It is truly incredible how quickly new technologies and media emerge and quickly become de facto aspects of our lives.  Twitter, created in 2006 and known only to relatively few early adopters a couple of years ago, has given us a term that is now nearly commonplace: “trending”.  While following the tweets of one’s favorite celebrity personalities might seem a bit sophomoric to some, seen in the aggregate, Twitter’s pervasive popularity and rapidly emerging adoption internationally means that it is, in a sense, “capturing the moment” for humanity.  After all, the timeline of tweets could arguably be construed as the most democratized form of history capture: history written by the masses.  Admittedly, without creating some order to the storyline, it’s a rather profuse form of history.  Enter “trending”.

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Editor’s Note: As we wrap up 2010, I wanted to share some of our favorite blog posts from the past year. We’ll be back with new content on January 4. This post by Bassam Salem first ran on September 8.

In recent memory, few things have preoccupied contact center managers' minds as has the topic of public social networks and how to deal with them.  Most managers will admit that, while they're aware of the ever-increasing popularity of sites such as Twitter and Facebook and of the potential challenges and benefits that come with such channels, most do not have a salient strategy or roadmap to follow.

While one could write many healthy books on the topic, in this post, I will attempt to provide a high level roadmap for contact centers specifying incremental steps they can take to go from merely being aware of social media all the way to leveraging them and potentially going as far as serving as nerve centers within their organizations for all social media activity.  The roadmap serves a dual purpose: it is also a maturity model against which to judge a contact center's developmental maturity vis-a-vis other centers. Read more >>

In recent memory, few things have preoccupied contact center managers' minds as has the topic of public social networks and how to deal with them.  Most managers will admit that, while they're aware of the ever-increasing popularity of sites such as Twitter and Facebook and of the potential challenges and benefits that come with such channels, most do not have a salient strategy or roadmap to follow.

While one could write many healthy books on the topic, in this post, I will attempt to provide a high level roadmap for contact centers specifying incremental steps they can take to go from merely being aware of social media all the way to leveraging them and potentially going as far as serving as nerve centers within their organizations for all social media activity.  The roadmap serves a dual purpose: it is also a maturity model against which to judge a contact center's developmental maturity vis-a-vis other centers.    Read more»

Contact centers come in all varieties: some are focused on handling in-bound support calls, some specialize in out-bound collections, others on in-bound direct response selling, and so on.  It thus follows that contact centers would have varying missions and business goals.  At a strategic level, I contend that there are only 3 core business goals that drive all contact center operations and that contact centers are typically driven by 2 of the 3 goals.  The 3 goals are:   Read more»