Customer Management IQ - Call Center, Customer Service & Customer Relationship Management

The call center is not on the immediate verge of extinction, but when considering the convoluted nature of resolving customer issues in that environment, it is no surprise that alternative channels like social are taking flight. “When you think about calling into a company, think

Complaints about C-level “ignorance” have softened in the wake of reports that executives are finally recognizing the business impact of the customer experience, but that does not mean customer management professionals feel any less compelled to achieve that buy-in for their

Elite organizations know that it takes more than mere hunches and guesswork to develop a successful pricing strategy.  There is a method to the madness, a “science” to pricing, and successful professionals must hitch their strategies to that wagon.  When it comes to

A product of man, our corporate society possesses a human desire to identify winners and losers.  It is not enough to play the game—we crave constant knowledge about how we are doing—and that results in an undying passion for benchmarking success. Since the

"There is a huge amount of customer impact in the back office.  If we can make that happen more efficiently through workforce management...[it] drives better performance in the back office and ultimately a better customer experience." Investments into new management

Whether on the backend supply side or the frontend sales side, channel partners are a necessity in executing for our customers.  But they can also be a significant bottleneck on performance, and that unfortunate reality is a key reason why effective channel management plays a

If you learned that a natural disaster was about to hit your neighborhood, you would surely make the necessary preparations. If you care about delivering an optimal customer experience, you must apply the same logic to your channel management strategy. Even though your brand might

Many of today’s customer management professionals commonly talk a big game about the importance of CRM.  Relationship-building, they argue, is a fundamental tenet of all contact center interactions. But knowing something needs to be done and knowing how to actually do it are

Make no mistake: customers are indeed demanding two-way brand communication and customer service on social channels.  True, some are not yet using it as an end-all, be-all alternative to calling a contact center for support, but the idea that organizations face no urgency to serve

When it comes to delivering an elite customer experience through our call centers, “what I think we often forget,” notes Michael Adams, senior vice president and director of the customer contact center for FirstMerit Bank , “is the value of the human capital and the

It might not be as sexy as social media.  It might not be as thrilling as customer complaint handling.  It might not be as buzzworthy as Big Data Analytics. But when it comes to issues pivotal to the successful operation of the call center—and the business at

The guy who famously put a major corporation on blast for poor customer service is now working to give brands a “fighting chance at managing their reputations.” Make no mistake—Dave Carroll, the musician and customer service advocate behind the groundbreaking

Perhaps made a bit “uncool” by its excessive level of overplay as a buzzword, customer relationship management—CRM—nonetheless remains a paramount business driver, hailed as a crucial focus by niche customer management and broad executive leadership alike. The

Social media is no fad, and the pressure on customer management professionals to engage more comprehensively on networks like Facebook and Twitter reached new heights in 2011. That, of course, is not to say that many social media advocates did not fall victim to overzealousness, and for

Archive:  This is an archived podcast recorded in advance of our 7th Annual Call Center Summit.   For many years, call center professionals found themselves fixated on performance benchmarks and “best practice metrics.”  They strived to quantify every possible