Articles by Alan Hubbard

Traditionally, the contact center has been a cost center. However, with the contact center transforming into a profit center, the selling of products and services has emerged as an opportunity for the contact center to improve agent and customer interaction. Yet the challenge will be balancing customer satisfaction goals and driving profits. Sixty...

The contact center has become the focal point of the customer interaction. Customers spend more time researching products, managing account and order information, resolving issues, and utilizing self-service than they do within the traditional brick-and-mortar storefront. This requires contact centers to have a 360-degree view of the customer. In order to enable this, integration of data from across the enterprise has become a must for a contact center...

Contact consolidation is not for the lighthearted. For years, contact center management has been attempting to control costs by reducing the number of agents, physical sites and consolidating software and hardware solutions. Often these attempts are in conflict with customer and corporate demands. So, how do we increase contact center availability? Improve customer satisfaction? Reduce operational costs?...

An increasing global customer base is driving companies to provide "follow-the-sun" customer support services. In order to enable this level of support, agents are now being located in any part of the world. The challenge is to merge technologies and provide seamless, accurate and real-time customer service Contact centers are constantly battling t...

Companies' integrated voice recognition (IVR) applications are being stretched thinner and thinner. Even with the best interface designs in place, customers are still abandoning calls before completion Forty-three percent of companies surveyed in the Aberdeen Contact Center Analytics benchmark report are either seeing poorer performance in call aba...

Companies' integrated voice recognition (IVR) applications are being stretched thin. Even when the best interface designs are in place, customers are abandoning calls before completion Forty-three percent of companies surveyed in the "Contact Center Analytics" benchmark were either seeing poorer performance in call abandonment rates or didn't measu...

The contact center has become the focal point of customer interaction. The method by which the customer interacts with the contact center dwarfs all other modes of interaction. Whether it occurs via phone, chat, e-mail, self-service Web or self-service IVR the customer is inundating the contact center with transactions and requests for information ...

Companies are increasingly faced with the challenge of how to leverage the large amounts of data available in the contact center. The data is accumulated through customer management systems -- CRM, SFA (sales force automation), ERP (enterprise resource planning) and order fulfillment -- and interactions with the customer (customer data, issues and transactions)...

The need to support a 24/7 global environment has forced companies to reinvent how they approach the various components of a successful call center Determining the right combination of people, processes and technologies is critical to the effectiveness of the virtual call center -- a call center that functions in every respect as a single logical e...