It may be hard to believe but, 67% of organizations in the industrial world find it extremely difficult to identify, develop, engage and retain their talented people. As a matter of fact, many deploy no talent management strategy at all. This is often due to insufficient time, money and expertise to internally and proactively manage this emerging priority. Most organizations actively spend thousands on carefully seeking out and identifying top talent but do nothing to continue developing that same important talent resource.

• Poor succession planning wipes an estimated $8.4 billion from the stock market value of the top Fortune 100 companies every year
• Management retention is identified as a negligent error issue by nearly every independent business analysis; the cost of recruiting a middle manager alone is between 33% and 65% of their annual salary
• 78% of organizations in the US and UK experience talent retention problems as opposed to 67% worldwide
• Despite the challenging economy, US and UK employees are among the most likely to consider leaving their job during the next 12 months, with 53% of employees specifically stating in exit interviews that they are leaving to fulfill their career development needs elsewhere
• Changing workforce demographics means that leadership and management skills, which are often developed as talent moves up through the lower levels in a company, are in devastatingly short supply

During my tenure working in a call center during college, I learned to play Hearts, had several eating contests (never won), spent weeks getting a radio station to play a song, and did a lot of homework. Suffice it to say, working the evening shift wasn't very busy and we were at least a tad overstaffed. Granted, our average answer time was off the charts and hold times were nonexistent. And, because we created a fun work environment as a team, attrition was quite low. 

While allowing your agents to have a pie eating contest on company time (at their desks) may not be a traditional means of agent retention, managing your workforce is becoming much more of a science. It's a long-held truth that personnel is the biggest cost in a contact center (as high as 70-80%) and training new employees carries a huge cost (as high as $5,000 per employee) so it makes sense that you would want to hang onto your high-performing agents. And along that same vein, many of the strategies that leading companies are using to manage the workforce seem very common sense at face value, but actually implementing them can require breaking down years of assumptions.   Read more»

I am a great driver!

My wife doesn't agree; she thinks I drive too fast and change lanes too often.  My wife has taught our kids, “Daddy drives fast and Mommy drives safe”. In my opinion, anyone slower than me on the road is a slow-poke and anyone faster than me is a madman. 

Two weeks ago I was in New Jersey. After an hour driving I called my wife to tell her, "these people are crazy drivers".  I think I was the slowest person on the road.  People in Jersey speed like their clothes are on fire, obviously madmen or madwomen as the case may be.

The next week I was in Oklahoma City.  People there had the audacity to actually obey the speed limits.  My frustrations mounted every time I hit the road, why would they not drive faster?   Read more»

A couple of weeks ago I discovered a new bakery not far from my home. It was amazing!!! The woman working the counter could not have been cuter. She walked us through every single item in the case, including the back stories of how the recipes were developed. And let me tell you, the strawberry shortcake I had was absolutely divine, and my husband enjoyed a fantastic piece of cake complemented by an ice cold glass of milk (they keep the glasses in the freezer).    Read more»

Desktop real estate is valuable in the contact center realm and we are constantly introducing ways to boost simplicity and efficiency. In this latest episode of On The Line, Heather sits down with Madelyn Gengelbach, Senior Product Marketing Manager, to discuss some delicious comparisons involving our CRM Plug-In Agent. Get a look at some screen captures of the product, showcasing a few key features including click-to-dial, the slide-out panel, our unique ribbon interface and more!

If you are like me, life and work are inextricably linked.  Work has shaped my thinking, determined where I lived and has provided me with my means of support.  In turn, my family has provided me with emotional support and purpose in life.  Work and home, each motivates and nourishes the other.  Along the way, I have learned to balance the two.   Because the two are linked,  I will often blog about family events and how they relate to my job.  What I have related has varied from near death vehicular mishaps to father and son outings in the middle of winter.  I talk about these things because I see corollaries between day-to-day life and my work.

For example, I have told you about camping and how it teaches you to be prepared.  The ground is hard, the night is cold, and your clothes are wet… you had best learn what your environment is going to be like and do your best to be prepared.  I have found that the same is true in work.  Your contact center has SLA’s, costs and people and if your contact center solution cannot provide the services at the level needed, at a cost that you can afford and with a technology that your people can use, then you won’t be in business. Similarly, when I look at inContact, and I consider the design of its network, the architecture of its services, the skill of its staff, the scope of its products and the flexibility of its tools, in my mind I quickly draw comparisons to things like my 4x4 truck, my high tech fleece, my water proof gear, my GPS systems.  Each is instrumental in making my experience (work or play) successful and enjoyable.   Read more»

Just as so many others who watched The Masters, I was amazed and excited for Bubba Watson. The winning shot on the 10th hole of a sudden death playoff match, Bubba hooked a wedge shot from in the trees and landed it on the green. An impossible shot! Astonished by the intensity of this game, it made me think about how company education is like golf. Companies seek to hire great talent, and when they do, the initial investment, after the hiring process, goes into educating those individuals how to “master” the skills they will need, not just do their job, but to excel at it. After all, that’s why we hire them.

As humans we measure how far we walk, how much gas our cars use, how much electricity it takes to light our homes, how much of our budget we spend and don’t. Our lives are governed by measurements from instant to instant. We measure, measure, and measure! Without measurements we don't know whether we spent too much, got any value back or even moved a single inch ahead in the race to win the gold that is life!

We all know this and we see it every day when we punch a time card to see how many hours we worked, or when we pay a bill that measures how much usage we had and how much we owe. The same goes for each aspect of business that affects our lives. Because we deal with vast amounts of simple measuring and metrics so often in our personal lives, we all tend to think that we are quite familiar with what metrics are necessary to measure when it comes to our business processes as well; how to extract them, how to read them, which measurements are important, etc.

But do we really understand the process of professional metric measurement as it relates to our actual business processes? Certainly most of us think we do. When it comes to contact centers, there are the traditional measurements of average talk time (ATT), average handle time (AHT), and even average speed of answer (ASA), as well as some of the more specific metrics like hold time, abandon percentage, occupancy, etc. But do these tell the whole story about our success? Certainly these factors are extremely important, but do they tell us truly whether we are optimized, productive, and successful in our chosen theatre of operation?

In setting up contact centers around the world under widely different conditions, many different metrics have come forward into importance that most traditional environments attach only small significance to. A few of these might include customer loyalty, agent loyalty, agent attrition, agent proficiency, supervisor proficiency, supervisor loyalty, agent knowledge, tool uptime, agent satisfaction and many, many more.   Read more»

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to streamline the agent desktop by integrating all aspects of the call center into a single interface, allowing the agent to focus on the customer, and give the customer a better overall experience. 

As many of you may have seen, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) recently announced that it has formally adopted a proposed change to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) regarding the use of autodialers (also known as robocalls) and pre-recorded messages in calls made to cell phones. The good news, is that InContact has the technical capabilities to support our customers compliance with the new regulations by the effective dates of the new regulations. The ATA created an outline of the key impacts of the new regulations to break down the new regulations and highlight the key changes:

1. The new regulations maintain the prior express consent standard for non-telemarketing calls to cell phones initiated with automated dialing equipment.
2. The new regulations prohibit live operator or prerecorded telemarketing sales calls to cell phones without the recipient’s prior express written consent.
3. The new regulations prohibit prerecorded telemarketing calls to residential numbers without the recipient’s prior express written consent (EBR exemption eliminated).
4. The new regulations change the permissible call abandonment safe harbor to 3%, measured per campaign over 30 days.
5. The new regulations require that live operator abandoned call messages contain an automated, interactive voice- and/or key press-activated opt-out mechanism that enables the called person to make a do-not-call request prior to terminating the call.