All blog posts

Increasingly, call centre outsourcers are turning to technologies like speech analytics to drive value in their contact centres through revenue generation and improving the quality of their services. The growth in this historically recession-proof sector has increased competition, making it important for an outsourcer to stand out from the crowd. Using analytics to demonstrate industry sector knowledge Research (from the CBI Market Information Database) shows that call centres that offer industry-specific expertise are at a particular advantage at this time...

Our last blog highlighted what makes an effective short term forecast. These are the forecasts that you will apply your workforce schedules against and in this post we will cover tips for creating and applying best practice WFM scheduling. Customer Experience vs Expense Resource optimisation and resource planning is in simple terms, an attempt to balance service expectations against expense or operating costs. The key to optimising resource and minimising expense is the creation of effective shift patterns that meet...

Although a monopolised market, the budgets of water and sewerage companies are at the mercy of their performance. Ofwat (The Water Service Regulation Authority) uses the recently created Service Incentive Mechanism (SIM) as a measure of the quality of service provided by the water and sewerage sectors of England and Wales. The prices that water companies are permitted to charge their customers are a reflection of their performance on these measures; a company providing a good service to their customers...

In the last blog we covered long term forecasts and what components are required. Today we will be covering another key component of the WFM forecasting process - special days and special distribution patterns. Forecasting within WFM for 'Special Days' All forecasts from long term down to intra-day need to take special days and special distributions into account. A special day may be: - a national holiday - a specific event - the day after a specific event. - a...

One of the key challenges for any planning team is the need to supply accurate long term forecasts providing capacity, workforce planning, and resource planning for an organisation. What are Long Term Forecasts? It generally means workforce planning forecasts that are used to provide input into budget setting, target operating models or 1-5 year plans. A business may even consider a today +1month as a long term forecast. Regardless of timescales, there is a common aim; to supply input into...

How much real business insight can you get from your customer interactions?A wealth of data lies at your fingertips, trapped inside the thousands of phone calls that your agents have with your customers every day. How can you tap into this? Using manual call listening, you are unlikely to ever reach a level of analysis possible to make the time and effort put into this technique worthwhile. You are probably more likely to win the lottery than you are to...

Effective debt collection is a tricky balancing act between collecting revenue and avoiding spending more time or money than is necessary to do this. Speech analytics provides a vital window into the interactions between agents and debtors and helps collection agencies identify where changes need to come from to give them a leading edge when competing for portfolios and collection accounts. Keeping your agents working towards the highest return on every phone call Speech analytics can help debt collection agencies...

Imagine what you could accomplish with access to external workforce management (WFM) specialists, who could generate forecasts, create work schedules and analyse processes using your data - providing you with the most effective workforce planning for customer support. For smaller organisations who previously could not afford this resource, the ability to implement workforce management as a managed service for workforce planning will be a key trend to watch in 2012. If you haven’t moved beyond excel spreadsheets for planning and scheduling, a...

Equity Insurance Group is a specialist motor insurer in the UK comprising Equity Insurance Partnerships (EIP), Equity Red Star and Equity Claims Limited. With key operating facilities in Colchester, Brentwood and Swansea, the group employs around 500 agents providing an end-to-end service dealing with insurance enquiries, sales, renewals, claims, fraud prevention and service recovery. With the continued aim to improve service management and efficiency whilst maintaining compliance, Equity Insurance Group has invested in a new call recording and quality monitoring...

Robust security combined with an intuitive web interface and a ‘pay as you use’ cost structure is what every financial institution can now expect from a hosted call recording platform. This is perhaps why leading city based professional services companies are now putting their faith in the cloud, and more specifically the OPEX Hosting Call Craft platform. What is Call Craft? Developed by OPEX Hosting, Business System’s sister company, Call Craft is a hosted self-service platform helping companies to manage...

Business Systems attracted over 280 delegates to the 10th annual Improving Performance conference last November which focused on the need for real time customer engagement in the social age. Customer Service Fact! Some topical areas covered included; ‘the top 2011 call centre issues’ presented by Call Centre Helper Editor, Jonty Pearce who pointed out that it typically takes 24 hours for call centres to respond to an email enquiry. Subsequently more and more customers are turning to internet chat and...

Following the acquisition of Cybertech, NICE have been busy working to enhance the NICE call recording product suite so it aligns more closely with its existing portfolio, the end result being NICE Recording eXpress. Through this transition period, NICE Recording eXpress has evolved to give customers an easy and scalable call recording platform to mitigate risk, address compliance and fulfil quality monitoring needs. NICE Recording eXpress has the capability of recording thousands of channels across single or multi-site environments with...