Advice from a Call Center Geek!

Send us Fan Mail What happens when you are told to come up with the policy plan to safely get your call center back onsite in your brick and mortar facility?  This episode of "Advice from a Call Center Geek!" will hopefully be able to help you. In episode 98, entitled,  "Procedures to Move Your Call Center Back Into the Office",  we take a look at our personal case study of how...

Send us Fan Mail You guys may think I am crazy, but I think I found the technology that will be changing the customer service and customer experience industry to levels we have never thought of. Currently, we are using call center technology to either gauge the CX (CSAT, NPS, Sentiment..) or we are trying to make interactions shorter, more cost-effective, or easier for the customer. These are all...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of "Advice from a Call Center Geek!",  we sit down with Jimmy Budnik, the VP of Customer Care and CRM at Overstock.com. An engineer by trade, Jimmy takes to the role of VP of customer care at Overstock.com with one eye on the culture of his team and another on improving the customer experience through education and technology. In this 30 minute interview,...

Send us Fan Mail Outsourcing is not for everyone, and we have been very open about that, in fact, we did an entire episode on 10 reasons why you should NOT outsource. These 7 falsehoods though are topics that organizations that are new to call center outsourcing think are reasons why they would NEVER outsource.   This is a false narrative.  In this episode, we talk specifically about these seven e...

Send us Fan Mail Call Center Superbowl.... For many of us, that is what Black Friday and Cyber Monday are.  Over the years, we have come up with some tips that help make these high-traffic days go as smoothly as possible. In this podcast we go over 7 call center tips for Black Friday: No IT Updates This week Look at Your Shrinkage % Have a Motivation for Your Associates Taking Care of Large Queues...

Send us Fan Mail Speech analytics is an evolving tool that has use cases not yet thought of. As we are evolving how we use the tool, we want to tell the Geek! community as a whole to possibly spur some thoughts on the best way to use analytics in your organization and to also increase the ROI for an analytics investment. In this episode we talk about 10 unique ways that we see analytics being used...

Send us Fan Mail Its almost 2021 (YES!!) and we here at Expiva are having budgeting talks and discussions on where we see the industry moving in 2021 and what technologies and strategies do we want to invest in for next year. In this episode we talk about the top five trends that we see in the industry and how we plan on using them to our advantage. Topics include: Google Real-Time Transcription /...

Send us Fan Mail One of the age-old call center ops questions is "Should we use live or recorded calls" for our QA?  Understanding that many call centers are moving to an analytic based QA platform, there is still a majority of centers using managers to "listen" to calls. In this episode, we talk about the benefits of using both methods and when to do so. We discuss what type o...

Send us Fan Mail I am going to start to answer the awesome  questions I am getting in the Advice from a Call Center Geek! SMS Texting community as Community Q/A mini-podcasts.  I want this to be a huge benefit of joining our texting community (to join text "podcast" 814.247.0366 to get signed up). In this Mini-Pod, I give my thoughts on some best practices when you have voice and chat ag...

Send us Fan Mail  Here is a quick overview of what skills-based routing is, how to use it, and why it's such a great tool. This is the biggest difference between a UCAAS (Office Phone System) and a CCAAS (Call Center) platform. I have been getting a bunch of questions on skills-based routing so I hope this answers a lot of them! We did a white boarding video that goes along with this as well...

Send us Fan Mail Lowering handle and talk time the right way can add to a center's ROI and make the customer and agent experience better In this episode of the Geek!, we talk about tips on how to break calls down into segments to streamline processes. how to lessen hold time, and how to minimize one of the biggest killers to handle time and call center efficiency...after call work/wrap time....

Send us Fan Mail Outsourcing your call center operations can be a scary deal. If you can manage the relationship in a proper way, there can be a win-win mentality that happens not just for you and the BPO partner but most importantly for your customers as well. In this episode, we give you actionable items to put into place to make sure the client/call center relationship runs as smoothly as possi...

Send us Fan Mail This is an Episode for true Call Center Geeks!  I want to give you my five favorite call center reports and tell you why they help me and can help your call center. In this episode we will talk about: Daily Summary Reports Monthly Volume Trends Interval Volume Trends Agent Occupancy Reports Customer/Agent Sentiment Reports Blog Post Link: https://expiviausa.com/my-five-favorite-ca...

Send us Fan Mail SOOOOO, I was scolded by my staff about the title (not the content) of yesterday's episode on "10 Reasons why you Should NEVER Outsource Your Call Center". They said it sounded finite like you should outsource no matter what, if you listened to the episode you know that was not my intention... So to make peace with everyone, I have done an episode on "10 Reason...

Send us Fan Mail I can talk all day on why you SHOULD outsource your call center and the benefits of doing so, but that doesn't seem very much fun. Let's talk about the 10 reasons why you should NEVER outsource. If you or your organization can relate to 2 or more of these topics on the top 10 list, then you should seriously consider keeping your call center internal. Some of the reason w...

Send us Fan Mail To maximize revenue, some call center outsourcers will do some things that are not up to industry standards.  This is no different from what a SAAS or website creator may add in the "small details".   I don’t want any member of the "Geek Nation" to fall for any of these when you are looking for a great outsourcer.  Some of the ways that outsourcers may pay game...

Send us Fan Mail If you have not joined the Call Center Geek Texting Community here is another reason why.  (text " Call Center " to 814.247.0366 to Join) The Texting Community gets to ask anonymous questions to me that I then will answer on Linkedin.  Every couple of weeks, we will do a podcast episode with these questions so the geek nation can hear them and hopefully gain some value f...

Send us Fan Mail Just a quick message for any organization out there that is looking to purchase a new telephony platform or software but may need a little help making the best decision for your organization. I started Call Center Geek Consulting a couple of months ago and in that time frame, we have been able to help some of our podcast listeners that have reached out to me with making the best c...

Send us Fan Mail How many times has your boss or manager said the call center was not servicing properly and that the NPS and CSAT scores were too low!  It has to be poor service in the call center right? WRONG! With so many ways that customers can interact with an organization, most times the call center can only triage a poor experience that a customer had had with a product, delivers, website,...

Send us Fan Mail I had the great pleasure of being asked to give a talk to the University of Wisconson E-Business Consortium on "Making Call Center Culture Tangible, Using Culture as a Weapon, and Engagement Practices for Call Center Reps".   This is the full talk that I gave.  It's well worth the listen. If you would like to have the deck that I used, please message me on Linkedin...

Send us Fan Mail If you are in the market or will be in the market for a new call center platform, this is a can't miss episode. In Episode 78 of the Geek!, we talk about everything you need to know when purchasing a new call center platform. Host Tom Laird goes in-depth to the different types of providers, what are must/should-haves for any platform you purchase, tips on saving money, tricks...

Send us Fan Mail In this quick episode, we talk about some best practices on how we set up our supervisors and admin call center dashboards.  From real-time metrics to interval data, we give you a good way to stay efficient and on top of your call center. Join our texting community!  It's free, we never sell.  It's just a great way for all of us to communicate call center content.  Text...

Send us Fan Mail I received a question from a member of the Advice from a Call Center Geek Texting Community that sparked this quick podcast. This is our unique take of setting up a call center employee suggestion program.  From using culture to narrow the suggestions to engaging employees, I think this is a helpful episode for all call center operations looking to engage.   The "Advice from...

Send us Fan Mail If we had an unlimited budget for our call center, what tools would we purchase? Lets take a look at the advanced tools that world-class call center utilize in their contact centers.  Omni-channel Session Handling WFM Analytics Self-Service CRM integrations QM WFI RPA Voice Authentication Gamification Advanced Routing Join the Advice from a Call Center Geek texting community!  Tex...

Send us Fan Mail Join the Advice from a Call Center Geek texting community! Text "Hello" to 814-247-0366 and you will be able to have direct access to us for any call center ops question. We will also be sending out exclusive call center ops content to all community members. We will NEVER attempt to sell you anything nor will we sell your data. All this is, is another way for us to be ab...