Last week Envision had the pleasure of hosting its annual Customer Forum at the Sheraton Seattle and it could not have turned out better! We had a top-notch line-up of customer speakers including BCBS of Nebraska, Costco and Southwest Airlines as well as motivational speaker, Nolan Burris.  It was our goal to WOW our customers and provide them with ideas and best practices they could take back to their contact centers to WOW their employees and customers! We had two jam-packed days of business and technical sessions, a partner solutions expo as well as a live demo of our upcoming release, Envision Centricity™.

I enjoyed hosting two networking sessions: Tactical Management of the Contact Center and Quality Monitoring and Coaching Programs. Both were great environments to discuss trends, challenges and best practices and I would like to share a few with you:

One of the common themes I heard was “simplify”. One of Costco’s promises to its employees is to “keep it simple”.  Southwest Airlines agreed and shared how they are keeping it simple by combining and aligning their quality evaluation forms and tossing out skills that really don’t matter. Another hot topic was work at home programs.  Several customers in the house including Alaska/Horizon Airlines, Free & Clear and Staples have developed some great work at home programs and have seen their attrition rates lower pretty dramatically. The group agreed this is trend that will continue to grow!

Calibration was also discussed and it was clear that this is still a challenging area for contact centers to track and manage.  Below are two calibration best practice documents that I mentioned at the conference and I wanted to share. The first is a way to automate your Calibration sessions within Envision Quality Monitoring.  The second is a spreadsheet that will help you track your Variance.

Automating Your Calibration Sessions

Tracking QA Variance

If you have any questions or ideas on the subjects below please post a response! Thanks for all of you who came to Seattle for the 2008 Customer Forum- I look forward to seeing you all next year!

Post tags: Envision Customer Forum, agent effectiveness, Costco, Southwest Airlines, BCBS of Nebraska, Seattle

Last week Envision hosted an educational Roundtable in Dallas, Texas.  The session was entitled “What Makes Great Leaders so Great”.  We had about 55 contact center professionals in attendance and it was a highly interactive session.  We talked about the important roles that leaders play in managing, coaching and developing contact center staff.  We also discussed the different types of agent classifications and how each has its own unique role within the center.  With each personality comes a need for a different leadership approach.  One of the best practices of the day was that it is up to the leader to adapt their style to who they are leading - not the other way around.  We all agreed that we have a lot to learn in this area and being a remarkable leader entails going through trial and errors and understanding the importance of being a life long learner.  As an added bonus, Jona Berta, Manager, Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards and Customer Relations, was on hand to talk about “Measuring What Matters” as it relates to our quality programs.

Thanks for all that participated and for those of you outside of Dallas, continue to check our Web site for a local Roundtable in your area in the remainder of 2008. 

Have a safe and happy 4^th of July, everyone!

Your Chief Evangelist,

Connie Smith  

Post tags: call center coaches, call center best practices, contact center agent, contact center effectiveness, call center, contact center

Allow agents to submit calls they deem to be “great member experiences” for scoring by quality assurance specialists once or twice a month. This allows for self discovery of agent’s strengths and weaknesses as well as closes gaps between QA and agent perspectives on differing aspects of a call. This promotes greater understanding from agents of how QA may score a call vs. what the agent thinks is “great.”