CallTalk™ Radio

Change surrounds contact center managers: mergers, systems changes, organizational changes are all high-impact events that present managers with huge challenges. Join us for the final CallTalk episode of 2017 as we explore these issues with our Change Management expert, Steve Ellis. Steve will share his exceptional experiences and walk us through a structured approach to leading contact centers during major changes. Be ready to take notes on tips to prepare your team for both change – and success!

Excellent customer service requires excellent training - - and a culture that supports learning and doing. You need to articulate the results you hope to obtain in order to determine the training you need.

In this episode of CallTalk Bruce Belfiore and Conner Burt focus on the importance of access, speed and data to your center's success. Please join us for a lively discussion that will both explore these themes and give practical suggestions on how to leverage them best.

Conner Burt is the Chief Operations Officer at Lessonly, the leader in modern team learning software. He directly oversees Services and Client Experience. Conner lives in Indianapolis with the love of his life, Lena, and a placid dog named Titan.

Huddles can be the team’s daily opportunity to communicate and plan. They can also be used to circulate other important company or product information. If there is a special focus on a particular metric or initiative the huddle can be used to remind the team and reinforce these initiatives each day. Announcements, such as a scheduled downtime, can also be made during this dedicated time. Communication is the grease that makes things happen smoothly in contact centers. It is also an area in which there is often the greatest variance between management and agent perceptions. Managers sometimes feel they are doing a good job of communicating to agents who, instead, feel their superiors are doing a mediocre or poor job on this count. In fact, in our groundbreaking report on agent attitudes and satisfaction, intra-office communication ranked only 14th among the 18 categories

Contact center managers know that a strong, positive, can-do culture will improve their metrics and make their customers satisfied. However, culture can seem like a complex, difficult thing to turn around, to build, and to maintain. There are some important tips that will help you with this important element of your operation. Bruce Belfiore will ask Jeff Toister to give you the benefit of his experience regarding issues such as: - The importance of leadership in fomenting, forming and furthering customer-focused cultures in the work place - Ways to foster engagement in a way that will build morale - Encouraging senior executive involvement in the life and culture of your center. Join us for an information-rich session of CallTalk, the industry's online talk show since 2009!

What do Google, Netflix, Apple, Uber and Amazon have in common other than rapid growth and amazing profits? They all are considered among the most innovative companies, perpetually seek ingenious ways to delight their customers.  Remarkable service for today’s picky, fickle and vocal customers requires a constant and deliberate pursuit of innovative ways to make the customers’ experiences sparkly, but consistent; enriching, but profitable. Since value-added has gotten way too expensive; smart organizations focus on value-unique—novel, not just more.

Chip R. Bell is a renowned keynote speaker and author of several best-selling books including Take Their Breath Away, Managing Knock Your Socks off Service, The 9½ Principles of Innovative Service and Sprinkles: Creating Awesome Experiences through Innovative Service. His newest book is the bestselling Kaleidoscope:  Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles released in February, 2017. Dr. Bell has appeared live on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, CNN, ABC, CBS, NPR Marketplace and his work has been featured in Fortune, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, USA Today, Businessweek, Entrepreneur, Inc. Magazine, CEO Magazine, Money Magazine, and Fast Company.  He can be reached at chipbell.com.

Call Centers are full of many moving parts, we will dive into as many as we can and get the viewpoint of a long time Call Center Pro, Michael J. Tamer, CEO and President of Proponisi.

Michael is a 25-year veteran of the customer contact industry. Michael is the author of the book, The Four-Minute Customer, which outlines his Customer Experience management philosophies, and was at the forefront of  the contact center quality monitoring industry. Throughout his career, Michael has been teaching the benefits of quality and customer experience to organizations all over the world, including the United States Senate.

As the President and CEO of Teknekron Infoswitch, Michael introduced the industry's first quality monitoring product, which led to the "this call may be monitored for quality purposes" phenomenon heard today on all 1-800 numbers.

Proponisi offers a SAAS solution that provides a Voice of the Customer solution designed with the Call Center in mind.

Some of the things we hope to touch on:

-  values alignment

-  ?Why can't my work life be like my personal life?

-  Employee engagement ROI chain

-  Culture + Tech + Data = engagement

-  Description of Ohana

-  Unifying the on-boarding experiences of different areas (pulling together best practices)

-  Improving the new hire experience 

-  Use of AI in evaluating and career-pathing employees

 

David Kingsley is an experienced organizational effectiveness executive who currently serves as Salesforce's Senior Vice President, Global Human Resources Strategy and Operations (S&O).  He leads a global team of 85 professionals in 12 offices around the world in HR Strategy, Analytics, Program Management and Employee Relations, serving the 25,000 employees of Salesforce across 26 countries. David is focused on the design, development and delivery of the employee experience with the perspective that company culture is a thread which runs from the candidate and new hire experience, to the employee experience, through to the customer experience.

 

David holds a B.A. in International Relations from Catholic University and an M.A. in Organizational Science from George Washington University. Prior to Salesforce David held leadership roles in management consulting with Accenture and Booz Allen.

Joe LaTorre, Director of Innovation at Employment Technologies, will talk with host Bruce Belfiore about emerging practices that every contact center manager should know about. Focus will be on giving you take-aways that will make your recruiting and screening efforts more cost efficient as well as more successful in terms of hiring the right people for your center. Join us for this illuminating episode of CallTalk!

Joe has designed and directed the development of more than 100 custom simulations for employee hiring. His design team has earned an unprecedented five national “Top Product of the Year” awards, and has participated in the development of video-based and computer-based simulations for a variety of domestic and international clients. He holds an M.S. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Valdosta State University and has more than 20 years of global consulting experience. He has presented at national conferences related to advancing the science and accuracy of personnel selection and will share his expertise and unique perspective with our CallTalk audience.

Bruce Belfiore interviews Michael Sanders on his efforts, with the non-profit NTI, to help Americans with Disabilities and Disabled Veterans back into the workplace. Through his work, he has actively placed over 650 work-at-home employees, per year, in Fortune 500 companies.  Michael talks about the challenges and opportunity of hiring Americans with Disabilities within the Call Center, Customer Service, and IT Help Desk industries and the solutions NTI can provide. 

Michael Sanders is the Director of Marketing and Communications for NTI, a non-profit focusing on placing Americans with Disabilities and Disabled Veterans in Call Center, Customer Service and IT Help Desk work-at-home positions.  He is currently partnering with multiple Fortune 500 companies, such as Amazon, Apple, IBM, and the IRS, to build relationships and provide jobs to individuals with disabilities. His extensive 20 years’ experience in advocacy and marketing strategy, along with his Master of Science in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, have contributed to his success building NTI as the leader in placing Americans with Disabilities in the workplace.

Contact Mike if you would like to see if NTI can assist with your staffing needs:

Miake Sanders

877-248-8912

Bruce Belfiore interviews Mark Coudray on his brand new methodology that creates vastly improved connections between agents and customers. A recent trial resulted in an increase in reservation closure rates from 24.9% to over 70%, as well as an increase in satisfaction. Leveraging his knowledge of the human mind and decision-making processes, Mark has created a unique approach that begins with listening to customer calls very carefully, then coaching agents in ways no one has ever done before.

Mark's professional activities involve the strategic planning, direction, and transition for companies moving from an analog marketing delivery model to a digital model.  Mark is actively involved in the R&D of sales, marketing, and analytically driven social media technologies as well as the implementation into commercial environments. This is the third round of digital disruption within the communications industry, and the forces and drivers for this disruption have now spread to all businesses. Segments served include health, retail, entertainment, education, and industrial/manufacturing. Prior to his current activities, Mark focused on developing and implementing digital technologies for the specialty printing industry.  His work has been published globally in more than 400 articles, papers, and columns. Mark’s columns have appeared continuously in multiple industry publications for more than 25 years. He has worked with client companies in 41 countries. His implementations, products, and services are offered in the areas of digital workflow design, consulting services, software development, technical seminars, workshops, technical assessment, and expert witness testimony. Mark received a BS degree in Graphic Communications in 1977 from California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, California.

Learn more about this new sales approach by reaching out to Mark directly at:  [email protected]