All blog posts

Across the industry there is an increased focus on employee engagement and the critical role staff play in the overall customer experience.  This is not a situation unique to contact centres but reflects a worldwide shift in all industries.   Within the contact centre world, the increased focus on employee engagement and productivity has led to the term Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) being more widely used.  WEM goes beyond traditional workforce management or workforce optimisation. It focuses on the human aspect of the contact centre to improve engagement, performance, and results.  In fact, Gartner, the research analyst took a decision to change its Magic Quadrant evaluation category...

The pandemic has had a significant effect on how business are being run, due to the challenges of homeworking and changes to technology.  According to Julia Hoggett, the FCA’s Director of Market Oversight, banks must still deliver the same standard of surveillance with home workers as they would in an office environment.  Hoggart warned that any challenges faced at the beginning of the pandemic where the usual levels of recording and surveillance were not possible, should now be fixed. It...

Guest Blog - Rachel Auer, Product Marketing Manager, Calabrio - USA In the era of big data, data is everywhere! But accessing and using this data can be tricky, and that’s where analytics can become a vital tool. So, we teamed up with our partner Business Systems to host a webinar around this popular topic (to catch the webinar replay, click here >) For those who couldn’t make it, here’s a re-cap of the session! Firstly, let’s start with a...

Most organisations are dealing with rapidly evolving and growing technology landscapes and voice architecture plays a big part in this. Call Recording solutions have been around for years, it’s an established technology and many organisations are now on their second, third, fourth or even fifth generation voice recording solution – and therein lies the problem.    Call Recording Management: Challenges of a large Call Recording Infrastructure  When it comes to managing a large call recording estate, the waters have become muddied. Heads of IT are having to deal with call recording systems...

The chaos of the worldwide pandemic has pushed us to the verge of another cloud migration . We’ve seen it with data storage, and we will now witness the same evolution in the contact centre industry, moving from the on-premise call centre solution to a cloud contact centre. Why implement Cloud Contact Centre technology? It’s a reality that COVID-19 caused contact centres worldwide to struggle as they attempted to implement efficient remote-working solutions for their contact centre agents. Implementation needed...

These past few weeks have been promising. The pandemic lockdown restrictions have slowly started to lift. Shops (and soon even pubs) are gradually starting to re-open. Businesses are now also complying with a host of new workplace guidelines, designed to create safe workspaces for employees. According to GOV.UK, the main objective to these guidelines is to: ‘maintain social distancing wherever possible, on arrival and departure’. As more of us might start to make a gradual return to the office, contact centre...

As the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions slowly start to ease, businesses are now turning their attention to reopening and looking forward. Organisations, particularly contact centres are now operating in a world that already looks different to the one we left a few months ago.It’s an everchanging landscape, where contact centres now need to be thinking strategically rather than tactfully, so we thought it timely to team up with our partners NICE inContact, to deliver an insightful webinar on how you can...

Our latest webinar, ‘Top Tips for Combating Challenges in The Contact Centre’ was packed with an array of knowledge, best practice techniques and even a very good list of suggestions on what to watch next on Netflix, thanks to our audience contributions! (Tiger King it is then!). To catch this webinar on-demand, check out this link:Top Tips for Combatting Challenges In The Contact Centre During COVID-19 Here are the top takeaways from the day: Demand V Customer Service COVID-19 has...

Exclusively written for bslgroup.com by Alice TrentAlice Trent is a workplace trends blogger who uses her own experiences to provide advice to her readers. She believes that all workplaces should strive to encourage and protect their employees. In her free time, she loves to hike.Today’s modern contact centre faces more demand than ever. With consumers having grown used to faster and more personalised services, and agents expecting better working environments, there are a lot of relevant concerns. Fortunately though, there...

With markets fluctuating wildly due to the economic effects of the coronavirus outbreak, and companies closing offices and asking employees to work from home, organisations have had to adapt rather quickly in uncertain times. Financial Services Firms in particular, have had the burden of setting up traders to work remotely, recreating the carefully monitored environment of the trading floor at not just one site, but potentially thousands. According to The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) all firms are expected to have...

With Contact Centres all over the globe still facing the reality of home working, real-time adherence functionality remains to be vital in order to protect service levels.   Managing today’s multi-channel contact centres from home could be easier than you think with a little forward planning and the right WFM technology. We all need to be flexible and agile with ‘on the go’ workforce planning. Real-time adherence will play an integral part of effective intraday management.  Challenges Many organisations are now set up for home working. Staff are set...

Challenges Contact Centres face during COVID-19 As the nation reacts to contain the virus, organisations need to be ready to adapt and do what is right for their staff, colleagues and customers, which includes ensuring remote contact centre agents are working efficiently. However, as organisations swiftly move to enable their staff to operate remotely, they are inevitably faced with a number of challenges: Providing customers with the right support: Ensuring customers can continue to reach the right agent on their...