Customer Service King

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Become an Alpine Access agent!

Alpine Access is in the business of providing customer service for its clients, by having highly qualified, well-trained agents available to work with clients’ customers through telephone calls, web chats, or e-mails… all from the comfort and convenience of their own homes, using their own PC, Internet access and telephone line.

Visit us today at http://www.alpineaccess.com/

CRM Secrets - Winning Strategies to Beat Your Competition

Winning accounts and gaining customers is a natural part of running an organization, but, without the proper tools, it is sometimes difficult to know how you compare with your competitors.

Keeping track of your competition’s products, sales literature, and marketing methods can help you get ahead in the market.

Most CRM systems have a “competitor win loss” report, so you can create a catalog of competitor products and sales literature that offers your organization insight into the competitor’s world of marketing and sales. This insight can help your organization develop winning strategies.

In another area of CRM systems, most commonly called the “products area”, you can enter products and sales literature that you have in common with the competition. This data can show what the competition is selling, for how much, and potentially, how often. While these pieces of information are extremely valuable, knowing what the competition has that you don’t is also important. Creating custom views and catalogs will show you what the competition is doing and how it is affecting your organization in terms of sales, marketing, and ultimately, making money.

You can run the “competitor win loss” report in either the reports area. You can filter the report before you run it, so that you receive only the data that you need. When using filters, you can usually choose to view only one item, such as competitors or opportunities, or you can choose many different areas to filter on.

Because this type of report uses so many different areas of information, we recommend that as you create your competitors in your CRM system, you enter all possible details. Later when you run the report, you will have all the necessary information to accurately evaluate in what areas your organization is losing to the competition and where it is winning. For example, the sales team and sales managers in your organization can use this report to discover which competitors are giving the most challenges.

CRM is becoming a required technology in businesses of all sizes. Most people first need to understand what CRM really means before buying into the technology. There seems to be a lack of CRM information and most CRM companies are assuming visitors already know what it is. Their assumption is wrong. Start with the basics and then allow the prospect to dig deeper.

With this winning strategy, your organization can broaden its awareness of the competition as well as develop new strategies in sales and marketing.
About the Author
David Cowgill is an avid CRM writer and blogger. For further information please visit: CRM Blog

technorati tags: CRM, customer experience, call centers, Outsourcing.

10. Be Internet Savvy
We are seeking people who are very computer literate. Prospective employees coming into a job with our company should know how to operate their computer quickly and efficiently, manage several windows simultaneously.

9. Know How to Apply Correctly
Alpine Access hires 100% of our agent employees through our website at www.AlpineAccess.com. From our homepage, simply click the ‘Careers’ tab at the top and then go to ‘Apply to Be an Agent’. You can fill out an application form there that will start you on the road to employment.

8. Be Self-Motivated
Working from home is a great opportunity, but it requires people who are driven and have the ability to separate work-life from home-life during their shifts. For people who are motivated and have success as an agent, there is long-term opportunity for career advancement. Work hard and you will be rewarded!

7. Have a Pleasant, Professional Phone Presence
Your voice and language skills are important. After all, you are representing clients, Alpine Access and yourself every time you answer a customer call. Your voice and your words are all that a customer has to judge the quality of the service you are providing.

6. Have a Schedule that Allows You to Work 20-30 Hours per Week
Two great parts about working for Alpine Access are that there is no commute to work and employees are able to select your own shift window. That flexibility is great for potential home-based employees of our company. We are looking for people with a minimum of 20-30 hours of availability.

5. Have a Reliable Personal Computer
Your home personal computer that you plan to use should have Windows 98 Second Edition or higher, Pentium II 300 MHz or faster processor, 600MB free hard drive space, 256 MB RAM, Internet Explorer 6.xSP1 or later, antivirus software with current and updated virus definitions, and installed anti-spyware software.

4. Subscription to Reliable High-Speed Internet
We ask that all potential employees have high-speed internet which is neither a wireless nor satellite connection. A wireless connection within the confines of your home is acceptable as long as your DSL or cable connection is “hard-wired”.

3. Reliably Quiet and Professional Work Environment
We love kids and we love animals, but they don’t mix well with a telephone work environment! Since you are working from home, we expect that you will have a place where you can work effectively while being separate from noise or distractions that will negatively impact your performance or the experience of a customer on the phone. A den or spare bedroom with a door that closes is ideal.

2. Have a Corded Telephone Headset
The headset must be corded and plug into a corded telephone to allow you to work hands-free. It should also have a noise-canceling microphone, a common feature in most headsets.

1. Share Your Existing Skills and Talents
We seek employees who have strong educational backgrounds and/or a large amount of experience working. For our retail clients, we may hire employees with a retail background. For financial services clients, we may seek people with a finance degree or accounting knowledge. Let us know all of your skills and talents that you think will make you a great employee for the company!

Apply at www.AlpineAccess.com to work from home for our company!

Remember when “outsourcing” just meant sending your call center services to an off-site facility? Then, as costs began to rise and labor markets became saturated, off-shore outsourcing to countries like India and the Philippines became popular. While some calls will continue to be sent offshore for cost-cutting purposes, transactions that involve a premium customer, a sale or involved customer service issue are returning to U.S.-based call centers in droves.

Today, the home-based, or ‘virtual’ contact center model is gaining in popularity through the public adoption of the model by both public and private sector organizations, such as Office Depot, Jet Blue, the Internal Revenue Service and 1-800-Flowers.

The Advent of Home-Based Call Center Services
Recent analyst reports from firms such as Gartner and IDC confirm that the virtual contact center model is the best choice for the long-term success of corporate call center operations. Companies that are looking at the overall value they receive from their contact centers are discovering that they can, indeed, find both quality and value in home-based contact center outsourcing However, terms such as “home-shoring” continue to creep into the call center vernacular, implying that companies should look at the use of home-based agents as a way of gaining the benefits of offshore centers (low per-unit cost) without having to deal with the operational and political concerns associated with sending calls out of the country. Not only is this inaccurate, but it is a bit of a red herring and the true value of the model is often overlooked.

The Benefits of Home-Based Agents
With home-based contact center employees, commonly referred to as home-based agents, costs are competitive while providing significant increases in agent quality. While there are many benefits to utilizing home-based agents, the overriding theme is that the right home-based model provides higher quality agents that deliver better results. Whether your needs are related to lower-than-expected conversion rates, low average sale amounts, or a sought-for increase in customer service rates, the home-based agent model allows the flexibility to recruit, train and support agents that are best suited to perform optimally to achieve your desired results.

Agent Quality
By far, the most important advantage of using agents working from their homes is higher quality agents. The reason the home-based agent model can deliver on the promise of providing higher quality agents is quite straightforward: the larger the pool of candidates from which a company hires its agents, the more selective it can be in the quality of those agents. In a physical call center, a company is limited to hiring agents within a reasonable commute, but with a home-based agent model that provides regional, national, or even international access to agents, the candidate pool is essentially unlimited. Instead of desperately trying to keep seats filled, companies employing home-based agents have the luxury of hiring only the very best of those applying for positions. Having such a large reach does not automatically yield a high-quality workforce, however. It is important that the company has solid processes, specifically designed to identify those characteristics of candidates that will lead to outstanding performance. Once on board, those agents expect a professional and efficient operation, with appropriate training, communications and support. The company that can meet all of those expectations will be rewarded with an agent workforce that is extremely difficult to replicate in an affordable manner at scale with a traditional call center model.

Redundancy
In addition to providing higher-quality agents, the home-based agent model offers a unique opportunity to create a fully-redundant service offering. Traditional call centers can implement a wide variety of sophisticated hardware and software infrastructures providing for very high systems availability, but being able to route calls and data to an alternative location in an emergency is not very helpful if the agents trained to answer those calls all live near the primary (now non-operational) facility in a disaster situation. Transporting trained agents to alternative locations may look good in a disaster recovery plan, but the logistics and realities of actually implementing such a plan often undermine the intended redundancy.Building comparable multi-location redundancy in a home-based agent model, with agents dispersed over wide geographic areas, provides the ultimate redundant infrastructure. Designed properly, the loss of an entire facility at one location can go unnoticed by the end-user as calls and data are routed to alternate facilities and agents receive those calls and data without interruption.

Flexibility
Another attractive characteristic of the home-based agent model is that it is possible to quickly add staff in the event of an unexpected increase in call volume. By contacting agents who are trained on a given call type, but not normally scheduled during that time, it is possible to increase staffing significantly in a matter of minutes. Not only would those agents be far less likely to drive in to a call center in such an emergency, but the time required to mobilize and affect any significant increase in staffing would likely be measured in hours instead of minutes. This can be critical, as the longer it takes to react to an unforecasted increase in call volume; the more difficult it is to dig out of the inevitable resulting queue.In addition to responding to unforeseen surges in call volume, the home-based model can easily expand its capacity to handle forecasted surges in call volume, such as holidays, new product releases, or even Mondays, which are typically the busiest day of the week for call centers. In any of these cases, the ability to add staff without needing to worry about having physical seats to accommodate those forecasted surges, can be a significant benefit. With agents working from home, the only fixed infrastructure needed is the technical system capacity to handle peak concurrent agent load. By having more of the part-time workforce deployed during those surges, it is much easier to provide consistently high levels of service.

Control
One of the most common concerns about agents working from home is that of not being able to control or manage behavior; however control is actually another benefit of the model. Management by wandering about is the too-often employed default in traditional call centers, resulting in lack of control over many of the key operational functions. In a distributed-agent model, those traditional processes are inadequate, so new processes and systems are needed in order to manage the workforce. Implemented properly, the result is a control infrastructure that actually provides a much higher degree of “visibility” to what every agent is doing at every moment. The systems provide the support that is necessary to maintain absolute control, and with thousands of agents working from home, there is either absolute control or total chaos. Because there cannot be any middle ground (and assuming chaos is an unacceptable option), the home-based agent model is required to operate with a very high level of control.Many of the traditional control components, such as real-time or recorded call monitoring, should be standard components of a home-based agent model. Likewise, regular quality assurance sessions similar to those that should be used in traditional centers are easily accommodated.

Security
As with control, many are surprised to learn that security is actually a strength of the home-based agent model, primarily because of the people. A secure technical infrastructure and appropriate business processes should be similar in both the traditional and home-based agent models, but the home-based agent model has a distinct advantage when it come s to the people handling the calls.Many people think an external hacker or malicious program that tries to access sensitive information is the biggest threat to data security when, in fact, if you were to ask most security experts about the most vulnerable point in a given data network, they probably would tell you it is the internal people who are authorized to access that data. Whether through intentionally accessing protected data for improper purposes or through inadvertently making system access available to outsiders, authorized users usually are a company’s greatest security risk. With the ability to be much more selective in hiring people to whom system access will be granted, a company using home-based agents can significantly reduce the likelihood of a security breach.Similar to control, the unique business processes needed to support a large, distributed workforce provide the opportunity to implement a much higher level of security than typically is accomplished in a traditional center. Every action of every agent at all times must be monitored and recorded by the supporting systems in order to maintain control. In fact, simply making agents aware of the level of activity monitoring that takes place can be a significant deterrent to inappropriate behavior. Combined with the use of algorithms designed to identify behavioral trends that could indicate potential security breaches, the level of data protection and breach detection can be extremely high with the home-based agent model.

Cost and Value
Given the fact that, by far, the single largest expense in any call-handling model is agent labor, and that the labor rates in the most common offshore locations is a fraction of that in domestic labor markets, it would not be possible for a home-based agent model to compete with offshore models if the measurement were simply on the basis of the cost per agent hour (or minute, or call). That does not mean that the home-based agent model is without significant cost benefits, however. In a traditional model, it generally is necessary to schedule agents for a minimum of 3-4 hours at a time to make it worthwhile for the agent to commute to the call center. With this scheduling limitation, it can be very difficult for a traditional call center to match its workforce with the incoming call volumes in a manner that yields high agent utilization without compromising acceptable service levels. In order to maintain acceptable service levels, it generally is necessary to operate at lower-than-desired agent utilizations during certain periods of the day.In contrast, a home-based agent model affords a company the ability to schedule its agents in much smaller time increments; often with multiple schedules in a given day. This ability to more closely match agent labor to forecasted incoming call volume can yield a very significant cost savings. Although the unit cost per hour (or minute) may be comparable to a traditional center, the number of units required to get the job done can be much lower. One cost impact that often is overlooked is the cost per dollar of revenue generated in an average transaction. Many businesses consider the call center function to be a pure cost component when, in fact, it may be possible to have this function not only pay for itself, but become a profit center for the company. Once again, the key to that success lies in the quality of the agents. If the nature of the calls is customer service, then an agent’s ability to perform at a higher level can translate into higher customer retention rates, higher return purchase levels and superior word-of-mouth support, not to mention the possibility of real-time up-sells and cross-sells.If the nature of the calls is sales, the benefits are clear. Agents who have been selected because they are friendlier, smarter and the best possible representative for the product or service being sold will produce higher close ratios and higher average order sizes. The higher levels of agent satisfaction resulting from the convenience of working from home also result in longer average tenures which further translate into increased levels of product knowledge and experience.

So, Why Isn’t Everyone Doing It?
Although the value proposition is quite compelling, making the move to home-based agents can be difficult. Making the assumption that it is possible to extend traditional operational models to the home is a big mistake. While it may work for a few agents, the chaos that would result from a more aggressive initiative without a major shift in operational philosophy would be disastrous.On a more practical basis, many companies have been reluctant to move to a home-based agent model due to the enormous amount of existing investment in traditional call center infrastructure. Certainly, the bricks and mortar aspects of that investment are completely unusable in a home-based agent model. Companies also find that much of their technology, business process and human resource investment are of little or no value in this model, as well.To date, the combination of these factors has limited the model’s large-scale adoption in existing operations. Companies looking to launch new or expanded operations, however, as well as a growing number of those with existing traditional centers are beginning to reconsider their options as they discover the real value proposition of the home-based agent model.

About the Author: Jim Ball is co-founder of Alpine Access (www.alpineaccess.com), the nation’s leading provider of outsourced call center solutions through the exclusive use of home-based agents working over the Internet.technorati tags: CRM, customer service, call center, outsourcing, home based business, contact center.

Contact centers that have already deployed their own equipment can still make use of managed services that work in sync with on-site equipment. Technological advances and favorable laws have enabled managed-services providers to offer a wide range of applications to both small contact centers that require self-service applications and large contact centers that operate from more than one location. In a managed services model, the network provider’s site holds significant amount of hardware and software, which frees up valuable space at the client organization.

Calls to the contact center can be delivered from the premises of the business; routing, IVR, and ASR functions can be managed by the network. Such a service made available by a hosted provider can either use IP for both calls and data or use IP for data transfer and route the calls through PSTN. Multiple contact centers linked by a single provider experience better communication amongst themselves and are able to provide better service to their customers. The key benefits of a hosted contact center include exposure to cutting edge communication technology; this is of particular significance for small companies that do not have the resources to access the latest contact center technology.

A business wishing to set up a contact center stands to save a significant amount by opting for a managed service, resources that would otherwise be spent on equipment, bandwidth, and training operatives can be used for improving the core competencies. The managed service provider takes care of upgrades and patches. As against a premise-based solution, a managed service allows a company to leverage economies of scale with respect to setting up the contact center. In a managed setup, intelligent network routing and self-service applications allow callers greater freedom for self-service. The intelligent network routing is quick and it ensures that the calls are answered by the most suitable agent.

In a premise-based scenario, the equipment has to be installed keeping peak usage in mind; as against this, in a managed service a business can pay for extra usage as and when it occurs. Thus, it ensures liquidity in a company, in a premise-based scenario, much of the capital would be blocked as an upfront investment. Considerations in selecting a service provider include the degree of control with the business, usability of the infrastructure already in place, scope of the SLA, time taken to go live, and support for open standards. With an outsourced business function, control over business applications can be difficult at times.

Companies wish to be able to improvise and respond to a business situation with speed, for this to happen they need to have control of the business applications so that changes can be initiated via the browser. A scalable contact center platform that integrates CPE allows businesses to view the managed services model as an enhancement rather than as a replacement for the existing infrastructure. The service level agreement (SLA) should clearly spell out the type and extent of service and penalties in case of under-performance. The speed with which a managed contact center goes live depends upon the functionalities desired; simple functionalities such as call routing can be implemented and used as a stepping stone to more complex functionalities like self-service.

The managed service provider should offer a technology platform that can be used with as many applications as possible; it should support both TDP and IP as well as open standards like VoiceXML. Support for open standards enables integration with applications that are premise-based and network-based. According to Frost and Sullivan, in the field of hosted CRM services, hosted contact centers are the fastest growing category. The study “North American Hosted Contact Center Market” by Frost and Sullivan reveals that the hosted contact center business in North America recorded a business of $ 127 million in the year 2005. The business is expected to be worth $ 1.2 billion by the year 2012. Companies that are doing well as hosted contact center providers include Five9 and Echopass.

Hosted contact center service providers are benefiting from the fact that businesses are realizing profits made from investments in 1999-2000 and are favoring hosted services for their quick deployment and the facility of managing remote operators.
About the Author
neophyteblogger runs the blog www.crmchump.org, the blog posts news and information on CRM.

technorati tags: CRM, customer service, call center, outsourcing, home based business, contact center.

If you’re evaluating a CRM suite in particular, you may have heard a lot of horror stories about CRM investments going to waste. Rest assured, it’s not the technology; cases of outright technology failure are rare in e-business, and their heyday was years ago, when a lot of applications were in their early generations.

Much more often, CRM failure has to do with the old saying, much beloved of coaches, that goes, Fail to plan, plan to fail. This is the point emphasized by Mike Murphy, executive director of Siebel Global Services. Addressing his company’s CRM audience some months ago, Murphy remarked, “If you focus on technology as the only aspect of a customer-facing solution, you’re going to have a fairly high-risk project.”

This truism of CRM has been out there for years, but it seems not all adopters have paid attention. “People frequently do not take into account the lessons of those that have gone before them,” Murphy tells Line56. “They will ignore some of the warnings.”

It’s part of a larger pattern in which CRM adopters haven’t conducted due diligence about the state of their own company, or of customers. Take the case of Cisco, which bought hosted CRM from Salesforce.com but subsequently came to realize that user behavior rejected the tool in favor of existing applications. That’s something that the company should have known from the CRM get-go, either causing it to pass up Salesforce.com altogether or else paying increased attention to the change management needed to embed Salesforce.com.

That’s a case of not knowing how CRM users behave, but Murphy knows of plenty of other cases in which a customer strategy has been missing. “When we do a post-mortem on these projects, we see that a customer strategy is lacking, or isn’t linked to a corporate strategy.”

For example, a manufacturer might be tasked to use CRM to do order management in order to improve cross-sell numbers, but might not have segmented the customer base properly. The customers might be craving cross-divisional solutions, not the discrete products currently offered by the manufacturer. But you’d never learn this by implementing order management.

Murphy offers a simple, three-step guide to avoiding CRM failure: 1. Align IT and business about what CRM-addressable problems are, and what to do about them; 2. Articulate a customer strategy, and how it links to corporate goals as well as to the proposed CRM system; and 3. Define goals in a measurable way so you can track your progress.

That’s what you should have on your mind when you think about a CRM suite, or even a component tool. Otherwise, as Murphy says, you might end up with “the technology piece working, but no results.”
About the Author
David Cowgill is a Senior CRM Marketing Manager in San Francisco. Article Source: http://www.crmblogger.com/crm/2005/09/avoiding_crm_fa.html

For further information contact: David Cowgill CRM Blog Founder http://www.crmblogger.com

technorati tags: CRM, customer service, call center, outsourcing, home based business, contact center.