“Genius (News - Alert),” Thomas Edison declared in 1932, “is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.” That description also fits a sports locker room pretty well, or a summer’s day in Georgia.
Call center success, say officials of vendor Contactual (News - Alert), is 90 percent human ability, 10 percent technology availability. Where the two merge, they say, “is in the quality of the supervision call center supervisors provide their teams. Done properly, the combined result can even exceed 100 percent.”
Leaving aside mathematical nitpicking, it’s true that call center supervisors perform countless tasks to ensure their agents’ success and professional growth -- “given the right technology tools, supervisors can shorten agents’ learning curves, enhance customer satisfaction, and improve the bottom line,” Contactual officials agree.
They note how people often talk about the impact of technology on service levels, “but in reality, technology is just a facilitator. Unless the supervisor uses the technology properly, the application is little more than a string of zeros and ones.”
Call recording is a good example: “Empowering supervisors with call recordings from every call their contact center agents take, gives them the ability to constructively manage agent performance and improve service levels.”
There are plenty of reasons why calls need to be escalated, Contactual officials concede. “Everything from the simple -- an agent’s action requires a supervisor’s approval -- to the complex, caller complaints or a query beyond an agent’s area of expertise. In those instances, technology can make your company shine.”
This past week Contactual’s Multichannel Connect for Salesforce tool received a 2010 Product of the Year Award from Technology Marketing Corporation Customer Interaction Solutions magazine, the leading publication covering CRM, call centers and teleservices since 1982.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Chris DiMarco