CallTalk™ Radio

Are you endlessly trying to get agents to improve their customer service? There might be a culprit you’ve never considered. Discover hidden and counterintuitive obstacles that hurt agent performance.

You’ll learn:

Why rewards and games often makes service quality worseHow wall boards can increase your queuesWhat secret your agents know that can immediately improve service

 

Guest Jeff Toister

Jeff Toister is a best selling author who has written three customer service books, including Getting Service Right: Overcoming the Hidden Obstacles to Outstanding Customer Service. Feedspot has named his Inside Customer Service blog one of the Top 50 customer service blogs on the planet.  Jeff has been recognized as a customer service thought leader by Global Gurus, ICMI, and Comm100. Thousands of customer service professionals subscribe to Jeff's Customer Service Tip of the Week email, and have taken his video-based training courses.

Ever have a bad experience with a contact center agent? Why do you think this happened? One answer may be poor training or poor coaching – either way these situations can be avoided. Join us for our next discussion to hear Nancy Munro share tips and advice on how contact centers can build better and more effective training programs.

 

Guest: Nancy Munro, CEO of Verbal Transactions, has over 28 years in helping organizations implement and deploy voice enablement solutions.  Nancy has worked with organization’s like CVS, AT&T and Microsoft, helping them decipher how best to address performance challenges that align to their structural capabilities and revenue goals.

Nancy pioneered voice-enabled technologies in the corporate space and was the first to launch an interactive audio role-playing simulator. Her current solutions leverage speech recognition and AI to provide a scalable and immersive learning application.

Nancy speaks at various conferences such as the eLearning Guild, ASTD, and AA-ISP and was the Chair of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Chicago for three years.

Gamification and Engagement have been used in contact centers for some time now and so far, the results have been… mixed. Why do some Gamification and Engagement programs work so well for some organizations, and fall flat for others?

Fresh out of the military and religious service, Elijah stumbled upon Snowfly, a leading gamification-based incentive, engagement, and analytics company, that did things differently. It’s a company that focused on people and understood and leveraged human psychology. He’s seen and participated in effective programs and created tools that have completely transformed organizations and its people. He’s now on a mission to spread the message the Gamification, Incentives, and Engagement have a new look.

Guest: Elijah Cox, COO of Snowlfy

Elijah is the Chief Operating and Technology officer at Snowfly, a leading gamification-based incentive, engagement, and analytics company. Elijah started as a junior programmer for Snowfly and within a few years was involved in all operations and consulting within HR, product, and Employee Experience/Engagement. Elijah is passionate about self-improvement, leadership, and organizational health.

Contact center industry associations can contribute a lot to the success of your center and your career. However, many managers don't consider joining or, if they do, fail to make the most of their investment. We have brought in an expert who has seen this from both sides, and can tell you how to make the most of the opportunities that associations offer.

"Conversational Virtual Agent (sometimes known as chatbots) are all the rage. There has been an explosion, with easily accessed and low-priced conversational frameworks from the likes of Amazon and Google. However, while it’s easy to put together a bad conversational application, developing and deploying one that actually provides a useful service for everyone

involved is a different matter.

Join this show to hear about the different channels on which virtual agents can act, how their knowledge base should be structured, the best approach to training, the necessary integrations, and why machine learning, with

all its promise, is not enough to build a conversational agent that you can trust to talk with your customers."

Technology is impacting every aspect of our lives from home shopping, home deliveries, video streaming, voice activated home hubs,  to kids paying to watch their favorite gamers … well play Video Games.  Technology developments in Customer Care world are also developing at a dizzying pace and the increased use of live chat, SMS, Social Channels and Chat Bots in customer care are staggering)

The Call Center industry can be full of drama that can be a poison to the customer experience, employee satisfaction, agent retention and your overall center performance.  In this episode, we will learn how to identify different types of drama and discuss things you can do right now to overcome the negativity associated with drama.

Has the collections industry taken a few black eyes through the years?  Yet, your specific company was not at fault?  Does your company get “stereotyped” unfairly  Our guest today, owns a collection agency that is intent on changing the way collection agencies are viewed - - by being ridiculously nice.  Not just nice, ridiculously nice. 

Today, we are going to talk to CEO of Americollect, Kenlyn T. Gretz who will explain how to change the way collection agencies are viewed by being ridiculously nice to consumers. He will explain how data + nice = results. 

Guest Speaker: Kenlyn T. Gretz | Americollect

Kenlyn T. Gretz is the President & CEO of Americollect, which has been in business in Wisconsin since 1964. Americollect prides itself on changing the way collection agencies are viewed by being Ridiculously Nice. In 2008, Kenlyn and Americollect were awarded the “Small Business Solid Growth” award by “Corporate Report Magazine”. For nine consecutive years, 2009-2017 “Inc. Magazine” included Americollect in its list of “5000 Top Growing Privately Held Companies in America”. Americollect has been consistently (2009-2018) ranked as the Best Place to Work in Collections, according to InsideARM.com.

Contact centers are under increasing pressure to become profit centers and leverage new channels of engaging customers. Live chat is growing in use--especially among millennial customers--and chat communications can be optimized using machine learning in order to improve engagement, reduce cost and grow sales.

Workforce Management is both science and art. Hear the voice of experience as Rick Lee, Workforce Manager for Convergys, is interviewed by host Bruce Belfiore on his WFM best practices tips. Practitioners who are looking for a deeper level of WFM insight should join this episode.