WebEx Interactions: A Web Collaboration Blog by WebEx

Optimizing Your Call Center

Call center managers looking to improve profitability of their teams will find a recent case study (registration required, PDF) by McKinsey & Co. draws a good line between analysis and action. The subject of The McKinsey Quarterly study is an anonymous telecommunications company with some interesting lessons on when to automate versus when to rely on live agents, with live agents being the best way to drive new sales.

Perhaps most interesting in this case study is the mix of live touch, self-directed and mixed support. Using tools such as instant messaging and speech recognition systems, call centers can manage the balance of self-directed help against the need to engage in selling. In this particular instance, the telco company's own research with customers found that the vast majority preferred self-directed help. Interactive voice response systems, or IVR systems, give customers the ability to quickly take care of basic call center requests, such as updating an address, through speech recognition rather than engage a CSR (customer service representative).

A combination of live touch and automated help systems gave the telco's CSRs the ability to reduce time with the customer in revenue opportunities so to improve productivity. By extention, the added free time gave them the opportunity to engage in more revenue generating opportunities.

Last year Wayne Pietraszek and Adesh Ramchandran of McKinsey & Co. authored a report for McKinsey on IT that provides a good vision for a holistic approach for Using IT to Boost Call Center Performance. The report provides more detail on the hows and whys of call center and call routing and call traffic optimization.

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx 

 

Introducing Fall 2007

Lots of kudos coming in for our news on the launch of Fall 2007, and how the update on our on-demand collaboration suite makes the Web a better place to meet.

Out of the gate the day the news broke was this positive article from eWeek, making a special note on our ease-of-use features.

As you can see from these quotes, everyone was quite enthused about the suite’s Network Based Recording capabilities:

•     “NBR is HUGE and long overdue” – Ken Molay, The Webinar Blog
•    “It does, however, show how Web conferencing is evolving at the higher end.” – Carl Weinschenk on WebEx’s Network Based Recording functionality
•    “It's one of the things I like about the way WebEx approaches the conferencing space.” – Ken Molay, The Webinar Blog, on WebEx’s product differentiation
•    “The real value-add seems to be a new suite of recording capabilities for webinars, meetings, and training sessions.” – Irwin Lazar, Irwin Lazar’s Real Time Blog.

We also saw coverage in Domino Power Magazine, Collaboration Loop and Collaborative Thinking blogs.

We expect more to come! Click here to check it out or sign up for a free trial.

Colin Smith, Dir. Corporate Communications, WebEx

Pitching Telework and Flexible Work Schedules

Ahead of the Labor Day weekend, CIO.com ran an article about flexible work schedules. The article specifically mentioned Cisco's tele-work program and the productivity gains Cisco has seen, documented in this Boston College Sloan Work and Family Research Network report. The article primarily focuses on negotiation strategies for employees that want to create a flexible work schedule with their managers.

New Yorkers could have an easier time negotiating a flexible work schedule after today's and tomorrow's taxi driver strike in New York City. Although the number of taxi drivers on strike is subject to conflicting reports, the bottom line is that people can be more productive by not sacrificing time to variables of commuting, regardless of whether the delays are man-made or not. For more information, go to www.webex.com/go/avoid_traffic

Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx