Our Heroes are outstanding customer professionals, with exceptional personal contribution in developing professionalism and best practice.
Our National Conference focusses on our individual communities of Leadership, Planning, Insight and Quality providing a community focus to develop topics, discuss challenges, share ideas and learn from fellow professionals. The last face-to-face Forum event was in November 2019 in Manchester. The pandemic gave us an opportunity to do something different and experiment with virtual events which have proved extremely popular. With the opportunity to hold face-to-face events now opening up, it gives us another opportunity to experiment.
The question now is: How do we combine the best of virtual and face-to-face?
Categories: Library, Planning & Resourcing
Sensée, the work-from-home specialist, is creating 500 new permanent and temporary positions to meet the growing demand for homeworking staff.
The vacancies are for Customer Contact Advisors, Team Managers and back office staff to work for new and existing clients. Start dates are immediate.
Categories: Library, Partner News
The recent merger of Aspect Software and Noble Systems, two leaders in the CX space, to become Alvaria has created a centre of excellence that combines the best and brightest of both companies. Alvaria is a new global force delivering leading-edge customer experience and workforce engagement software as well as cloud services technology solutions to many of the world’s largest enterprise contact centres.
Our true measure of success lies in what is done with information we provide and how much it is trusted. Take a look at this changing focus of analysis and consider what it means for your role and function, whether you are in planning, insight, quality, management or leadership.
Categories: Library, Quality & Customer Experience, Data, Analytics & Insight, Strategy & Leadership
8 areas have been identified, from our strategy round tables, as key to a future-proof operating model for the ‘next normal’.
Many organisations and sectors have faced exceptional stress during the pandemic, both economically and operationally, in terms of working from home and responding to so many changes at such short notice. While sectors have been impacted differently, the most successful organisations during the pandemic, in each sector, have been agile and resilient, as recent research by McKinsey demonstrates.
Categories: Library, Planning & Resourcing, Strategy & Leadership
I recently saw on the BBC website that additional travel restrictions have been imposed on eight areas in the UK including where many of my family live.
This has been in place since Friday, but nobody knew about it. There was no announcement it was simply posted in a subsection of a governance Covid advice page. But since as far as anybody was aware there had been no change, there was no reason to visit that page.
Categories: Library, Planning & Resourcing, Quality & Customer Experience, Data, Analytics & Insight, Strategy & Leadership, Beyond The Contact Centre & Back Office, Learning & Development, Digital & Omni-Channel
Work-from-home specialist Sensée has won an Innovation and Transformation Award for ‘Engaged Homeworking’ at the 2021 Forum Awards. The company also received a Highly Commended Partnership Award for its groundbreaking homeworking partnership with Bupa at the gala awards evening on Friday 23rd April.
Categories: Library, News & Events
Homeworking is here to stay say top UK contact centres
Throughout lockdown, business leaders have debated the tricky issue of how best to engage and support their people while working from home.
Forum Hero awards were presented to three outstanding customer professionals, active in our Customer Strategy & Leadership Forum, recognising their exceptional personal contribution in developing professionalism and best practice. They join our growing rank of heroes, reflecting excellence at all levels in our profession.
Categories: Library, The Forum Events, Forum Heroes
You are the key to unlock opportunities, whether this be a personal change, a team development or a business transformation. In celebrating 21 years at The Forum, Phil Anderson looks at the part you can play in influencing the people around you, changing mindsets and overcoming the issues that block or slow down progress in our member organisations.
Are you struggling with bad data in your CRM? Have you tapped into the wealth of information your contact centre interactions data holds?
We all know that the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation and that contact centres have followed suit, with 3 or 4 now using full or partial cloud solutions. Calabrio’s original research, State of the Contact Centre 2021, is based on a survey of 273 contact centre managers in 3 major global markets and in a variety of industries.
Following on from my last article we are seeing a lot of data being displayed graphically, we can take some great ideas from these but we can also see examples of some of the common pitfalls we need to avoid.
Categories: Library, Data, Analytics & Insight
Categories: Library, Planning & Resourcing, Quality & Customer Experience, Data, Analytics & Insight, Strategy & Leadership, Beyond The Contact Centre & Back Office, Learning & Development, Digital & Omni-Channel, News & Events
Categories: Library, News & Events, Partner News
Insights & Tools You Can Use to Increase Your Pandemic Escape Velocity Insights.
Budgets don’t typically create excitement, more of a necessary evil, “we need to do it”, it is often a long drawn out, boring process which often feels like a making the numbers fit, which few people follow anyway. Tedius detail, wild estimates, ambitious sales targets and even more ambitious handle times and shrinkage percentages.
In the fact the only thing potentially more tedious, unnecessary and, drawn out would be a keynote on the very topic.
Outbound dialling – viewed by some as a nuisance, and by others as a vital tool in the battle to serve customers in the most effective and efficient way possible. Whether done manually via a list or automatically using the latest in Dialler systems, hundreds of companies employ tens of thousands to make outbound calls for making sales, managing inbound queues, imparting information, or collecting outstanding monies. It is a very important consideration for modern companies.
Which possibly makes it more surprising that so little consideration is actually given to the best way to build capacity plans or plan FTE requirements.
As a result of Covid-19, each aspect of the employee lifecycle has been challenged. This has provided an opportunity to design and rebuild a new and joined up approach, supporting both the long- and short-term strategies. The uncertainty of planning during a pandemic has led to decisions being made with a short-term view in mind; some of these responses may turn out to be poor enduring solutions.
Moving to your Contact Centre to the cloud is easier and more critical than ever!