Athens Services continues to expand its trash- and recyclables-hauling business to include partnering with communities and other groups on disposal and other environmental communities. The company’s growth has exploded, especially after winning a contract with the city of Los Angeles, in addition to serving residential and commercial customers in communities across Southern California. Before NICE inContact, Athens Services did not have an IVR. And without real visibility into its contact center operations, managers and agents were at the mercy of wildly fluctuating call volumes and Excel spre ..read more

Sharpen your skills and transform your career by attending our pre-conference sessions, Interactions.edu and take your Interactions 2019 experience to the next level! Interactions.edu offers a multitude of sessions delivered by our expert Education Specialists and Business Consultants, which are built upon an extraordinary reputation for great content. Interactions.edu is all about hands on training, getting tips and best practices from our experts and sharing valuable, practical knowledge with other NICE inContact users. Be sure to check out the sessions for Interactions.edu. You can explore ..read more

Millennials – born between 1980 and 1995 –  have been workforce rookies for the past 15 years, but there is a new kid in town, Generation Z. Gen-Z was born between 1996 and 2010, with the oldest workers of the era being 23 years of age, and prime entry-level job candidates in your contact center. While both generations have commonalities, it’s important to recognize the differences and how to cater your performance management strategy to their unique needs and preferences. Both generations are tech-savvy, but each rely on technology differently. Millennials pioneered the internet, texting ..read more

In Part One of this two-part series, we sought to demystify the forecasting and scheduling components of contact center workforce management. In Part Two, we will seek to address intraday management and employee engagement as components of a WFM program. Intraday management You figured out the forecast and created a schedule to cover it, so now you can just coast, right? WRONG – much to the dismay of all workforce managers everywhere! You can have the most accurate forecast and most optimized schedule in the world, but unexpected occurrences are always going to pop up and throw a wrench ..read more

Forecasting is a critical component of a call center’s workforce management program. The accuracy of your forecast has a ripple effect on almost all performance metrics and business outcomes. A bad forecast can directly lead to under- or overstaffing, which then has cascade effects on average handle time, CSAT, labor waste… the list goes on and on! Forecasting has often been described as part science and part art, and there are many factors that impact forecast accuracy. However, one critical component is the accuracy and reliability of the historical contact volume data from which your foreca ..read more

NICE inContact CXone call center software helps contact center managers deliver great customer experiences, engage contact center agents, and reduce costs. CXone provides unified administration that simplifies contact center management. It offers integrated tools to drive and empower agents, elevating performance and enabling contact center managers to quickly respond to meet or exceed their service level agreements (SLA). CXone empowers managers to quickly and easily make omnichannel routing changes based on changing business conditions and/or contact center agent needs and capabilitie ..read more

Contact centers need to manage, engage and retain their contact centers’ most important resource—their people. Workforce optimization can provide the insights, analytics and clarity into productivity to build and keep an expert team. 45 Workforce Optimization (WFO) Ideas in 45 Minutes features four panelists sharing practical workforce optimization tips based on their extensive experience managing contact center teams.  Featured panelists include: Christina Sheehan, Workforce Manager at Crate and Barrel Jeff Kennon, Director, CSC Affiliate Experience at NeoNova Chad Pritchard, a Product ..read more

With $1.5 billion in annual sales, Omega World Travel is one of the largest travel management companies in the U.S.  Approximately 200 onsite and virtual agents handle corporate, government and leisure travel, making or modifying reservations, generating quotes and exchanging tickets.  Together they support three different channels—voice (inbound and outbound), email and chat (both inbound) in 19 different languages, making a unified cloud platform imperative in the contact center. But not that long ago, Omega’s contact center was going nowhere. Its old third-party hosted cloud solution had ..read more

Recruiting excellent agents can be a challenging task. It can even be more difficult keeping them around once hired. According to the JOLTS survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employee turnover rate is higher now than it has been in the past 18 years. Retaining call center agents doesn’t occur by chance, it happens by implementing practical, proven retention tactics. Check out these five tactics to retain your top call center agents:  1) Recognize Your Agents  Humans have an innate need to be appreciated and belong. Recognition via a performance management program in the work ..read more

How boring would life be if there were only one flavor of ice cream?! Baskin-Robbins loved variety so much they created 31 flavors, and then Ben & Jerry had to do them one better with 50+ flavors! So why subject your contact center to just one flavor of gamification? Studies show gamification positively impacts employee engagement, and employee engagement impacts the bottom line. According to Forrester Research, a 5% improvement in employee engagement typically results in a 3% increase in revenue growth. With such clear benefits, incorporating gamification into your performance man ..read more