|
Welcome The Perfect Agent: Tools and Technology for Coaching Your Support Team Tuesday, 20 October, 3 PM (UK/Europe) How do you motivate people to deliver excellent performance, whether they are in the next cubicle or far away? Communications skills expert Rich Gallagher joins with Citrix Online to share the secrets to getting the best out of today's distributed support team. Topics this Webinar will cover include:
|
October 16, 2009  |
|
|
|
 |
|
WorkForce Management Software Group: Community Version 3.5 Available for General Delivery
Conducted across the UK in August 2009, a joint survey of 2,127 consumers by YouGov and of 90 contact center managers by Corizon, revealed that despite significant investment in technology to increase customer service, strategies are not being delivered in ways that satisfy consumers, agents or businesses. The survey discovered that contact center staff face challenges from the increasing numbers of applications that they need to switch between when responding to customer queries. More than a third (37%) of call center managers cited this as a problem, with 30% saying that it had worsened over the past year. In addition, three quarters (75%) of mangers said that their agents used three to five different software applications to handle customer service queries during a typical working day, and 40% said their agents used 5 or more applications. One manager even admitted that contact center agents used as many as 18 different applications. Of all the consumers surveyed, most (83%) said they had experienced and were frustrated by long waiting times, 69% said they had experienced and were frustrated by repeating information when passed to another agent and 68% had experienced and were frustrated by having to repeat information from a previous call – all of which are consequences of the number of disparate applications that agents are forced to use, compounded by the inaccessibility of information across those applications. As a direct result of the myriad of applications being used in contact centers, 32% of contact center managers surveyed believed their agents' desktops were becoming more unstable. Applications are crashing, freezing and becoming unavailable to frontline staff, as often incompatible software struggles to work together. One in ten managers even felt that ending customer calls due to application instability was their most common problem. In the UK, contact centers represent a critical sector of employment with 958,000 working in more than 5,000 public and private sector call centers, an employment figure expected to increase to over a million by 2012 .
Forrester surveyed respondents on workplace adoption of technologies such as devices -- PCs and laptops -- productivity tools, mobility, collaboration software, intranet portals, and Web 2.0 technologies. Highlights include: Devices. The desktop still dominates the workplace. Three out of four iWorkers use a desktop, and 63 percent of desktop users spend four or more hours per day on it. However, more than one-third of respondents use more than one device at least weekly. Productivity tools. Email, word processing, and spreadsheets are the top three productivity tools used by iWorkers, but even the use of those applications fluctuates greatly. Email is used by 57 percent of iWorkers hourly. However, word processing and spreadsheets are not used as frequently -- only 16 percent and 14 percent, respectively, of iWorkers use these applications every hour. Mobility. Only one in 10 iWorkers has a smartphone for work, but almost one in three iWorkers agree that they use a personal mobile phone for work purposes. There is demand among iWorkers for smartphones. Collaboration. With collaboration tools going widely untapped by companies -- only one in four iWorkers use Web conferencing and one in five use team sites -- email remains the de facto collaboration tool for most professionals, with an 87 percent adoption rate. Intranet portals. Seventy percent of all iWorkers visit the employee portal and 43 percent do so at least daily. Search is the most commonly used resource on the portal, followed by information related to performance reviews and personal goals. Web 2.0 technologies. Surprise -- Gen Y is not leading business adoption of social technologies. Even though 59 percent of these 18-to-29-year-old professionals use social technologies at home, only 14 percent use them in the workplace -- the same percentage as Gen X employees, ages 30 to 43. Instead of social technologies, mobile texting is Gen Y's communication method of choice: 51 percent are using their personal mobile for texting at work.
|
|
The 10 *Worst* Practices for Technical Support and How to Overcome Them This white paper explores 10 of the "worst practices" that are common to customer support operations. Each of these feature a section discussing how these worst practices can creep in to your contact center, and new ways in which to deal with them. We touch on how to eliminate well-intentioned management blunders that can hurt your performance from within, together with good and bad uses of support technology. Taken together, the guidelines in this report represent a summary of a new kind of best practices for support. |
| Good Business
|
|
Leadership: Theory and Practice, Fifth Edition is the market-leading survey text for leadership courses across disciplines. Author Peter Northouse combines an academically robust account of major theories, approaches, models, and themes of leadership with an accessible style and numerous practical exercises to allow students to apply what they learn about leadership both to themselves and to specific contexts and situations. The book is divided into fifteen chapters, which cover all of the key aspects in the leadership field: defining leadership; trait approaches; skills approaches; style approaches; situational approach; contingency theory; path-goal theory; leader-member exchange theory; authentic leadership; transformational leadership; team leadership; psychodynamic approach; diversity and leadership; culture and leadership, and leadership ethics. For more information, or to order your copy...
|
| White Paper: Best Practices for Coaching Your Support Team to Handle Anything This white paper provides a step-by-step game plan for solving your support agents' worst nightmares, based on the author's experience in successfully "turning around" support performance, as well as current research in the psychology of how we communicate with people. In the process, you will learn how specific, procedural skills -- both for how your agents respond to customers, and how you coach your team -- can change everything about how your interact with customers, in a way that will impact both your support metrics and your bottom line. |
| Manage
Your e.Newsletter Subscription Editorial
suggestions, feedback & comments: Advertising
Information: Thank you for reading
RecognizeServiceExcellence.com's weekly newsletter! |
|
||||
