Leverage the power of the entire ICMI Community and our resident experts on every aspect of the contact center industry!

ICMI is combining its Ask The Expert feature with QueueTips, the world's largest knowledge exchange for call center professionals (supervisors, managers, directors and executives).

Please ask your question in QueueTips, where you'll continue to get answers from ICMI's contact center gurus as well as from your colleagues in the industry. And don't forget to search our QueueTips Archives where you may find that your question has already been answered!

You may continue to browse the Ask the Expert archives below.

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Meet the Experts

Brenda Kross Senior Consultant,  ICMI Brenda brings more than 16 years of experience in call center operations in financial services and retail industries. Her primary focus is assisting clients in developing and improving their workforce management, performance metrics, reporting and overall call center procedures and processes.

Brent Haferkamp Senior Consultant,  ICMI As a senior consultant, Brent provides strategic and tactical consulting for organizations in a variety of industries. He focuses primarily on call center technology, workforce management, outsourcing, and strategic/tactical planning. He has performed numerous call center assessments and multiple executive replacement engagements while with ICMI. Before joining ICMI, Brent held positions ranging from senior forecasting and manning analyst to operations manager to senior manger of technical operations for a large passenger transportation company with over 24 million in annual call volume. Prior to that, Brent was a workforce manager for a large international call center outsourcer. In his spare time, he writes/develops Visual Basic call center tools.

Greg Levin Creative Projects Coordinator,  ICMI Greg Levin has been researching and writing about call centers ever since he joined ICMI back in 1994. Today, Greg's feature articles, case studies and satire column, "In Your Ear", appear monthly on www.icmi.com, and his research reports are published separately by ICMI. In addition, he has spoken on a diverse range of customer contact topics at numerous industry conferences and other events.

Layne Holley Director of Community Services,  ICMI Layne oversees content, peer channels and other programs and services for ICMI community members and stakeholders. Her deep respect for frontline representatives and their leaders began long ago as a college student in retail book sales and sales management. An award-winning journalist, Layne has spent more than 10 years as a business and technology writer and editor covering the people, processes and technologies in the contact center.

Michael Stalker Client Communications Analyst,  ICMI Michael has more than six years of experience providing business consulting services. His expertise in business plan development, business and legal analysis, and business and legal writing (he's still and active member of the Kansas Bar) helped secure timely investment for clients, furthering their growth and development and creating jobs. His experience includes drafting complex business plans for high-tech start-up companies seeking venture funding to support their product development and/or market entry efforts.

Rose Polchin Senior Consultant,  ICMI Rose is a Senior Consultant for ICMI. She brings over 20 years of call center experience including, five years as an independent consultant and 15 years of hands-on call center leadership roles in the financial services and health care industries. During her tenure as Senior Director of Customer Service Strategies for one of the country’s largest health care laboratory services, her leadership was instrumental in creating and implementing a common vision, mission, strategy and processes across the company’s multi-site contact center network. The results included standardized and improved: call handling processes, key performance indicators, quality and coaching standards, technology, recruiting and hiring practices, training programs and establishing the contact centers as strategic assets for the business.

Susan Langwell Senior Consultant,  ICMI As a Senior Consultant, Susan brings over 20 years call center operations experience to ICMI. Her background includes domestic and international consulting as well as many years in call center leadership roles. Serving in these roles has allowed Susan to gain a broad perspective of call center management and operations as well as hands-on practical experience.

Wendy Smalls Senior Consultant,  ICMI As a seasoned industry expert, Wendy is a strategic thinker with a successful track record of implementing successful, world-class call center and workforce management processes and teams for companies of all sizes. She has 18 years of customer experience, starting from CSR and quickly moving to call center manager and then to WFM director. Nearly 11 of those years have been in leadership roles, where Wendy focused on developing and motivating people, reengineering processes, implementing best practices and leveraging technology. Before joining ICMI, she honed her skills in consulting and leadership roles with organizations such as Vistakon, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida, Washington Mutual and Humana. She has a clear passion for Customer Service and Workforce Management and a talent for being able to identify opportunities quickly within an organization and provide the necessary design to make cost-effective, data driven change.