CallTalk™ Radio

A thoughtful review of employee rewards and recognition programs will provide you with ideas for improving your operation. These programs do not have to be expensive - many motivational techniques cost little or nothing. Applying latest best practices to your organization may be the way to attain better results and a more satisfied, stable workforce. This episode of CallTalk(TM) will give you the ideas you need to address this important issue.

Christopher Tomsa is a seasoned contact center manager who is currently a BenchmarkPortal Senior Consultant and is a lead instructor for the College of Call Center Excellence in-person and on-line training courses. He has held senior leadership positions in the call center industry at Citibank and at MetLife Group, where he was Director of Client Services for a MetLife affiliate company. His operations earned numerous awards, including BMP’s Top Call Centers award. He shares his experiences on the topic of employee recognition in ways that today's managers can use in their operations.

Your own kids, the team you coach, the scouts you lead, and the people you manage at work.  How much do you reel them in by rules, and how much do you let them run on trust?  It’s often a struggle to figure out how to get the balance right, and many managers have been hurt by situations in which they have trusted people too much, or have been humbled by situations in which they have erroneously relied too heavily on rules.

Our guest, Marge Robba, has more than 30 plus years of experience in management, training, coaching and consulting. She is focused on; Leadership development, corporate coaching, behavioral change management and cultural transformation. Helping organizations transition from the traditional transaction focus to a value add, learning environment.

She has excellent interpersonal skills with an ability to foster and maintain positive professional relationships. Delivering success through building high performance teams and cross team collaboration. She accomplishes this by understanding the communication needs of each level of the organization, from the C-suite to frontline employees.

International experiences include assignments in South America, Europe and Asia. She has worked in diverse industries such as; travel, banking, manufacturing, technology and health care.

We talk with Debbie Frazier on what accountability in a call center means and how to ensure it is alive and well!

Debbie Frazier is a Senior Consultant with Benchmark Portal.  She has over 3 decades of experience in customer service managing captive agents and most recently a vendor relations manager for outsourced contact center operations both in the US and outside of the US.  Her previous responsibilities included recruiting, hiring, quality assurance, workforce management, customer relations and process improvements.

Agent turnover is one of the costliest issues for Contact Centers and when the agent is heading out the door, it's usually too late to save the agent or the day.

Our guest, Chris Mulligan, from Talent Keepers, will be talking about Stay Interview and in particular, a 4 step methodology that based on years of research, improve results in employee engagement.

Chris has over 25 years of experience in the human resources industry, the majority of which has been in the employee engagement, selection, assessment and retention arena. Chris co-founded TalentKeepers in 2000, an organization dedicated to the issue of employee engagement and retention. TalentKeepers products have twice been recognized as “Top Training Products of the Year” by Human Resource Executive Magazine for their innovative and effective approach to employee on-boarding, engagement and retention. Chris has worked with organizations around the world on employee engagement and retention issues including: Accenture, AT&T, BMW, Coke, EDS, GE & UPS. Prior to co-founding TalentKeepers, Chris was the Vice President of Business Development for AlignMark, a division of Thomson Rueters, a multi-billion dollar and leading global e-information and solutions company serving the business and professional marketplace. Chris is a member of the American Psychological Society and an Associate Member of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from the Florida State University, and a Master of Science degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Central Florida

"Intentional Coaching is an innovative coaching approach in which supervisors are out on the floor with their agents, reinforcing what’s right and helping them go beyond fast, efficient transaction handling, to creating a positive customer experience. Intentional Coaching reduces  escalated calls by 50%, improves handle times, first call resolution, customer satisfaction, as well as agent engagement. Join Bruce and Barbara as they discuss what happens when supervisors use this common sense approach to coaching."

Recognized as an international expert and thought leader on creating customer-centric contact centers, Barbara Burke specializes in enabling customer service organizations to focus on what’s really important — the quality of the experience customers have with their front-line agents.Barbara is the author of two popular business fables about life in a contact center — The Napkin, the Melon & the Monkey: How to Be Happy & Successful by Simply Changing Your Mind, and The Monkey, the Moon & Maybe: How to Embrace Change & Live Fearlessly.  Her popular e-newsletter, Monday Aha! Sage Advice for Customer Service Leaders has over 2500 subscribers worldwide.Barbara’s extensive client list includes: Target, Microsoft, Estee’ Lauder, Proctor & Gamble, American Family Insurance, Lands’ End, Honeywell, City of Austin Texas, State of Minnesota, State of Pennsylvania, Cox Communications, Verizon, Portland General Electric, Integrys, Louisville Gas & Electric/Kentucky Utilities, San Diego Gas & Electric, Duke Energy, Georgia Power, and Time Warner.

In this episode, Charles Paelinck, Former Chief Product Officer for Ceasars, will join us to share several reasons why happiness in leadership is so important.

Charly has been in senior IT leadership for over 20  years and was most recently the Chief Product Officer for Caesars.

In this episode, you will learn "Five Keys To Call Center Consolidation". 

They can have other positive impacts on your operations such as culture, resources, technology and processes. These five keys will aid in looking at financial and operational benefits.

Tim has over 30 years of experience working in the customer service field, serving in leadership roles both internally and within the BPO outsourcing sector. Tim’s role at Benchmark Portal is to help organizations to improve business results by changing how they deal with customers.   Tim examines strategy, culture, marketing, interaction and technology design, customer service, and leadership practices;all through the eyes of the customer.

Tim started his career at Disney, and had the opportunity to see the Disney Institute built from the ground floor. Later Tim led U.P.S.'s customer service organization during their service transformation   Recently Tim headed customer service at Amazon.com, and lead a team within Amazon that formed a customer experience road map that provided that highest customer experience and loyalty rankings in the history of the retail sector.  

Tim holds a B.S. in Business Administration at Indiana State University.  Tim also serves as a board member on a number of industry and charity organizations, and is an author, speaker, and award recipient in customer experience and servant leadership.

Knowledge Management tools and resources are the brain of your contact center, providing your agents with the information they need right when they need it…when developed effectively and working properly.   The effectiveness of your Knowledge Management tools have an impact on several of your key performance metrics, including First Contact Resolution, Sales Conversion Rate, Average Talk Time and Handle Time, as well as your overall Call Quality and Accuracy.

Those tools can also have other positive impacts on your operations by providing each of your agents the capability to handle a broader range of call types, requiring fewer skill groups and therefore enabling greater efficiency.   When leveraged into customer-facing resources, they increase self-service opportunities for customers who prefer finding their own answers, reducing your overall workload and improving customer satisfaction.

Brian Golden brings more than 25 years of leadership experience in contact center operations management, design, organization development, and process engineering. He partners with client companies to create and implement solutions for aligning their service strategy with market and customer demands while achieving cost effectiveness in their operations. 

Brian has worked with a wide range of organizations both in the public sector as well as Fortune 500 companies, including UnitedHealth Group, AT&T, Atmos Energy, Allstate Insurance, Amgen, Toyota, Convergys, and the United States Department of the Interior. Along with having a master’s degree in organization development from Pepperdine University he is a certified facilitator of the Implementation Institute’s “Practicing Implementation Effectiveness” workshop and was a keynote speaker at the Singapore Institute of Management.

Have you ever wondered why some people are more difficult to work with than others?  No matter how hard you try, it seems impossible to see eye to eye with the other person.  Believe it or not, there is a quick way to figure out why the other person is prioritizing, planning, executing, and in some instances holding back from project completion at work. 

Following the Enneagram method, a form of psychology that breaks down the 9 basic leadership styles, Sheena Monnin explains how Enneagram is different from every other type of leadership assessment because it goes beyond behaviors and reveals the ‘why’ behind our actions and propensities.

It’s okay to have a different way of filtering information than your boss has, but companies are discovering how much time and money is wasted because of these differing and misunderstood perspectives. The solution is to learn what is motivating you, and that not everyone is propelled to action the way that you are, and how to respect those differences.

How can an organization increase customer satisfaction by providing a positive experience and reducing the customer’s effort?  Is your organization thinking of, or looking into, more effective and less expensive says of interacting with customers?  If those questions sound impoirtant, you will want to listen to todays show and here is why and how to go about it:

The mapping experience will expose roadblocks, pain points, and can come up with a journey to provide the customer with a superior experience.  The exercise examines the customer experience at each point of interaction in the various communication channels to identify opportunities that can enhance the experience.  The objective is to leverage all channels of customer contact center interaction and to promote satisfying cross-channel experiences. 

Our guest and specialist for the show today, Amy Novack, has over 15 years of experience and has spent several years managing inbound and outbound service teams.

Prior to joining Benchmark she acted as Senior Manager of Call Center Operations, for a small to mid-sector outsourcing company.  She introduced lean Six Sigma methodology for call center process improvement and design, and implemented multi-channels within her center.  Amy’s focus on employees aided in driving results of consistency among staff, processes, and systems to enhance an effective and efficient customer experience. 

Amy attended Walsh College where she acquired her Bachelors of Business Administration in Management.