Call Center Rocket Science

"I once heard it said that running a call center is not rocket science. While you may not need the skills and education of an aerospace engineer, successful call center management does require certain skills and insight."-RANDY RUBINGH Call Center Rocket Science gives practical, hands on advice for today's customer service professionals. Here you will find real world advice on a wide variety of topics essential to effective call center management including: Recruiting and Hiring: How to find great agents, what to look for in a candidate, how to weed out applicants that may not be a good fit, closing the best candidates. Training: How to develop an effective new hire training course that prepares reps to take successfully take calls starting their first day on the floor. Effective Role playing strategies to increase effectiveness of training. Management: Creating a world class culture to motivate and retain your staff. How to look at and understand call center statistics. Call Center Operations: How to handle the day to day activity of a call center, and manage the business without constantly fighting fires. Outsourcing: For outsourcers- tips on how to make your client satisfied and give you more business. For those who outsource there are tips on how to get below the surface to truly understanding the level of service being provided by your service provider. Overall 110 tips that most centers can implement right away and receive immediate benefit of improved operations, and higher levels of employee and customer satisfaction.

This book brings together scientists, researchers, practitioners, and students from academia and industry to present recent and ongoing research activities concerning the latest advances, techniques, and applications of natural language processing systems, and to promote the exchange of new ideas and lessons learned. Taken together, the chapters of this book provide a collection of high-quality research works that address broad challenges in both theoretical and applied aspects of intelligent natural language processing. The book presents the state-of-the-art in research on natural language processing, computational linguistics, applied Arabic linguistics and related areas. New trends in natural language processing systems are rapidly emerging – and finding application in various domains including education, travel and tourism, and healthcare, among others. Many issues encountered during the development of these applications can be resolved by incorporating language technology solutions. The topics covered by the book include: Character and Speech Recognition; Morphological, Syntactic, and Semantic Processing; Information Extraction; Information Retrieval and Question Answering; Text Classification and Text Mining; Text Summarization; Sentiment Analysis; Machine Translation Building and Evaluating Linguistic Resources; and Intelligent Language Tutoring Systems.

Every business knows that the best customer is a happy customer. They return again and again, bring their friends and family, and deliver tons of free advertising via word of mouth and social media. But in order to grow that loyal base, you must be keenly aware of your customers' needs and preferences. Drawing on the latest research in the exploding field of positive psychology, Columbia Business School professor Bernd Schmitt offers three unique approaches any business can use to turning a casual customer into a committed fan: • The Feel-Good Method: Use the experience of pleasure and positive emotion to hook new customers, and watch those feel-good moments transform an impulsive buyer into a committed loyalist. • The Values-and-Meaning Method: Attract passionate customers by appealing to their core values, like being socially responsible, protecting the environment, or living a simple life • The Engagement Method: Get customers to notice a unique or limited offer, immerse them in the experience, and have them share it with friends and family. Schmitt shows marketers, brand managers, and entrepreneurs how to design an authentic and successful campaign that will reach, grow, and sustain a devoted base of customers.

Distill 100%–Usable Max-Profit Knowledge from Your Digital Data. Do It Now! Why hasn’t all that data delivered a whopping competitive advantage? Because you’ve barely begun to use it, that’s why! Good news: neither have your competitors. It’s hard! But digital marketing analytics is 100% doable, it offers colossal opportunities, and all of the data is accessible to you. Chuck Hemann and Ken Burbary will help you chop the problem down to size, solve every piece of the puzzle, and integrate a virtually frictionless system for moving from data to decision, action to results! Scope it out, pick your tools, learn to listen, get the metrics right, and then distill your digital data for maximum value for everything from R&D to CRM to social media marketing! • Prioritize—because you can’t measure, listen to, and analyze everything • Use analysis to craft experiences that profoundly reflect each customer’s needs, expectations, and behaviors • Measure real social media ROI: sales, leads, and customer satisfaction • Track the performance of all paid, earned, and owned social media channels • Leverage “listening data” way beyond PR and marketing: for strategic planning, product development, and HR • Start optimizing web and social content in real time • Implement advanced tools, processes, and algorithms for accurately measuring influence • Integrate paid and social data to drive more value from both • Make the most of surveys, focus groups, and offline research synergies • Focus new marketing and social media investments where they’ll deliver the most value Foreword by Scott Monty Global Head of Social Media, Ford Motor Company

This book is for people who work in a call center and common traits the call center location must offer. It contains practical observations about how to use particular technologies, and ideas about how to run the call center, which has become its own corporate discipline.

Why we choose companies and brands in the same way that weunconsciously perceive, judge, and behave toward one another People everywhere describe their relationships with brands in adeeply personal way—we hate our banks, love our smartphones,and think the cable company is out to get us. What's actually goingon in our brains when we make these judgments? Through originalresearch, customer loyalty expert Chris Malone and top socialpsychologist Susan Fiske discovered that our perceptions arise fromspontaneous judgments on warmth and competence, the same twofactors that also determine our impressions of people. We seecompanies and brands the same way we automatically perceive, judge,and behave toward one another. As a result, to achieve sustainedsuccess, companies must forge genuine relationships with customers.And as customers, we have a right to expect relationalaccountability from the companies and brands we support. Applies the social psychology concepts of "warmth" (whatintentions others have toward us) and "competence" (how capablethey are of carrying out those intentions) to the way we perceiveand relate to companies and brands Features in-depth analyses of companies such as Hershey's,Domino's, Lululemon, Zappos, Amazon, Chobani, Sprint, and more Draws from original research, evaluating over 45 companies overthe course of 10 separate studies The Human Brand is essential reading for understandinghow and why we make the choices we do, as well as what it takes forcompanies and brands to earn and keep our loyalty in the digitalage.

The BDC in the digital age exists for staying in constant contact with prospects, communicating with and developing more business opportunities with past clients and the retention of loyal customers, increasing sales by driving traffic tothe front door. Today the BDC concept is even more important than in the past. This is largely due to the impact of the Internet, social media, Smart-Phones, devices and the instant nature of communication in the digital age. Sales success in today's brave new digital world demands understanding of the place of the BDC in the Internet age and dealing with the needs of the information-based customer.Bernard Smalls, CPO HuMax Consulting Group

This is the only book available today that provides a very readable, step-by-step guide for managing an incoming call center. The book combines theory with practical advice and is filled with over 100 charts and graphs, several case studies and an extensive glossary and index. Readers will learn how to: achieve service level with quality in an era of more transactions, growing complexity and heightened caller expectations; understand the "how" behind best practices; boost caller satisfaction; win top management's support; and discover what separates a good call center from a great one.