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”
Open or Closed Relationship: Which One is Right for You?
Open source software has come a long way in the last few decades. What was once just a mash of code lying around that lacked features and actual usefulness and usability, can now be full-fledged solutions for individuals and companies alike. Is an open source based software solution right for you or your contact center though? Let’s compare a few points of interest. Continue reading “Open or Closed Relationship: Which One is Right for You?”
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”
Apple Watch or Samsung Gear? Get More Mobile!
Smart watches and wearable technology aren’t entirely new, however I’m sure that there are millions of people eagerly awaiting the release date of the Apple Watch. The Samsung Gear has been in the wild for a bit already, but there’s always going to be that dividing line of Apple/non-Apple users, so now both sides will have options. How can we relate this to a call center? Continue reading “Apple Watch or Samsung Gear? Get More Mobile!”
The Right Agent For the Job
What happens when an agent completely bungles an incoming call at your call center? This may be the caller’s first experience with your business. A well trained sales agent just isn’t going to be as effective if they’re getting calls from your “Tech Support 2” queue. Your techs may flub sales calls. Obviously you can’t just have calls ringing the phone of anybody who connects to the system.
This is the way simple PBX queues often work. Continue reading “The Right Agent For the Job”
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!”
Call Center ACDs and the Common Cold
I was on the receiving end of a fairly vicious cold this week and I think I’ve almost got it beat. Let us hope! Winter can also go away as well.
This got me thinking about some of the most commons reasons why your call center ACD may be sick, or just behaving poorly. Here are a few big ones. Continue reading “Call Center ACDs and the Common Cold”