What Are Guatemala and Honduras Doing to Generate Labor Supply?
June 30th, 2010By Tarun George
It’s on the minds of virtually every buyer who has long-term visions of outsourcing to Latin America – will there be enough qualified people to go around? This is acutely true when we consider the contact center industry, for which it takes years to build English competency.
Two rising powers in Central America outsourcing – Guatemala and Honduras – are faced with exactly that scenario. As more providers arrive, pressure for qualified and bilingual workers is increasing. Which begs the question: What is being done to anticipate that demand, and will it be enough? Get the answers here.
The Hidden Costs of English Training in Contact Centers
June 2nd, 2010By Jon Felperin
In a recent conversation with a Central America-based contact center manager, it was insightful to learn just how much is involved with ramping up agents to meet real-life language expectations.
“The real cost of hiring a new employee is not just the cost of a faltering English fluency or having a strong accent, but rather the time it actually takes to get up and running on the telephones,” the manager said.
By Kirk Laughlin
Imagine the horror that Comcast, the largest cable provider in the U.S., experienced when its feed for a Stanley Cup Hockey game was suddenly cut mid-game – and millions of hockey fans were effectively left in the dark.
The experience quickly became a signature moment for Comcast’s social media initiative, run through the company’s “Customer Cares” division which manages customer relationships. A team of Customer Cares’ staffers, whose key role is to monitor social media activity related to Comcast, quickly spotted negative reaction to the network outage on Twitter and pounced on the opportunity to announce that service had been restored.
By Jon Felperin
It is no secret that Central America faces some challenges on the road to create a robust and truly bilingual professional workforce. Local efforts at English education are inconsistent across the region and many hardworking students graduate with less than an intermediate level of spoken English–far below what contact centers require for entry level employment.
Have Your Agents Been Trained to Listen?
April 6th, 2010By Sara-Ann Bermont
Can you hear me now?
Soft skill training – especially in the fundamental art of listening to the customer – is overlooked far too often by contact center organizations.
The CSR’s proficiency to convey product information or provide service is invaluable. Content training is pretty much standard: classroom courses, e-courses, testing and monitoring, leading to certification. It is supported by the call center Skills Based Routing application, managing queues by CSR proficiencies.
A soft skill training curriculum includes lessons in: listening, tone, conversation, dialect, research, documentation. Measuring performance becomes reminiscent of the methodology used by Henry Higgins. Combined, content and soft skills training encompass the full arsenal of knowledge to resolve client issues. For purposes of this discussion, the focus will be soft skills training.
Contact center agents are problem solvers. And solving problems all day is no easy gig. It can be hard to maintain a positive attitude; as a result, turnover is a major issue. But contact center directors can help to a great extent to keep up morale and improve retention in the process.
Customer care expert Barbara Burke recently spoke with 1to1 Magazine about employee engagement in the contact center. Burke is author of The Napkin, the Melon, and the Monkey: How to Be Happy and Successful at Work by Simply Changing Your Mind, a fable about how a positive attitude can transform a call center agent from flop to star performer. She advocates storytelling as one way managers can help their agents learn new skills and improve their current performance. Here, she provides some additional advice on engaging agents so they stay longer:
Sustaining long-term employee …
“Benchmark Portal” Begins Certification of Costa Rica Contact Centers
February 12th, 2010Benchmark Portal, a US-headquartered firm that assist contact center organizations with service excellence, has set up a regional center in Costa Rica.
This company, which services 25,000 customers worldwide, choose Costa Rica as a regional headquarters due to the strong growth of the industry and also the incentives offered through Costa Rican Coalition for Development Initiative (Cinde), a governmental body.
“It was decided to come here also for the teaching of English,” said CEO Bruce Belfiore Benchmark Portal.
Among other services Benchmark Portal is dedicated to certifying compliance with call center best practices and to compare results with business peers in order for companies to improve performance and correct deficiencies. The aim is to standardize and continuously improve processes and quality control.
Orlando Morales, regional manager of corporate relations, in partnership with Purdue University in the United States, applies a proprietary methodology involving 24 processes.
For example, Benchmark Portal knows that 93% …
NCO Uses Data Analysis for Better Call Center Performance
January 30th, 2010NCO Group, Inc., a provider of business process outsourcing services, announced the deployment of a Web-based software tool to track and analyze customer behavior patterns, leading to better, data-driven business decisions.
“uNCOver” is one in a set of analytical tools in NCO’s proprietary Insite call center management suite of applications, designed to improve performance in the call center.
NCO program managers use uNCOver as part of a structured analysis methodology to improve results for clients. uNCOver helps achieve goals such as enhancing the customer’s experience, reducing the incidence of repeat calls, increasing first-call resolution, and dentifying automation opportunities. The tool also helps gather data needed to support making the business case to drive process and system improvements.
uNCOver features desktop data capture, which automatically gathers relevant data useful for analyzing call trends and patterns. Browser-based, uNCOver is easy to deploy, allows immediate updates, and tightly couples to host systems.
NCO agents use uNCOver’s drop-down …
Five Top Priorities for Nearshore Call Center Managers
January 15th, 2010Congratulations. You’ve survived 2009, the most challenging year for business since the Great Depression. DMG expects 2010 to be a better year, and the economic indicators show that the recession has bottomed out, but we don’t expect significant improvement for contact centers until Q4 2010. This is because, unfortunately, most contact centers are still cost centers and therefore less likely to benefit from quick budget relief and incremental investment dollars. The profit centers will come first, as they should.
The continuing challenges in 2010 will present contact center managers with opportunities to offer assistance beyond their departmental borders to sales, marketing and other operating areas. (Contact centers are positioned to help these groups with deep insights into customer needs, wants and issues.) The need to achieve corporate revenue, retention and cost savings goals will open doors. Contact center managers should find out what their corporation’s top five goals are for 2010 …
Nina Kawalek, President and CEO of the Resource Center for Customer Service Professionals (RCCSP), has just 
announced the schedule for training throughout the Caribbean and Latin American (CALA) region. We talk a lot about investing in human capital in the nearshore BPO industry and there is probably nothing more tangible than investing in your own teams through these top-notch programs.
Click here for more information:
