Companies looking for a competitive edge must convert their reactive, cost-laden contact programs into proactive, revenue-generating, "real-time" contact centres. Real-time is a big "buzzword" in the customer service field right now, and this book offers real, practical strategies for turning the call centre into a real-time operation that generates profits. These centres provide an outstanding customer experience, enhance loyalty, create new revenue, reduce expenses, and streamline the flow of information between the center and the rest of the company. "The Real-Time Contact Center" shows how to implement one.
"The Real-Time Contact Center" is a practical guide to building a service infrastructure that will simultaneously exceed customers' expectations and build revenues.
This is the only book available today that provides a very readable, step-by-step guide for managing an incoming call center. The book combines theory with practical advice and is filled with over 100 charts and graphs, several case studies and an extensive glossary and index. Readers will learn how to: achieve service level with quality in an era of more transactions, growing complexity and heightened caller expectations; understand the "how" behind best practices; boost caller satisfaction; win top management's support; and discover what separates a good call center from a great one.
Call Center Forecasting & Scheduling There is simply no way to establish and operate an effective call center environment without a solid understanding of the principles behind forecasting, staffing, scheduling, service level, queuing dynamics and real-time management. Originally published in the pages of Call Center Management Review, these articles were selected for their educational value, practicality, and most importantly, coverage of timeless call center management principles. - Amazon
This book gives an accessible overview of the role and potential of mathematical optimization in call centers. It deals extensively with all aspects of workforce management, but also with topics such as call routing and the scheduling of multiple channels. It does so without going into the mathematics, but by focusing on understanding its consequences. This way the reader will get familiar with workload forecasting, the Erlang formulas, simulation, and so forth, and learn how to improve call center performance using it. The book is primarily meant for call center professionals involved in planning and business analytics, but also call center managers and researchers will find it useful. There is an accompanying website which contains several online calculators.
Tips on making your call center a genuine profit center In North America, call centers are a $13 billion business, employing 4 million people. For managers in charge of a call center operation, this practical, user-friendly guide outlines how to improve results measurably, following its principles of revenue generation, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. In addition, this new edition addresses many industry changes, such as the new technology that's transforming today's call center and the location-neutral call center. It also helps readers determine whether it's cost-efficient to outsource operations and looks at the changing role and requirements of agents. The ultimate call center guide, now revised and updated The authors have helped over 60 companies improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their call center operations Offers comprehensive guidance for call centers of all sizes, from 20-person operations to multinational businesses With the latest edition of Call Centers For Dummies, managers will have an improved arsenal of techniques to boost their center's bottom line.
"Advice from a Call Center Geek: Rethinking Call Center Operations is a field manual for the 21st century contact center. Practical, poignant, and funny, Tom dishes out amazing real-world advice that has made his organization successful. From culture to education to incentives, Tom addresses the key areas to make your contact center world-class!"Paul HerdmanHead of Customer ExperienceNICE inContactAdvice From a Call Center Geek takes a look at a new way of running today's high end contact center. Tom Laird, the CEO of award winning Expivia Interaction Marketing, 600 seat BPO call center guides you through the process of developing a world class operation.This book will take you through the process of evaluating and changing your call center's culture, how to look beyond a resume to hire the "right" associates and show you how to educate for quality while maintaining high level management. Advice from a Call Center Geek will make you rethink how the call center manager of today should be looking at running their call center.
One of America's foremost public intellectuals, Jean Bethke Elshtain has been on the frontlines in the most hotly contested and deeply divisive issues of our time. Now in Real Politics, Elshtain gives further proof of her willingness to speak her mind, courting disagreement and even censure from those who prefer their ideologies neat. At the center of Elshtain's work is a passionate concern with the relationship between political rhetoric and political action. For Elshtain, politics is a sphere of concrete responsibility. Political speech should, therefore, approach the richness of actual lives and commitments rather than present impossible utopias. In her essays, Elshtain finds in the writings of V clav Havel, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Camus a language appropriate to the complexity of everyday life and politics, and she critiques philosophers and writers who distance us from a concrete, embodied world. She argues against those repressive strains within contemporary feminism which insist that families and even sexual differentiation are inherently oppressive. Along the way, she challenges an ideology of victimization that too often loses sight of individual victims in its pursuit of abstract goals. Elshtain reaffirms the quirky and by no means simple pleasures of small-town life as a microcosm of the human condition and considers the current crisis in American education and its consequences for democracy. Beyond exploring the details of political life over the past two decades, Real Politics advocates a via media politics that avoids unacceptable extremes and serves as a model for responsible political discourse. Throughout her diverse and insightful writings, Elshtain champions a civic philosophy that tends to the dignity of everyday life as a democratic imperative of the first order. "Jean Bethke Elshtain is a person of rare intellect. The moral wisdom that pervades these essays reminds us that when all is said and done politics is about the life and death of real people who are anything but abstractions. Her erudition is remarkable, but equally stunning is her eye for the significant. What she is so good at is helping us see the moral and political significance of the everyday." -- Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University " Real Politics serves as a forceful reminder that Jean Elshtain has been dealing with the real world in twenty-five years of powerful essaying. Transcending ideological categories, she writes out of hope that human beings can enjoy those capacities of reason and faith which make them human. It is a pleasure to be reintroduced to her sustained intelligence." -- Alan Wolfe, Boston University
