Best of CCIQ '11 Q1: Disney's Experience, First Tweet Resolution, Dissing Customers, Charlie Sheen

Call Center IQ is proud to present its Best of 2011. The following pieces received the most traffic for each respective month of Q1, 2011. The index (including links to the top pieces from Q2, Q3 and Q4, follows)

January

Working Smarter Not Harder for Process Excellence in the Call Center- Most employees in a call center wear more than one hat—especially in a smaller call center. One person will take on the role of call center supervisor, in addition to the resident call center analyst and scheduler. Call center training also manages quality control and so on. This is great when it comes to cross training in a larger call center but every small call center needs to ensure that call center responsibilities make sense.

Dissing Customers. Somebody Do Something!- We were horrified by what we heard. The first escalated call the supervisors, team leaders and I listened to as part of the role playing exercise was an obviously distressed, elderly woman pleading with the rep to stop sending her utility bills in the name of her long-deceased husband. Instead of apologizing for the error and offering the poor woman her condolences, the rep proceeded to explain....

February

What Time is the 3 o'clock Parade? Disney's Approach to a Quality Customer Experience- If you were a man wearing a Mickey Mouse costume for eight hours under a blisteringly hot Florida sun, you would expect to be forgiven for snapping when the hundredth person came up to you and asked: "What time is the 3 o’clock parade?"

Complaints About US Contact Centers Increase by 40%- Contact Babel recently conducted a case study in the UK about the rise in complaints in call centers, and which areas in particular this rise was coming from. The study revealed, among other shocking statistics, that over 770 million complaints about contact centers are made by customers in the US each year.

March

Charlie Sheen, Twitter and the Future of Brand Marketing- If the world were like Inception, Charlie Sheen would be its Leonardo DiCaprio. His PR team has been on a roll and his face has managed to grace everything but the milk carton. But quite possibly the most fascinating development among his latest PR stunts is his newfound Twitter page. For an individual who doesn’t appear too tech savvy, this has raised some eyebrows.

First Tweet Resolution and other New Contact Center Metrics- As customer care and contact centers continue to evolve, so must the metrics that centers measure. Sure, some classic metrics – such as service level, quality and C-Sat – will be around forever; however less pertinent and impactful ones will fade away while newer, sexier measures emerge. For example, in the early years of customer service, metrics like ATTCT.

Q2 (April-June): Content on why Twitter is overrated, how to track social media metrics, mistakes made on social media, Sprint’s customer experience overhaul and LEGO’s customer management culture

Q3 (July-September): Content on mistakes agents make when dealing with angry customers, Zappos’ and Apple’s customer experiences, Netflix’s pricing fiasco, why teenagers hate certain brands and why Google loves its call center

Q4 (October-December): Content on why Disney and Bank of America are hurting the customer experience with their IVRs, how Southwest Airlines delivers an elite customer experience, nine steps for improving customer experience and the role of live agents in 2011