Contact Center Trends

CP Wire recently published an article outlining 10 trends in the contact center. They do a decent job of describing the activities of forward-thinking contact centers, and the ideas here are very similar to my own posts.

Right Party Contact Podcast

I hosted my first podcast for The Evolving Contact Center. This episode (about 5 minutes total) is all about right party contact for the collections industry. I interviewed Rick Novak, a long-time contact center consultant, and he offers some great info about how companies use RPC as a strategy to collect more debt. He also talks about integration with Avaya PDS (predictive dialer) systems.

Proactive Customer Service

Here's an interesting idea for companies to notch-up customer service efforts using their existing call center investments: proactive customer service using outbound IVR. When you bring on a new customer account, send an automated outbound call with a pre-recorded "thank you" message, and give the customer a menu of options to further interact with your company. If one option is to speak with a customer service representative, the new customer can either inquire further about other products, answer survey questions, or even voice a complaint.

Along the same lines of