A while ago, our Chatham client delivery center in Ontario, Canada helped a major automotive company change the way it measures customer satisfaction. With CES (Customer Effort Score), we began looking at the “effort” that customers expended to get their issues resolved.

Delighting customers has been the backbone of contact center management for many decades. Companies spend millions on front line training to ensure agents offer a delightful/pleasant interaction...

Anyone who’s ever worked in contact center management understands that the job is not for the faint of heart. Dealing with daily problems is inherent in the business process outsourcing environment, which deals with multiple stakeholders all at once. And the balancing act of satisfying customers, clients and large teams of staff in meeting highly measurable tasks can leave everyone feeling stressed and pressured. So how can floor managers and team leaders minimize the stress to run a high-performance operation? Creating a leadership culture in which not only the managers, but all levels of staff, agree to abide by the principles of ownership...

Editor’s Note: To continue with our Crystal Ball 2012 blogs, Sax Krishna, Global Leader, TIME and BFS provides fascinating commentary on the business models, markets, and consumer focus shaping the telecom and technology industries in 2012.

Editor’s Note: To continue with our Crystal Ball 2012 blogs, Scott Shafer, Global Leader, Manufacturing, Strategic Industries, and Minacs Marketing Solutions, shares his views on how business process outsourcers can prepare to meet the demands of the Manufacturing industry in 2012.

There are many ways to ensure enchatment for your customers. Marketing guru, Guy Kawasaki defines “enchantment” as a process of delighting people with a product, service, organization, or idea whose outcome is voluntary, long-lasting and mutually beneficial. Today, many companies have deployed chat support successfully because it is user-friendly, cost effective and enhances customer experience. Therefore, “EnChatment” could definitely drive customer “enchantment” (pun intended)!

Conventionally, chat has been used as a customer...

Editor’s Note: We hope you’ve been enjoying reading our Crystal Ball 2012 series:

• The first post from Minacs CEO Deepak Patel captured his “take” on developments in outsourcing globally.
• Minacs’ President-APAC, Milind Godbole shared his predictions from the perspective of a veteran outsourcing services practitioner in this post

Here, Anil Bhalla, President-North America & Europe at Minacs offers sharp predictions for technology trends that may be changing business and insights on how they will...

Usage monitoring of home energy consumption in real time seemed like a no-fail idea. Who wouldn’t want to save money and help the environment? However, consumer uptake failed to materialize, as we saw last year with announcements that Google was discontinuing PowerMeter and Microsoft’s competing Hohm service will be discontinued on May 31, 2012. So does the failure of home energy usage monitoring provide a lesson for the telecom industry?

Around-the-clock work hours, a fast paced life and unforgiving deadlines – that’s outsourcing for you! In this scenario a person becoming a Team Leader (TL) for the first time experiences a typical exhilaration to exhaustion cycle. The modern day workplace has created thousands of opportunities for young people to lead groups. Usually they are exceptional individual contributors who habitually outperform their peers. Their constant success invariably earns them the “higher role” or larger responsibility that they have long aspired for. The fascination for this higher role usually stems from a basic sense of comparison between oneself and the immediate...

Is your outsourcing provider selling you contact centers? That’s what has traditionally been bought and sold. But as a client that’s not what you are paying for! Contact centers are after all just infrastructure – at two levels. The first consists of hardware and software including, facility, networks, computers, furniture, etc., which by itself can do little for you. The second level includes the technology and people with real domain knowledge that can add value to your business. You need the combination to deliver quality customer service. Clearly it’s not contact centers, but business results that you are interested in. n the telecom industry, as I mentioned in my earlier...

More and more consumers of all ages are turning to social media not only as a means to stay in touch with friends but also to share ideas, look for help, express views, etc. Many companies are leveraging this medium to advertise and spread “viral” content to create a “buzz”. This presents a unique This presents a unique challenge to customer service teams today. Treating social media as “just another channel” will result in very poor results and has the potential to negatively impact your brand (in some cases it can be worse than doing nothing at all). Social media networks are based on trust. To earn your customer’s trust you must enter this arena with...

Customer care is an ever-evolving area. Keeping up with trends is absolutely critical to staying in the game. Most companies are constantly seeking newer, more effective and cost efficient customer care techniques to engage both existing and potential customers. In such a scenario, outsourcing services providers are under constant pressure to not only adopt, but also improve emerging customer care trends. Of the latest trends in customer care, the ones likely to make deeper inroads into the industry include leveraging two-way SMS and social media. Studies have shown that a large number of people prefer SMS to live calls, because...

It’s true. Customer satisfaction sets you apart from your competition. Keep your customers happy, build customer experience and they will continue to be loyal to your brand. Even endorse it. But what drives customer satisfaction? Those small but significant factors that make customers choose one brand over the other? Not surprisingly, it’s the simple things! My list of the top three drivers includes Knowledge: In the world of outsourcing, it’s critical that you are able to solve the customer’s problem or answer his query satisfactorily. Your reps need to be well equipped, or in other words, knowledgeable enough to do so. The customer has called you for help and is looking...