There’s a fast-service restaurant near my house that specializes in frozen dairy products. Let’s say it rhymes with Fairy Shmeen. My order is usually something fairly simple. The drive-thru experience is usually pretty quick and painless. Sometimes, however, there’s a problem, and I have to repeat my order several times. Sometimes I have to repeat it after I’ve gotten to the window. Each time there’s a problem, it’s the same girl taking my order. I’m sure she’s an excellent employee. Maybe seniority dictates that she should have the headset. But she can’t seem to get the hang of it. At least not in my case.
Continue reading “Getting it Right When Some Get it Wrong”
More Storage Needed! Ways to Increase Your Contact Center’s Capacity
We’re heading on a bit of a vacation this weekend. I needed to install the roof rails and cargo carrier on the vehicle because we just don’t have enough room in the trunk area for all the things we will be bringing. More storage was necessary so we made the adjustment. You may have to make a few adjustments as well in your contact center in order to increase the amount of accessible storage space. Continue reading “More Storage Needed! Ways to Increase Your Contact Center’s Capacity”
Managing Do Not Call Lists
Sometimes part of customer service is making sure that you never bother them again. It’s a sad part of the call center business, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Since the United States Federal Trade Commission established the National Do Not Call (DNC) Registry in 2003, DNC blocking earned extra importance.
In most call centers, there are two kinds of Do Not Call lists: Continue reading “Managing Do Not Call Lists”
Testing and Monitoring With Live Data
When you’re trying something new, like testing a web service or getting data from your dialplan, it’s important to be able to ensure the data you expect is where it’s supposed to be and in the form you expect.
Small Tips for Keeping Your Contact Center ACD Running Smoothly
This idea sort of came to me as I dropped off my vehicle this morning to get maintenance done due to two recalls. The letter I received in the mail described the issues quite nicely and while neither of the fixes were completely critical, ie. my vehicle won’t explode, they were definitely recommended as they will certainly help sustain the vehicle’s longevity. Plus, getting recalls done is free, so why not right? Here’s a few pointers on how you can keep your contact center ACD running smoothly. Continue reading “Small Tips for Keeping Your Contact Center ACD Running Smoothly”
Putting Your Web Service to the Test
As you can guess from recent topics, web services have been a hot issue around here. Whether it’s in the dialplan or the agent scripting, we find that call centers are increasingly looking for live data delivered in real time, and web services are a great way to do this.
Where things do sometimes falter is on initial setup and testing. Hours and hours get spent diagnosing whether an issue is on the remote side or in the way the receiver is interpreting the data. Tests get set up and run, the results are checked, then some incremental change is made and the test run again.
It really doesn’t have to be that complicated.
There are a couple of tools that we use to help cut down the testing and verification time:
1) Just create a file and have it downloaded.
If you’re sending a request and expecting an XML or JSON file with certain fields back, just create a simple valid case in the form of a file. Break out your favourite text editor and write it out. It could be something as simple as:
Small Tweaks Can Make a Big Impact for Usabilty
Mouse clicks. It’s no secret that reducing mouse clicks makes life easier for users. The fewer times you need to hear ‘click-click-click’ in the run of a day, the better off we all are. How did a relatively small tweak in the Q-Suite make a big impact for users?
Continue reading “Small Tweaks Can Make a Big Impact for Usabilty”
Keeping Minions Under Control: Quality Monitoring Tools for Your Contact Center ACD
Those little yellow characters from the Despicable Me movies are getting their own stand alone film and it’s out this weekend. If you are like me, you find them absolutely hilarious and chuckle every time you see them do anything, so the film should be highly entertaining I would think. They can go a little off the rails at times if you don’t keep them under control and the same behavior has a possibility of occurring at your contact center, with less than hysterical results. Here are a few tools you can use to help limit those events in the contact center. Continue reading “Keeping Minions Under Control: Quality Monitoring Tools for Your Contact Center ACD”
Saying Goodbye To MeetMe
MeetMe has been an invaluable tool for multiple purposes in Asterisk. Some call center software has traditionally used it for connecting agents to calls. More advanced call center systems have used it to manage things such as transfers, where you may have three participants (or more) in the same call. Certainly it has shown its worth in its intended purpose, voice conferencing. Continue reading “Saying Goodbye To MeetMe”
A World Wide Web of Data for Your Contact Center
A long, long time ago, we had a request to integrate with a third party lead system. There were a couple of moving parts that made it not 100% easy to do:
Continue reading “A World Wide Web of Data for Your Contact Center”