The GCS Blog
Helpful information on Contact Centers, Customer Service and People Skills
One of your biggest challenges in adding successful call center services to your operations is setting up the facility. There’s a lot of upfront time and capital investment in the set-up of the physical space for your facility. Even if you already have a contact center, it could be failing because you didn’t know how to set up a successful contact center in the first place. At GCS, some of the common problems we see are choosing the wrong location, building a facility that is too small, and picking the wrong combination of technology to balance the needs of your customers and your organization.
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Call center workforce management is a helpful tool for scheduling and supervision. Thanks to the nature of the business and technology in general, call center managers have an unprecedented amount of information about their agents’ activities and the call volume they receive. This information can give them an opportunity to truly excel, but only if they are paying attention to the data.
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A weekly soft skill tip for improving personal communication for you and your team. Emailed to you each week.
What do you think of when you hear the word “outsourcing”? Many of our clients tell us that while they knew that other companies outsourced some of their services to outside vendors, to them, the practice always seemed impersonal – until they got to know GCS.
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Call coaching is one of the most powerful tools in your call center operations management toolkit. You can take all the performance measurements and analytics you want, but if you aren’t actively coaching your staff to be better, you can’t be surprised when they miss the mark. Your agents will be more engaged and more effective when you take the time to help them improve, instead of demanding results and not explaining how to get there.
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Managing a call center requires a solid knowledge of business management concepts, but it also takes something more. Call centers are like nothing else. They are high-volume and customer facing, and they have their own unique set of challenges because of that. To be effective, you need management that knows how to produce at elevated volumes while providing effective customer service. We call this “sanity” - doing the same thing over and over and expecting the SAME result. For each call, a personalized result. One million calls, one person at a time.
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Being a customer service agent can be hard work. While helping customers all day is not often a hard task, it does take a special person to do it well. While many customers your agents encounter in a given day are simply looking for information, others will have a problem or an issue that needs to be resolved. Your agents need to have the personality and training to be the customer advocate. They need to be able to remain calm in the face of conflict, empathetic in the face of anger, and friendly even when your customers aren’t making it easy. Choosing the right people to work on your behalf is essential – but it’s not the only challenge.
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