Destiny’s disc (I still like physical media for games if I can help it) has been the exclusive tenant of my PS4’s disc drive since launching on September 9th, 2014. I’ve been through the campaign, completed Nightfalls, the Vault of Glass, and Crota’s End many times. The latest expansion, House of Wolves, dropped May 19th, and I am completely enjoying my time there. I’m mostly a casual player, so I don’t get bent out of shape if I fail to reach the max level on my characters (I do have a 34 Hunter though) or I don’t get all the best gear as quickly as possible. I’ll get there at some point. However I’ve already seen threads and forum posts pop up from the hardcore players who have already maxed out all 3 characters and now they are asking the question ‘What else is left for me to do?’ This can apply to how your contact leads are dialed. Let’s have a look. Continue reading “Progressing Through Destiny’s House of Wolves at My Own Pace: Take the Same Approach for Your Contact Center Leads”
Farewell David Letterman! Retiring (Your Leads) Can Be a Good Thing
David Letterman had a pretty spectacular career as a late night talk show host. He started his late night gig at NBC in 1982 and ended his storied career this week over on CBS. That’s 33 years of being on late night television. Impressive. However, sometimes you just have to call it quits and retire. Contact center leads can also be gracefully retired and there can be a few reasons as to why your contact center would want to follow this route. Continue reading “Farewell David Letterman! Retiring (Your Leads) Can Be a Good Thing”
Timeout! Sports, Kids, and Contact Centers
Timeouts in the sporting world are almost always used in an effective manner. Sure there’s the odd time where it turns into an amazing disaster (Chris Webber in the 1993 NCAA Finals comes to mind), but for the most part, they are used as methods to take a breather, either to get your players rested for a final push down the stretch or to get a break from getting overwhelmed by the opposing team. In terms of kids, timeouts are administered when a child needs a break, either from misbehaving or being overstimulated. How can we apply timeouts in our contact center? Let’s have a look at a few of the ways the Q-Suite can use these. Continue reading “Timeout! Sports, Kids, and Contact Centers”
Avengers Assemble! Gathering the Pieces You Need for Your Contact Center ACD
It’s a big weekend for movie fans. The first weekend in May unofficially begins the summer season for Hollywood blockbusters, and there’s never been an absolute lock for a tentpole like Avengers: Age of Ultron. After the first Avengers film completely shattered the record for the opening weekend take with a lofty $207M, the sequel is expected to surpass that. Quite incredible. Just as the Marvel universe needed to gather Earth’s mightiest heroes, you too will need to wrangle up the proper components for your contact center ACD. Let’s have a look. Continue reading “Avengers Assemble! Gathering the Pieces You Need for Your Contact Center ACD”
3 Minor Annoyances of Not Having Physical Control Over Contact Center Hardware
A situation came up this week where we needed to collaborate with a server colocation in order to rebuild a server. Overall, the process was very smooth and went by without much of a hitch. However, not having full physical access to the server definitely slowed us up a bit. Here’s why:
- Communication Delays – Regardless of how quickly and efficiently your colocation company works, there are always going to be delays, even if they are extremely minor. Every time something was completed on their end, they would respond to an open ticket, either waiting for further instructions or a simple approval. If you housed your server on site and had a dedicated technician working on it, these small communication delays can be eliminated and your contact center can be back in action that much faster.
- Server Layout – Ideally, your servers for a particular contact center would be racked together in a logical order, connected to common networking equipment, and likely all accessible via some type of switching box, like KVM. While this may entirely be the case at the colocation, it’s not a 100% certainty that your servers will be arranged in this fashion. Having multiple points of access to the servers can cause issues if, for instance, the power strip that has 3 out of 6 servers on happens to malfunction.
- Server Room Access – You have no control who has access to the room or rooms where your servers are located. This can cause small random issues like in our particular instance this week where somehow an ethernet cable became unseated on the primary interface right before we were about to reintroduce the newly built server into the contact center. This caused bad things to happen but we caught it in time. We are not sure exactly how it happened, but cables that lock in place do not magically become unlocked. Someone likely accidentally moved or hit the cable enough to cause the network disruption. Once we opened a dialogue with them, someone needed to go in and reseat the cable, which took much longer than it would have if the servers were in house.
You can see fairly clearly that the three issues above are pretty minor overall and none were catastrophic in nature. I’ve talked before about using a hosted platform and how great it can be for certain people and my stance had definitely not changed there. But as with everything in life, nothing’s perfect.
Game of Thrones Episodes Leak! How to Prevent a Similar Event in your Contact Center
On the weekend the first four episodes of Game of Thrones Season 5 had been leaked on the web. It appears that the leaks were made by a person or group on HBO’s list of approved recipients. HBO is assessing the leak and will deal with it as they see fit. The task of avoiding spoilers for the four episodes is going to be fairly tough, I think, but if you’re a watcher of the series, I sincerely hope we can all stay spoiler-free. Continue reading “Game of Thrones Episodes Leak! How to Prevent a Similar Event in your Contact Center”
Customize Your Experience!
We’ve talked a few times in older posts about how agents can effectively use scripts and how scripts can be created with ease in the Q-Suite. Aside from the scripts being used by agents in day to day operations and how to actually construct the scripts themselves, we haven’t necessarily talked about how an administrator can manage these scripts. Let’s do that now. Continue reading “Customize Your Experience!”
Why are my calls disconnecting? I’m not in an elevator!
We ran into a bit of a troubleshooting situation fairly recently. A few different clients were reporting that calls were disconnecting. Not only were calls disconnecting, but they were disconnecting at reproducible durations. Right away, given the nature of the drops, we can rule out normal every day occurrences, like horrible cell phone reception or driving through a tunnel. Continue reading “Why are my calls disconnecting? I’m not in an elevator!”
Voicemail in the Call Center ACD
We are going to talk a bit about voicemail in this post. Whether you like or dislike voicemail as a whole, I think we can agree that it is a fairly important medium for communication. Personally, I am not a huge fan of leaving and/or checking voicemail, but I may very well be in the minority. Let us go over some of the ways to configure and use voicemail in the Q-Suite. Continue reading “Voicemail in the Call Center ACD”
Recycle Times in the Call Center ACD
Outbound dialing is still an integral part of the contact center acd landscape. Leads can be generated in a multitude of ways, such as purchasing a list or a website inquiry, and depending on the weighted priority, they may be called in different fashions. It’s abundantly clear, that when outbound dialing, your agents will not connect to every number they dial. When this case happens, the agents disposition the call in a relevant manner, and carry on with the next call. We need to make sure that these non-connected get called back in a timely fashion. This is where we use recycle times. Continue reading “Recycle Times in the Call Center ACD”