer the person interacted with?

Our clients using our hosted application have their customers participating in employee performance appraisals, quality...

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Quality Monitoring – What’s Missing?

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Posted on 2011-07-12

Call Centers typically implement Quality Monitoring to monitor the customer experience, improve employee performance, and ultimately improve the customer experience. Granted there are others reasons including compliance, security, etc.

Now, consider how this accomplished and tell me if something is missing.

We pay one group of employees, to listen to the employees that we pay to help our customers.

or

We pay an outsourcer, to listen to the employees that we pay to help our customers.

What’s missing? The Customer!

This creates a situation of subjectivity, debate, inconsistencies, etc.
Why not leverage the voice of the customer in your quality process? Engaging the customer in your QM process allows you to calibrate managers, employees and customers. Customers drive performance on all levels. They help to reduce cost, increase accuracy, increase experience measurement, increase encouragement and often increase their...

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Call Center Bingo & Other Games for Your Contact Center

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Posted on 2011-05-20

Thanks for visiting my site! Contact me or visit my company website to start a free trial of our hosted CDM software. CDM allows your customers to help coach and improve your employee's performance. Visit the Tamer Partners Corporation website at www.tamerpartners.com to find out how!

Do you play games in your contact center? Handling customer contact can create stress so why not bring a little fun into your center that improves morale while increasing productivity?
What games do you play in your contact center? Sometimes a game of bingo can improve schedule adherence and attendance. Making mystery calls that randomly ask agents customer service trivia questions can improve skills or product knowledge. Playing games can create a team that works hard. I’ve had some people ask me for the details on adherence/attendance bingo, which is great to implement on Mondays or any other day prone to high absenteeism. Here are some tips...

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Ten Ways to Cure Boredom in Your Contact Center

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Posted on 2011-05-12

Working in a contact center can sometimes become a boring or tedious job. Often times I’m asked about ideas to make the job less monotonous while engaging employees. Here is an updated list of ideas from my book “Contact Center Ideas” which you can buy here. Enjoy!

10. Accurate Staffing and Forecasting.
Boredom in the call center may be a direct result of an inaccurate forecast and schedule. Over staffing can lead to high “available” time causing the agent to face very large “gaps” between calls. This may also have a negative effect on the agents who may be understaffed during other shifts, resulting in burnout or turnover. Workforce management tools can help you manage the “art” of effective forecasting and scheduling.

...

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