Improve operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction by establishing your own customer touch-point methodology.

One of the biggest dangers in establishing best practices for your contact center is to do so in isolation from your self-service stakeholders. Instead, all customer "touch-points" must be viewed as part of a continuum.

Customer touch points include Web Self-Service, Interactive Voice Response, Contact Center Agents, and Face-to-Face transactions. By tracking the interplay between these and gathering data on customer groupings and transaction types, you can more easily identify meaningful key performance indicators and make decisions on where automation should be improved to increase efficiency and customer satisfaction.

This whitepaper covers the key steps:

1. Characterize Customers
2. Access Task Popularity & Complexity
3. Determining Automation Candidates
4. Define Key Performance Indicators

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Don’t Be Left Behind: Build a Mobile Customer Service Strategy for 2013 and Beyond

Published 2013

With smartphone adoption on the rise, contact center leaders are tasked with integrating mobile customer support into their already channel-crowded centers. In late 2012, ICMI surveyed 422 contact center professionals to better understand the community’s intentions around mobile customer support for 2013. The research provided invaluable insight into how contact center leaders can prepare and execute a successful Mobile Customer Service Strategy for their company, their contact center, and their customers.

This whitepaper outlines the five key benefits that contact center leaders can expect to gain by putting the time and attention into building a Mobile Customer Service Strategy.

These benefits will extend through 2013 and into the upcoming years:

• BENEFIT 1: Insight into Customers and the Competitive Landscape
• BENEFIT 2: Guidance for Technology Investment
• BENEFIT 3: Executive Buy-In
• BENEFIT 4: Roadmap for the Contact Center
• BENEFIT 5: A Better Customer Experience
  

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Leveraging Complexity: Trends and Strategies for Future Success in the Contact Center

In 2012, 510 contact center professionals, representing more than two-dozen primary markets and industries, and located in more than 20 countries, participated in a study of contact centers' short- and long-term goals and investment trends.

Although the contact centers demonstrated a clear understanding and ability to identify the challenges they face, the centers' reactions appeared to involve some of the same continual issues. A majority of centers (69.8%) report increased complexity, but only a minority (32.7%) report that they are upgrading to meet the challenges brought by that increased complexity.

This white paper looks at the five key issues currently facing contact centers and evaluates the current strategies – or lack thereof – for handling those issues successfully, including:

• Issue 1 - What's Important to the Contact Center in 2012?
• Issue 2 - Customer Satisfaction Is Important, Just Like Everything Else.
• Issue 3 - Hot to Get to Where We're Going.
• Issue 4 - Drowning in Data
• Issue 5 - "The Future's So Bright" vs. "Land of Confusion"

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Driving Agent Attrition: The Affect of Salary, Attrition Goals and Satisfaction on Turnover

There is a clear correlation between agent satisfaction and attrition in the contact center. In order to discover why our agents leave, we must first examine the common processes and issues that affect the agent’s daily life.

In 2012, the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) surveyed 444 contact center professionals to understand the major drivers of external contact center agent attrition. The research examined agent salaries, contact center attrition goals and tools deployed to improve the agent’s daily experience.

Among the key findings of ICMI’s 2012 Contact Center Agent Salary, Retention & Productivity Report, include the revelation that agent salaries are, in reality, not the most important factor in attrition.

Many of the participating contact centers (20.2%) revealed that they are only collecting agent feedback during coaching sessions and some (7.8%) do not conduct agent satisfaction surveys at all.

Agent desktop tools designed to increase agent empowerment, reduce training time and aid in rapid customer contact resolution are not widely deployed.

This whitepaper endeavors to provide a clearer picture around agent satisfaction and retention for customer care and contact center executives, directors, managers and supervisors, in a way that helps them balance the hard numbers of agent attrition and the related (and sometimes harder to define) costs of dissatisfaction at the agent level. 

This whitepaper covers:

• Attrition: Why agents leave
• Agent Work Environment: Tools for Improving the Agent Experience and ROI
• Agent Work Environment: Agent Development and Empowerment
• Agent Feedback and Satisfaction
   

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Improving Operational Performance in Customer Acquisition and Retention with Dedicated Systems

Improving Operational Performance through Management Processes and Dedicated Systems

Providing Business Intelligence for the Marketer

Improving Agent and Contact Center Performance

Cloud Cover for the Call Center: Meeting Demands Intelligently and Efficiently

Facing "Do more with less" in your contact center? The hosted call center offers an efficient approach that allows the call center to maintain and improve services.

Intended for both IT and call center management, this ICMI whitepaper discusses cloud services for the call center and the span of applications available in a hosted model.

Download ICMI's complimentary whitepaper, and discover:

• Cost Management - why hosted call centers provide labor and technology cost savings
• Buying Decisions -  what to consider when investigating hosted call center services
• Hosted Call Center History - a brief account of hosted call centers
• Terms and Definitions - the basic terms you should know

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