Customer Reach Summer Update

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Summer Update

This has been a wonderful summer so far and we hope that all of you are enjoying wonderful weather.
While we don’t publish Customer Reach during the months of July and August, there is so much going on that we wanted to keep you up to date, hence the summer update.

We hope that you find this information helpful and intersting. As always we welcome you comments, suggestions and feedback as to hope we can improve Customer Reach. I hope you have a wonderful summer.
Colin Taylor

The International Contact Center Expo and Conference provides a unique opportunity to interact and network with industry leading operations, technology, and customer care executives from global companies representing many industries. You’ll get access to the most recent contact center products and services as well as tactical content that directly impacts your productivity. There’s no better place to share information, network and get a first-hand look at business-enhancing contact center solutions.

Best rates are available now – Register Today

What is Poor Service Costing Your Call center?
Anyone that operates a call center consulting firm has heard this question before: what is the cost of poor service to my organization? According to recent research the answer may be $243. Is one call, email or chat in your center worth $243? That’s the cost that a Greenfield/Ovum study found in a 16 country survey completed last December. $243 is the average value of a lost relationship based upon the 8,800 consumers surveyed. Where do these lost relationships go you might ask? According to the survey 63% of relationships are lost to competitors while 37% are abandoned completely.
We know inherently that there is a cost to poor service, but it has been difficult to pin down. Of course this is a survey and is still not specific enough to each of our businesses or companies, but it is yet another data point. To get a sense of how appropriate this figure is to your organization, look at this figure ($243) and compare it to your own estimate of Lifetime Value (the amount of money a customer is expected to spend with your company over his/her life), if your Lifetime Value is higher than $243, then the $243 figure may be on the low side. Regardless of your actual cost and whether or not you can pin it down to the penny, it is a significant figure.
You as a call center operator can influence this cost. In fact you can look at the call center’s role as protecting hundreds of thousands or even millions of these $243 relationships. The call center is the front line. This is where the rubber meets the road…Read More Here

Taylor Reach -Video Case Studies on YouTube
Long before my career in call center consulting and call center operations and management I took Radio and Teleivsion in college, but never worked a day in this field, so using youtube is the closest I have come.
Video may have killed the radio star according to the Buggles, but we will see how video treats call center consultants. Taylor Reach has just posted our first video case studies on youtube, Part 1 is found here and you can view Part 2 of this case study interview with Carla Kearns of Summerhill Group and Colin Taylor here discussing the Retire Your Ride automotive recycling program. We will be working hard to create one new video case study each month and well as producing videos which will help educate and inform our audience.

Please share your ideas regarding video topics and suggestions by emailing Colin Taylor at [email protected]

Sturgeons Law, Customer Service and Twitter
Sturgeons Law or revelation states that 90% of everything is crap. Now there is some debate as to whether he was speaking just about Science Fiction (he was a sci fi author) or literally about everything. Regardless of his target this quote first made in 1951 seems incredibly prophetic today when considering social media.

I have dipped my toe in this ‘pond’ and have found the law to be correct; 90% of everything on the net and on social media is in fact crap. I mean really, who cares what you or I for that matter, had for breakfast? The social media ‘pond’ is incredibly wide, but disturbingly shallow. To explore this premise I first looked at Twitter, life in 140 characters.

A review of the Twitter clickstream reveals congratulations to the Jonas brothers Mothers birthday for giving birth, a retweet of a link to Lance Armstrong’s crash at the Tour de France, homage to Harvey Pekar (a cartoonist) and Steve Nash’s goodbye to a former Suns teammate. Perhaps the clickstream is too broad to really mine any great value from this social media channel.

Drilling down to search just customer service on Twitter helps to demonstrate this fact…of more than 200 tweets under the topic of customer service revealed perhaps a surprising result;

more than a third of all tweets in the search were job postings to hire customer service staff, 19% were posts of a promotional nature…read my posts, buy my services etc, 16% were ‘darts’ of tweets saying that company XYZ has terrible customer service (it is interesting to note the only repeated company was AT&T), 12% were ‘How to Guides’ for social media and/or customer service (many of these could also have been categorized as promotional, they just don’t appear to be gratuitous, 10% were Kudos to companies with good or great service tied to a specific event, 6% were mundane observations; on my break watching the customers in line, hoping they will be gone before my break ends etc, and lastly 4%of the tweets were actually focused on customer service via twitter…Read More Here

Agent Retention eBook
Free Agent Retention eBook Available – $1000+ value
Labor represents two thirds of the operating costs in most call centers.Managing Attrition, staff retention,turnover is an essential to all centers.
Created by; The Taylor Reach Group, Inc. the new eBook “How to Improve Staff Retention in Your Call Center” is the result of thirty plus years of hands on Operational management experience by its author Colin Taylor. Similar content has been delivered at countless workshops Colin has completed around the globe. The average price for these workshops is over $1,000 per attendee. You can gain the same insights today for zero cost.
In the eBook you will discover;
• The reasons why turnover and attrition are never-ending processes,
• The significant impact turnover can have on your agent productivity,
• How to calculate the ‘real’ cost of attrition in your center,
• The impact of turnover on Wages, Morale, Quality, and the Customer Experience,
• How to assess you centers’ agent career process,
• Leadership strategies that lead to reduced attrition,
• How to employ Rewards and Recognition to gain the best result,
• How to motivate Gen X versus Gen Y,
• How to Align your hiring and training process to deliver the desired results,

To receive your complimentary copy of “How to Improve Staff Retention in Your Call Center” please register here

About the Publisher: The Taylor Reach Group, Inc. (Taylor Reach) is a contact and call center consulting firm. All we do is Call Center consulting. With four offices and consultants who each possess more than 20 years of hands-on operational experience, we do not sell the pyramid. At Taylor Reach we sell the knowledge and experience of our consultants who have faced similar issues as our clients. Through our proprietary methodology we assist our clients to develop strategies and processes to overcome their challenges.

How to Improve Staff Retention in Your Call Center

Receive ContactBabel’s 2010 US Contact Center Industry Report – free

ContactBabel’s annual US contact center research program has just begun and we’re looking for 200+ US contact centers to take part and receive the full report.

For businesses wanting to optimize their customer contact, “The US Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide” can help you compare your performance against your competitors – completely free of charge.

The 4th edition of ContactBabel’s annual 300-page contact center industry report covers all elements of customer contact – such as customer satisfaction, salaries, agent attrition and absence, budgets, technology, multimedia, cost savings and strategy.

Respondents to the survey will receive a copy of final report, free of charge, by participating in the online, 100% confidential research program. The survey is open to all US-based contact centers with more than 10 agent positions.

Completing the survey:

First, please click on this link, which will then send an email to you with your unique survey ID within it: http://www.keysurvey.co.uk/survey/316356/e70a/

Responses are saved automatically after each page is submitted, so if you do not wish to complete the survey in one attempt, simply close the browser and return later, via the link within the email. If you would like a colleague to fill in a specific section, simply forward that email or the unique hyperlink within it, to them. Please note that the link will be unique to you and should not be passed on to anyone outside your organization.

Please note, the deadline for completing the survey is Tuesday 3rd August 2010.

If you have any questions, including seeing a copy of the questionnaire before completion, please email [email protected].

Receive your free copy:

As thanks for your participation, you will be provided with an electronic copy of the full, 300-page report for your company’s use, in September 2010 – 3 months before the report will be available to non-participants.

Thank you very much for your time.

Many thanks

Steve Morrell

Principal Analyst, ContactBabel

a: 29 Wellgarth Mews, Sedgefield, Co. Durham TS21 3NN (UK)

e: [email protected]

w: www.contactbabel.com

t: +011 44 1740 629835

Contact Us:

Colin Taylor -CEO – The Taylor Reach Group, Inc.
[email protected]

John Cockerill -President – The Taylor Reach Group, Inc.
[email protected]

The Taylor Reach Group, Inc. Leaders in Call Center Consulting – All we do is Call Center Consulting