Call Center Agent Series

"Advice from a Call Center Geek: Rethinking Call Center Operations is a field manual for the 21st century contact center. Practical, poignant, and funny, Tom dishes out amazing real-world advice that has made his organization successful. From culture to education to incentives, Tom addresses the key areas to make your contact center world-class!"Paul HerdmanHead of Customer ExperienceNICE inContactAdvice From a Call Center Geek takes a look at a new way of running today's high end contact center. Tom Laird, the CEO of award winning Expivia Interaction Marketing, 600 seat BPO call center guides you through the process of developing a world class operation.This book will take you through the process of evaluating and changing your call center's culture, how to look beyond a resume to hire the "right" associates and show you how to educate for quality while maintaining high level management. Advice from a Call Center Geek will make you rethink how the call center manager of today should be looking at running their call center.

This book gives an accessible overview of the role and potential of mathematical optimization in call centers. It deals extensively with all aspects of workforce management, but also with topics such as call routing and the scheduling of multiple channels. It does so without going into the mathematics, but by focusing on understanding its consequences. This way the reader will get familiar with workload forecasting, the Erlang formulas, simulation, and so forth, and learn how to improve call center performance using it. The book is primarily meant for call center professionals involved in planning and business analytics, but also call center managers and researchers will find it useful. There is an accompanying website which contains several online calculators.

Call Center Agents are a critical part of many companies operations and customer service departments. But agent rarelyget the training they need to understand how call centers work and what their purpose is.They also don't understand what is expected of them and how their performance will be monitored and assessed.Our Call Center Training Manuals will prepare new agents for their future and will also give existing agents a new perspective on their current position.Learn call center structure, terminology and what the responsibilities are for call center agents. This book will help prepare anyone to be the very best Call Center Agent they can be!

Call centres have become the crucial front line for managing customer relationships. This book covers a range of call center terminology. It explains relevant terms, and provides the call center manager with a quick reference that covers the technology and operational issues that come up in running and improving a call center.

What's your strategy to remain competitive? Trainers realize that recruiting the right people with the right skills and providing them with great training is key to creating a great business. With the arrival of measurement and return-on-investment calculations for these key business activities comes the realization from business professionals that performance management does make a difference in profits, sales, and customer satisfaction. With a company's need to recruit and keep the best talent, performance management is its best strategy for remaining competitive in the global marketplace in which employees have more choices than ever before. Performance management is used to improve both personal and organizational skills. Recruiting and Retaining Call Center Employees illustrates the various ways employees can reach their potential and thereby contribute to the bottom line, made all the more profitable by creating stronger and more stable companies that can offer higher wages and excellent benefit packages. Combining theory with practical advice on training, recruiting, and evaluating programs, this book provides the trainer with practical models and guides. Plus, cases on process and technology provide a full range of solutions in creating a call center that is well ahead of the competition. ASTD is proud to present the 22nd book in the IN ACTION series: 11 cases that provide numerous examples of performance management programs in diverse applications. One basic premise remains constant in all of the applications: People matter most, and, when they adopt a relationship-based leadership style, the workplace becomes successful. Performance management involves all willing participants creating a learning environment together.

Tips on making your call center a genuine profit center In North America, call centers are a $13 billion business, employing 4 million people. For managers in charge of a call center operation, this practical, user-friendly guide outlines how to improve results measurably, following its principles of revenue generation, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. In addition, this new edition addresses many industry changes, such as the new technology that's transforming today's call center and the location-neutral call center. It also helps readers determine whether it's cost-efficient to outsource operations and looks at the changing role and requirements of agents. The ultimate call center guide, now revised and updated The authors have helped over 60 companies improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their call center operations Offers comprehensive guidance for call centers of all sizes, from 20-person operations to multinational businesses With the latest edition of Call Centers For Dummies, managers will have an improved arsenal of techniques to boost their center's bottom line.

What happens over time to Indians who spend their working hours answering phone calls from Americans—and acting like Americans themselves? To find out, the authors of Answer the Call conducted long-term interviews with forty-five agents, trainers, managers, and CEOs at call centers in Bangalore and Mumbai from 2003 to 2012. For nine or ten hours every day, workers in call centers are not quite in India or America but rather in a state of “virtual migration.” Encouraged to steep themselves in American culture from afar, over time the agents come to internalize and indeed perform Americanness for Americans—and for each other. Call center agents “migrate” through time and through the virtual spaces generated by voice and information sharing. Drawing from their rich interviews, the authors show that the virtual migration agents undergo has no geographically distant point of arrival, yet their perception of moving is not merely abstract. Over the duration of the job, agents’ sense of place and time changes: agents migrate but still remain, leaving them somewhere in between—between India and America, experience and imagination, class mobility and consumption, tradition and modernity, here and there, then and now, past and future. However tangible and elastic their virtual mobility might seem in these relatively lucrative jobs, it is also suspended within the confines of the very boundaries they migrate across. Having engaged with these vivid and often poignant interviews, readers will never again be indifferent to an Indian agent’s greeting at the other end of a toll-free call: “Hello, my name is Roxanne. How may I help you?”

New technology and best practices to turn your contact center into a revenue generator.

Tips on making your call center a genuine profit center In North America, call centers are a $13 billion business, employing 4 million people. For managers in charge of a call center operation, this practical, user-friendly guide outlines how to improve results measurably, following its principles of revenue generation, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. In addition, this new edition addresses many industry changes, such as the new technology that's transforming today's call center and the location-neutral call center. It also helps readers determine whether it's cost-efficient to outsource operations and looks at the changing role and requirements of agents. The ultimate call center guide, now revised and updated The authors have helped over 60 companies improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their call center operations Offers comprehensive guidance for call centers of all sizes, from 20-person operations to multinational businesses With the latest edition of Call Centers For Dummies, managers will have an improved arsenal of techniques to boost their center's bottom line.

The Language of Outsourced Call Centers is the first book to explore a large-scale corpus representing the typical kinds of interactions and communicative tasks in outsourced call centers located in the Philippines and serving American customers. The specific goals of this book are to conduct a corpus-based register comparison between outsourced call center interactions, face-to-face American conversations, and spontaneous telephone exchanges; and to study the dynamics of cross-cultural communication between Filipino call center agents and American callers, as well as other demographic groups of participants in outsourced call center transactions, e.g., gender of speakers, agents' experience and performance, and types of transactional tasks. The research design relies on a number of analytical approaches, including corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, and combines quantitative and qualitative examination of linguistic data in the investigation of the frequency distribution and functional characteristics of a range of lexico/syntactic features of outsourced call center discourse.