Books

Call Center Management on Fast Forward is the most widely read book on call center/contact center management available today. Trusted for its accuracy, clarity and proven guidance, it has become required reading in organizations around the world.

You'll learn how to:

• Boost customer loyalty
• Achieve service level with quality
• Build a team equipped with the right know-how
• Maximize the contact center's strategic value
• Win top management support

Six years in the making, this long-awaited new edition includes updated and expanded coverage of:

• Strategy
• Social media
• Performance measures
• Multichannel management
• Evolving customer experiences
• The latest on performance objectives and metrics
• The contact center's evolving role in strategy
• Case studies from top customer service & loyalty brands
• Much more!

Electronic Version

Call Center Management on Fast Forward is the most widely read book on call center/contact center management available today. Trusted for its accuracy, clarity and proven guidance, it has become required reading in organizations around the world.

You'll learn how to:

• Boost customer loyalty
• Achieve service level with quality
• Build a team equipped with the right know-how
• Maximize the contact center's strategic value
• Win top management support

Six years in the making, this long-awaited new edition includes updated and expanded coverage of:

• Strategy
• Social media
• Performance measures
• Multichannel management
• Evolving customer experiences
• The latest on performance objectives and metrics
• The contact center's evolving role in strategy
• Case studies from top customer service & loyalty brands
• Much more!

Please note: Due to the size of this file, it may take up to 10 minutes to download, depending on the speed of your connection.

Customer service is a helping profession. A CSR’s career is full of surprises and challenges—and it can yield immense personal satisfaction. In this second volume in the Call Center Agent Handbook Series, author Cliff Hurst provides readers with a solid foundation in the fundamental skills they need to handle each and every call in a way that mutually benefits their customers and their company, including how to:

• Make a positive first impression
• Use your voice to sound capable and professional
• Master the skills of purposeful conversation
• Manage emotional stress—yours and your customer’s
• Choose your words well
• Master a proven method for handling problems and complaints
• Deal effectively with angry customers
• Listen for meaningful customer feedback and share what you’ve learned

Welcome to the world of frontline leadership! It’s very different than what you were doing before. For that reason, the skills and attributes that you must bring to the job are very different, too. In this third volume of the Call Center Handbook Series, author Cliff Hurst equips you for the challenges of a leadership role by explaining:

• Why leadership is so critical in call centers
• Theories of Motivation: What makes your people “tick”?
• Time management: Where does your time go?
• How to improve your staff’s performance through monitoring and coaching
• Trends that will influence the way you lead

ICMI's Call Center Management Dictionary is a practical, comprehensive reference for customer contact professionals. This essential resource covers a host of subjects, including, but not limited to, measurements, objectives, reporting, analysis, forecasting, planning, monitoring, coaching, quality, performance, improvement, human resources, training, customer behavior, marketing, technologies, budgeting, finance, strategy, industry acronyms, and more! Accurate and easy to use, ICMI’s Call Center Management Dictionary is designed to cut through the clutter and confusion in today's terminology, so that you can communicate more effectively, improve customer services and make better decisions that will help build your career.

1072 acronyms and terms, 41 graphs and tables.

A convenient, portable reference of terms. At 3.5 by 5 inches, the book is small enough to fit in a busy manager's pocket, yet it's packed with industry acronyms and concise definitions of more than 500 call center industry terms.

148 pages.

Learn how to discover and unlock the “hidden opportunities” for additional revenue that are currently residing in your call center. In Driving Peak Sales Performance in Call Centers, Mary Murcott reveals the tools, practices and strategies for driving large-scale sales improvements, gleaned from her own experiences and those currently being used by the best-in-breed contact centers of leading companies, including American Express, Convergys, Cox Communications, Hilton Hotels, Lands’ End, RMH Teleservices and others. She shares proven techniques to create new performance reporting tools; develop new hiring, training, performance management and coaching processes; and design incentive programs that will motivate your staff to perform at their peak levels.

Call Center Technology Demystified clarifies the sometimes complex and often confusing array of technologies that enable call center success. This book will lead you through the labyrinth of customer contact technology jargon, common misperceptions and marketing hype to help you align technology with business needs and optimize your technology investments.

With a rare combination of business insight, technological savvy and down-to-earth, straightforward writing, Vanguard Communication's experts Bocklund and Bengtson have come up with the answer to the often-asked question: "Is there a book on call center technologies that will help me to understand this stuff better?"

375 pages, paperback, more than 100 figures and tables.

In this humorous collection of essays, exercises and puzzles, author Bruce Balentine offers a satirical insider’s perspective of the IVR and speech recognition industry. It’s Better to Be a Good Machine than a Bad Person provides a backstage tour of the science of ergonomics and the philosophy of user interface design, making a strong case for predictability and usability over delight as a primary design goal.

In his fun, easy-to-read style, Balentine points out that Jetsonian thinking—which has predominantly influenced phone-based self-service interface design for the past decade and a half—is on the way out. He stresses that the attempt to create humanlike applications has been the root cause of the abysmal performance in spoken interfaces that we all experience regularly.

For more information about the book, as well as contests, extras and the author's blog, visit www.beagoodmachine.com.

To help you develop processes to retain your best agents, we’ve compiled this collection of articles filled with ideas, information and tools that will allow you to create an environment that inspires agents to stay and grow with your organization – and help you get the best possible ROI for your recruiting and training dollars.