Author:  Jim Mitchell
When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Bank recently postponed their concert dates in Ft. Lauderdale and Orlando, FL, Ticketmaster proactively reached out to concertgoers to let them know. 
There was, of course, the public notification. Someone shared the information with the media who then communicated it to the public-at-large.  But, what if a [...]

Author:  Jim Mitchell
I just reviewed the results for the 2007 Aspect Contact Center Satisfaction Index.  This year’s data is especially interesting to me because it provides an in-depth look at what consumers say makes their exceptional experiences exceptional. 
The Empathy and Advocacy (people-related) scores really caught my eye – year-over-year across the board, consumers only rated [...]

Author:  Gary Barnett
I’m sure you’re familiar with a contact center’s core interaction technologies – the automatic call distributor (ACD), the self-service application, the predictive dialer, as well as email and chat capabilities.  These technologies are the primary vehicles through which many customer-company interactions take place before reaching an agent.
These core interaction technologies are themselves supported [...]

Author:  Jim Mitchell
A few days ago, I wrote about a positive experience my friend Susan recently had with Verizon customer service.  She just called and told me about another good interaction – one that again exemplifies proactive customer service done well.  I’m always talking about using predictive dialers for proactive customer service, so I thought [...]

Author:  Jim Mitchell
One day, out of the blue, my friend Susan started receiving frequent and somewhat random phone calls from a large technology company. The phone rang during the day, in the early evening, and even in the middle of the night. The phone calls were not the result of sales, collections or customer service [...]

Author:  Jim Mitchell
Last month, I wrote about Do Not Call legislation, specifically in Australia, Canada, and the United States.  There is some other somewhat recent, and much more restrictive, legislation in the United Kingdom that affects all types of outbound contact regardless of the business process they handle.  This legislation, which was proposed by the [...]

Author:  Jim Mitchell
There is a relatively new movement taking hold of small contact centers - hosted solutions.  Small contact centers looking to build their client base and grow their call volume are using hosted systems to access functionality and resources that they might not otherwise be able to support or afford on their own.  Applications [...]

Author:  Jim Mitchell
The Australian Parliament recently passed legislation to create a National Do Not Call (DNC) Register, and expects it to start in early 2007.  Canada also anticipates its DNC Register will be operational in 2007 while businesses in other countries, such as the United States, have been complying with DNC laws for years.  For [...]

Author:  Jim Mitchell
I was walking around my home tonight thinking about how much I would enjoy living in a “smart house.”  You know, one of those houses where all electronics and appliances are remotely controlled.  I would love it if I could press a button as I walked through my front door and instruct my [...]

Author:  Jim Mitchell
During the past 25 years or so, I’ve visited thousands of customer sites and have seen countless predictive dialer implementations.  There has historically been one overriding commonality - dialers have been used to connect people to people; live agents to prospects and customers, and vice versa.  But things don’t always stay the same, [...]