Advice from a Call Center Geek!

Send us Fan Mail Let's take a trip into a time machine and see what the contact center and customer experience look like in the year 2030. How will the Metaverse, NFTs, VR, and AR have an impact on how business and service are done.  In this episode, I try to give you what I see CX looking like after talking to many experts in the industry over the past couple of months! Follow Tom: @tlaird_e...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Advice from a Call Center Geek, Tom Laird sat down with Andrew McNeile, Chief Customer Officer at ThinScale. ThinScale develops and provides endpoint software solutions that enable IT to deliver the most user-friendly, secure, flexible/versatile, and cost-effective VDI environments for Windows devices. Tom and Andrew discuss, the new norm of the remote contact c...

Send us Fan Mail Let's pretend that I was hired out by a new million-dollar startup that asked me to set up their customer service contact center that they want to run in-house.  How would I go about doing it, what would I  prioritize, and what are the most important pieces to look at. This is a great episode for all call center managers that maybe want to change something or improve an aspec...

Send us Fan Mail That one call contact center agent that is consistently late by 1, 3, or 6 minutes every day to shift or coming back from break/lunch.  This can be a tricky situation to handle and one that we all deal with in the contact center environment.  You get frustrated, WFM is on you, other agents are irritated because they can go on break until that agent comes back...it can be a mess if...

Send us Fan Mail Middle management is the absolute lifeline of your contact center.  Have you educated and given them the tools they need to be successful. We are in the process of overhauling our management training program and want to give all of you an inside look at what you should be converting and how to do this. This includes chapters on : TECHNOLOGY/OPERATIONS Telephony understanding KPIS...

Send us Fan Mail In this totally unscripted episode, I sit down with 5 of our contact middle management to discuss how they manage their teams.  We talk about coaching tips, QA, dealing with motivation issues, and how to handle confrontation that sometimes arises in any work environment from their perspective.  Really unique episode and one that we want to do more of! Follow Tom: @tlaird_expivia J...

Send us Fan Mail Educating associates is a core competency of any solid contact center operation.  In episode 141 of Advice from a Call Center Geek, we look at 7 Effective Call Center Training Tips You Can Implement Easily. Topics in this episode include: Focusing On the Major Call Center Skills Equipping Your Agents with Sufficient Product Knowledge Creating KPIs for Every Training Session Making...

Send us Fan Mail This episode is definitely in my top 3 favorite episodes and a MUST listen for any Call Center Geek out there.  I re-recorded this episode 4 times to make sure I got across what I needed! In this episode, we take a deep dive into the Metaverse and How it will fundamentally change CX, service, rewards programs, and customer retention. Follow Tom: @tlaird_expivia Join our Facebook C...

Send us Fan Mail Turnover...the arch-nemesis of every contact center.  While it's never going to be perfect, there are some tactics that we can take to improve the culture and the turnover of the contact center environment.  In this episode, we look at 5 ways that we battle turnover here in my contact center, Expivia.  These include a dive into: Culture Associate Pay Agent Engagement Growth a...

Send us Fan Mail I love this episode. If you are a call center geek, it's for you, if you are not but want to understand the power of the oncoming NFT revolution, this is for you as well! NFTs are going to be a large part of business and service in the coming years.  They are not a fad, they are a tool that all of us will need to understand, and the earlier that happens, the more ahead of the...

Send us Fan Mail This time is YOU that is the star of the show! I asked this question on Linkedin "What's the one tip that you would give to a brand new call center supervisor managing his/her first team of 15 customer service agents? GO...." The many answers I got were amazing and I think really helpful.  So in this episode, we break down some of the top answers that we received. Y...

Send us Fan Mail Happy 2022! It's time to look at your center and develop a strategic plan for the new year.  In this episode of ACG, we take a look at four-five aspects of your center and talk through what we look at every year to improve.  These include: Technology      New      Existing Agent/Culture      Engementment      Goal Setting      Hiring      Education Reporting      Realtime/Das...

Send us Fan Mail NEW BOOK! Advice from a Call Center Geek 3.0! is done! Ok I just posted the full 204-page book for FREE on our Linkedin group Call Center Tips and Tactics, you can download it right now! I will also be offering the Amazon Kindle version for free for 3 days after it goes live on Amazon ( by Jan 10) Amazon is taking longer than normal to review all the published books as they are de...

Send us Fan Mail My New Book (Kinda) will be out on Jan 4th! We have taken "MORE Advice from a Call Center Geek" and added 10 chapters to it and over 50 pages. New chapters on AI, KPIs, Engagement, Outsourcing, WFH, new pricing guide, and more! We also included a Final Exam that you can take with your team that will allow for a deep dive into your contact center to improve every facet of...

Send us Fan Mail I got a Linkedin inMail from a listener that said: Hey Tom! Thanks for accepting my connection request so quickly. I recently stumbled across your "Advice from a Call Center Geek" podcast and have been loving the content. I'm a supervisor in a 25 head center about to apply for the manager position. I've listened to your New Manager cast from August and was wond...

Send us Fan Mail Let's look at your contact centers efficiency as we head into the new year.  In this episode, we look at: Call Routing and Skilling Mistakes Utilizing Self Service the Right Way Making sure we are Measuring the Proper Efficiency KPIs      *Adherence      *Occupancy      *AHT Follow Tom: @tlaird_expivia Join our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeek C...

Send us Fan Mail Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!  As we record this episode, it is December 23rd, 2021, two days before Christmas. We wanted to take some time at the time of year when you are off with family and away from work with an episode to get you to think a little about what will be happening in the contact center in 2022.  Here are our Top Ten trends that we are looking at and talking...

Send us Fan Mail I am doing a down and dirty episode here with my knee-jerk reactions to the Customer Contact Week (aka call center week) conference.  This episode has not been edited and has been recorded on my iPhone as I left my mic back at home but I didn’t want to wait to record as I didn’t want to forget anything.  The is my CCW recap episode.  Follow Tom: @tlaird_expivia Join our Facebook C...

Send us Fan Mail Friends, we have done deep into the law here with our attorneys to create a full policy for the upcoming January 4th mandated date for all companies, (we are focusing on contact centers) that have over 100 employees to comply with the government vaccine mandate. After you listen to this episode, you will be fully versed in the law, the dates that are of importance, what constitute...

Send us Fan Mail The week before Thanksgiving is a great time of the year.  It's time where you can reset some of the negativity that you may have in your contact center, and accent the positivity using some motivational tactics that really get a boost when paired with the holiday season. In this episode (129) we talk about ways to engage and motivate employees during the holidays, ways you c...

Send us Fan Mail I am always thinking about how can my contact center be different?  How can we have better quality, how can we as management engage our employees better? One of the thoughts that I had when I was out sick with Covid, was doing a Reddit style Ask Me Anything (AMA) and having all the employees do just that, and me anything they want. It was AWESOME! So many times we just assume that...

Send us Fan Mail This episode is a little different than what we normally do, much more personal.  10 days before recording this, I tested positive for covid, this at a time when Covid has hit our Expivia contact center family petty hard, much harder than in 2020. I want to give you my perspective on how I dealt with this and how it changed my perception of my WFH agents and my thought process on...

Send us Fan Mail One of my roles as the CEO here at Expivia, is to make calls on where I see technology and CX intersect to try to position us to be ahead of the curve. Facebook (at the time of this recording) just announced they are changing their name.  The name is a small piece of what they are doing.  One of the largest companies in the world is changing its entire business model to focus on t...

Send us Fan Mail Covid had changed the way many of us operate our contact centers.  In this episode of "Advice from a Call Center Geek!" we take a look back at where we were and all the policies, procedures we changed, the technology we now utilize, and the engagement that we have evolved. This is a great episode for you to take a look at your internal operation and see what areas you ca...

Send us Fan Mail The Ultimate Guide To Contact Center Outsourcing Episode...we created it! This episode of "Advice from a Call Center Geek!" is designed to give you everything you need before you outsource. What to look out for, what to negotiate, pricing... it's all here. This episode will give you everything you need to make the right decision about outsourcing (or not to outsourc...