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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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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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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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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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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While most managers do not consider commuting distance in their recruiting and hiring decisions, the following data challenges this norm.
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The over 5000 agents surveyed for our study broke down as follows between Full-time and Part-time:
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Parsing out agent satisfaction by tenure provides some interesting results:
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Agents participating in this survey N = 4,683 (90.4%) Leads participating in this survey N = 497 (9.6%) The role of “Lead” or “Team Lead” varies from center to center. In general, however, the Lead is a senior agent who supports newer agents, handles ...
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The skills of ‘taking initiative and taking ownership’ are being evaluated on more performance reviews these days at all levels of responsibility. Some organizations nurture these skills and harness the results more than others. Agents, like all employees, ...
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This area is of obvious importance to agent satisfaction. Agents tend to stay and be satisfied where they feel valued and appreciated.
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Communication is the grease that makes things happen smoothly in contact centers. It is also an area in which there is often the greatest variance between management and agent perceptions. Managers sometimes feel they are doing a good job of communicating to ...
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Research shows that the relationship between a contact center agent and his or her supervisor is a crucial component of agent satisfaction. Fostering good working relationships at the team level is one of management’s most important functions.
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Contact center professionals are, in general, people who feed off of the approval of others, both external (customers) and internal (managers and colleagues). Superiors who understand this dynamic and who act on it help foster positive feelings and superior ...
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The success of any service organization depends on continuous improvement, and the key to improvement is found through listening to the voice of the customer via direct surveys. There are numerous methods available to collect customer feedback, which include ...
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Listening to the voice of the customer is not just a cliché - - it is a key for measuring performance and for determining areas requiring improvement. Successful centers usually have open channels and open minds when it comes to gathering information, both ...
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Agents exist to satisfy the needs of customers. Most agents feel this keenly and appreciate working for a company that is structured to support the goal of superior customer service.
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Superior coaching is a key differentiator for contact centers. Content, delivery and follow up are all important to a great coaching program. Technology and training that facilitate the coaching function make sure that the participants have the information ...
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Quality is key to customer satisfaction and loyalty. It is important that agents perceive a true commitment to quality on the part of their organizations, and that they feel the processes aimed at guaranteeing quality are working properly.
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As every lawyer knows, the three elements of a contract are “offer”, “acceptance” and “consideration” (compensation). A clear, common understanding of what the offer entails is key, and a reasonable level of mutual satisfaction with the compensation is ...
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Properly selected and trained agents require the support of good technology to allow them success with customers. Proper IVR and routing capabilities, good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, well-chosen and continuously maintained Knowledge ...
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Job initiation and career prospects are both very important to contact center agents, as they are to all employees. This category starts with questions about initial training and transition and then asks questions about the individual’s professional and ...
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Location, location, location! Whether for new companies trying to establish their first center, or existing operations looking to expand or relocate their centers, the business of site selection and optimization presents some challenging issues. Our panel of ...
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