BenchmarkPortal, a leading contact center consulting services group, announces the winners of its 2024 Top Contact Centers Contest. The awards are based on contestants' performance on key operating metrics. The winners in each category had the highest ...
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Bruce Belfiore, CEO BenchmarkPortal
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Bruce Belfiore, CEO BenchmarkPortal
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Bruce Belfiore CEO, BenchmarkPortal
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Bruce Belfiore, CEO BenchmarkPortal
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Bruce Belfiore CEO, BenchmarkPortal Transitioning from a traditional contact center model to an AI-based model can be a daunting and complex process, but it is essential to meet the changing needs and expectations of customers. Here are some steps to consider ...
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BenchmarkPortal, a leading contact center consulting services group, announces the winners of its 2023 Top Contact Centers Contest. The awards are based on contestants' performance on key operating metrics. The winners in each category had the highest ...
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Introduction Elevating the Customer Experience (CX) is an obsession for the contact center industry, and rightly so. The experiences that customers have with your contact center condition the way they think about you as a supplier of goods and services and as ...
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BenchmarkPortal conducted a survey on behalf of eGain to find the state of agent experience (AX) in contact centers in the US. The survey also found from agents how good contact center knowledge is in helping them provide customer service. The survey was held ...
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BenchmarkPortal, a leading contact center consulting services group, announces the winners of its 2022 Top Contact Centers Contest. The awards are based on contestants' performance on key operating metrics. The winners in each category had the highest ...
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BY BRUCE BELFIORE | September 30, 2021
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Santa Barbara, CA – 76.64% of surveyed agents believe that their respective organizations are focused on Customer Satisfaction according to BenchmarkPortal's 2020 Agent Voices Report. The survey reports that 45.66% of the respondents "strongly agree" to the ...
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Santa Barbara, CA – Despite well-publicized challenges, BenchmarkPortal’s Agent Voices Report finds that a great majority of contact center agents are proud to work for their respective companies. While the calculated score for the question, “I am proud to ...
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(Updated February 2, 2021) By Bruce Belfiore We have all seen photographs of sinkholes that have swallowed buildings whole. Weak underpinnings can have tragic consequences; what you don’t see can really hurt you! In the contact center world, organizational ...
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BenchmarkPortal, a leading contact center consulting services group, announces the winners of its 2020 Top Contact Centers Contest. The awards are based on contestants' performance on key operating metrics. The winners in each category had the highest ...
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By Bruce Belfiore | February 29, 2020 COVID-19, more commonly referred to as the Coronavirus, is spreading rapidly as I write this in February, 2020. As a result, there are contact center managers worldwide who are wondering what to expect and how best to ...
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BY BRUCE BELFIORE | September 12, 2019 The end of the year brings two budget items for most managers: Spending what’s left of this year’s budget Submitting (and advocating for) next year’s budget. For contact center managers these are important items, for ...
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BY BRUCE BELFIORE | September 9, 2019
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BenchmarkPortal, a leading contact center consulting services group, announces the winners of its 2019 Top Contact Centers Contest. The awards are based on contestants' performance data on key operating metrics. The winners in each category had the highest ...
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BY BRUCE BELFIORE | September 28, 2018 Are you prepared for Customer Service Week? Customer Service Week is October 1-5, 2018. Find opportunities to bring forth stories and experiences about customers. Find powerful ways to get your colleagues to put ...
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CallTalk™ Caramels: Sweet Snippets from BenchmarkPortal’s Best CallTalk Episodes Tip of the day: The investments you make in your people (including their work environment) are your most important investments - and will provide you with positive Return on ...
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BenchmarkPortal, a leading contact center consulting services group, announces the winners of its 2018 Top Contact Centers Contest. Participants submitted performance data on key operating metrics. The winners in each category had the highest statistical ...
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Like any other work environment, call centers can either become a place of joy or the proverbial dungeon – that place to which we must go to serve out our time. If you find yourself dreading work each day, it’s time to take action. Some simple changes can ...
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Industry conferences are powerful when they allow you to make personal connections, hear compelling new concepts and send you home with your head full of ideas on how to improve your center. I will be attending numerous events this year, but two I am really ...
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Where Data Turns Into Action, Producing Measurable Results! This blog will be perky and pointed. There are some things in life you just have to do - - and you get a lot out of them. Benchmarking is one of them. True, some contact centers just seem to bump ...
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As the curtain rises on 2018, contact center managers should make resolutions to lead their operations to measurably higher levels of performance and preparedness for the future. Keep it simple or you will feel overwhelmed. Bring things down to three ...
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Learn about the low cost, high value technology that optimizes any Queue Time you cannot eliminate - - in a way your customers will love! •Earn money from your queue and hold times, or •Enhance your branding message during queue, or •Increase cross-sell ...
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BY BRUCE BELFIORE | September 29, 2017 Are you prepared for Customer Service Week? Customer Service Week is October 2-6, 2017. Find opportunities to bring forth stories and experiences about customers. Find powerful ways to get your colleagues to put ...
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BY BRUCE BELFIORE | September 29, 2017 Security breaches in the contact center environment can be enormously expensive and damaging, so it is worth real money to approach these matters the right way. It is important to foster a strong security culture ...
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BY DEBBIE FRAZIER & BRUCE BELFIORE | September 19, 2017 “When the team comes together to plan on a regular basis using a Huddle Board, we become more high-functioning and efficient and accomplish so much more with our teams.” – Debbie Frazier
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BY CHRIS TOMSA | September 21, 2017 Some articles give you pointers on how to manage. This article will give you a creative new way to think about managing. How often do we watch a great musical performance without considering the countless hours of training, ...
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BY BRUCE BELFIORE | September 18, 2017 I know. It’s not exactly Independence Day or Christmas, but Customer Service Week (CSW) still deserves some thought and celebration. In the U.S. it comes between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, which seems appropriate. After ...
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BY BRUCE BELFIORE | September 6, 2017 I think it was college basketball legend John Wooden of UCLA who said “coaching is teaching.” So if you are trying to build your contact center team, channel your inner teacher!
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If you have an issue with agent motivation, it can weigh you down in really unpleasant ways. Going to work isn’t fun for you, interactions are strained and performance is low. Those poor or mediocre reviews of your center on social media sites don’t help ...
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Four Ideas to Help Retool Your WFM Planning for the Coming Storms I was struck by a report that tornadoes were spawned from a Hurricane in Texas. As if a hurricane is not already too much! The idea that a concentrated danger can be found within a broader ...
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Every contact center wants to deliver great customer service - - the kind of service that will boost satisfaction scores and contribute to loyalty. However, is this enough?
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“Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
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Agent Turnover is costly and disruptive to call centers - - and it is going up as the economy improves. Our benchmark data over the last decade show that since 2014, agent turnover is heading back toward pre-recession peaks.
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Contact center managers are caught in a triangle: they have to satisfy their bosses by satisfying their customers, which requires satisfied and productive employees. Increasingly, the employees they have to satisfy belong to the millennials of Generation-Y.
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You may have seen the clever ad about the young German Coast Guard officer who receives a Mayday call from a British ship that is going down. “We’re sinking, we’re sinking!” yells the Englishman. The German calmly asks: “Vat are you sinking (thinking) about?” ...
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More and more contact centers are part of multi-national enterprises. Either as a result of organic growth, or as a result of trans-border mergers, contact center managers are increasingly part of a polyglot corporate community. However, most managers live in ...
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First call resolution (FCR) is best defined as the percentage of calls coming into your center that were satisfied completely on the first call, whether by IVR or by an agent. The goals of FCR include better agent performance, increased customer satisfaction, ...
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When agents are faced with a challenging question and do not have the answer, they generally have one of two options; 1) place the caller on hold, while they look for the answer, or 2) transfer the call to someone with the requisite knowledge. Thus we see a ...
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I consider First Contact Resolution (FCR) the “magic metric” for call centers, because it has impact on both quality and costs. Thus, when you take steps to improve it, you add value to your enterprise, both in terms of loyalty and bottom line. Most managers ...
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Ok. Here’s my bid for a Nobel. One of the macro questions for the customer contact industry is: “Does a robust customer contact industry correlate with higher economic growth?” The implications of this question are enormous. If such a relationship can be ...
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“If you chuck away too many things, you end up discovering there was value in them.” This quote from Prince Charles is a warning to our sector. The customer contact industry is prone to vogues just like any other. Several years ago it was fashionable to be ...
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Mobile is seen as a big challenge by most of the contact center industry - - and rightly so. However, it also offers some wonderful opportunities, one of which is aimed squarely at your collections function. Traditionally, a right party connect has required ...
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There are literally thousands of contact centers that are on (or over) the cusp of needing advanced workforce management systems. Continuing to spreadsheet your workforce needs as your center grows and becomes more complex may seem like a thrifty thing to do ...
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Customer feedback is only worthwhile when it is used to change behaviors within the organization to improve the customer experience. Yet most companies find it challenging to design and implement a truly effective customer voice program that adheres to best ...
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Do you know what your true cost of turnover is? When I ask this question to groups of call center managers, few raise their hands. Yet it is important to know how much it costs to recruit, on-board and train agents for two main economic reasons: a) turnover ...
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Do you know what your average cost per call is? If not, you should make the effort to compute it. It is a key metric because important decisions should take it into account, including staffing decisions. Consider one center that had an abandon rate of 6.5%. ...
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We hear a lot about “big data” - - but what has it done for you? For many, the answer is “not much”…yet. However, recently concluded research results indicate big data may help you hire better in the very near future.
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Industry-specific benchmarking is the baseline for best practice analytics because it is the essential first step in analyzing your situation against other contact centers that take similar calls and service similar customers. Without this competitive ...
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The Home-Based Agent (HBA) continues to gain popularity within the contact center industry for compelling reasons of:
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The Home-Based Agent (HBA) continues to gain popularity within the contact center industry for compelling reasons of:
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The surveys taken by the respondents included two open-ended questions:
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Our research showed some interesting results when surveys were broken down by geographical region. The following information is for the U.S. only:
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There has been much speculation but little hard data regarding the relative merits of large centers vs. smaller centers. Our research offers a window into the impact of center size on agent satisfaction, which is important given the attendant impact of agent ...
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