The Sytel Blog Team (from left):
Ian Turner (Development Manager)
Michael McKinlay (CEO)
Garry Pearson (CTO)
Ian Turner (Development Manager)
Michael McKinlay (CEO)
Garry Pearson (CTO)
the sytel blog
Call center software & solutions
Sytel lives day by day at the coalface of call center software design.
We take on the hard tasks that many other companies balk at. We invent from the ground up, working to bring you the best call center software solutions to the toughest challenges, resulting in world-class, best-of-breed call center software.
With this blog, we aim to educate, illuminate and also challenge the call center industry. Expect us to talk about call center technology, but technology is just a means to an end. What matters ultimately is the quality of the service that technology can provide for customers. So expect the blog to be wide-ranging. And expect us to shed new light on received call center industry wisdom.
You may not agree with everything we say. Great! Informed debate lies at the heart of innovation. So feel free to give us your feedback and if you argue your case well, we may post your ideas on the blog.
Enjoy!
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Jan 2013
title:
summary:
Great customer engagement is a product of a thorough understanding not only of the customer’s values and needs, but also of their culture. To communicate effectively, speaking the language is not enough. You also need to 'speak' the culture.
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Dec 2012
title:
summary:
The technological challenges of
home-working for call center agents are not well
known. Getting these right is an important step
toward a successful work-at-home strategy.
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Nov 2012
title:
summary:
In both the UK and the US, outbound operators are getting a raw deal. The fact is that virtually no predictive dialers were designed to deliver good performance under Ofcom/ FTC rules for abandoned calls.
This blog explores the implications for the
operators and the industry.
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Oct 2012
title:
summary:
Taking the plunge from TDM to IP, or setting up an IP based contact center from scratch, can be a daunting prospect.
Here are 5 often overlooked signposts to save a lot of headache and back-tracking further along.
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Sep 2012
title:
summary:
There are many definitions out there for the term 'universal queue'. They all sound great but are very agent-centric. Focusing on agent productivity is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Here we call for an alternative that can actually deliver satisfaction for the customer.
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Aug 2012
title:
summary:
Even if we believe the hype of some vendors, if we look
at the bigger picture, we see that claims for very high uptime - maybe 99.999% - refer to
software only. But in the new world of virtual, hosted and cloud-based contact centers,
the vast majority of downtime is caused by hardware and network failure. This blog looks at
the areas of risk and how call center software vendors can (and should) respond to them.
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Jul 2012
title:
summary:
Customer interaction data produced by virtual/ cloud-based contact centers has the potential to grow massively in a short time, and is virtually unlimited. This phenomenon has been dubbed
'big data' and managers must carefully consider how to cope with, and extract value from, this big data load; high performance tools are needed that, as some have put it, can drink from the fire hose.
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Jun 2012
title:
summary:
By and large, call center scripting tools are built either for IVR only, or for agent scripts only, and are entirely separate entities. Why? Surely they are fundamentally
the same thing: routing and branching decisions based on
user input. This blog offers some answers and a way forward.
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May 2012
title:
summary:
Most companies
fit into one of two camps; closed architecture (promoting 'own
brand' only) or open architecture (offering APIs to other
products). Here we compare and contrast the two approaches.
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Apr 2012
title:
summary:
Sytel's
contribution to the latest controversy over Network
AMD, and some background on how we got here.
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Mar 2012
title:
summary:
How do providers of high
availability cloud-based or hosted contact center
services prevent failure and disaster from becoming loss of service? And what questions should users/ service providers ask of vendors such as ourselves?
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Feb 2012
title:
summary:
As delivery of cloud computing
services threatens to become a way of life, it is
timely to look at where vendors like ourselves
should be concentrating their efforts to ensure high
availability.
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Jan 2012
title:
summary:
Contact center agents are empowered to provide excellent quality of response by continual evaluation, training and improvement. The tools that enable this to happen are standard for voice-only interactions, but how about web chat, email, SMS, video and others?
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Dec 2011
title:
summary:
These days, to keep the customer happy a contact center must manage voice, email, web chat, video, text (and others) successfully. Rather like juggling with 4 balls (and a chainsaw), this can be challenging. In this blog, we look at the technological challenges in delivering speed of response in a multi-media contact center.
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Nov 2011
title:
summary:
IVR systems can be both difficult to design and set up, and difficult to manage and update,
resulting in low usability and user frustration. So, in terms of technology, what are the features of an easy-to-design, easy-to-manage IVR system? Here’s our top six.
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Oct 2011
title:
summary:
In the UK, and in fact most
countries, many users are still buying predictive
dialers without looking under the cover. If you
really care about getting the best performance out
of your predictive dialer, you must know your
predictive gain!
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Sep 2011
title:
summary:
Call center managers should be
armed with the crucial information that allows them
to make the best business decisions. But many
performance management software packages just don’t
deliver. Here are 5 important requirements for a
call center reporting package that actually does the
job.
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Aug 2011
title:
summary:
Here are the top 5 misconceptions
about how predictive dialers actually work, along
with some suggestions for better practice.
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Jul 2011
title:
summary:
As Turkey considers the impact of silent calls produced by predictive dialers, and the best way to manage the marketplace,
we point out some lessons that can be learned from
the US and the UK where this path has been trodden
before.
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Jun 2011
title:
summary:
As the sands of social media shift
at a fairly bewildering rate, prepare for an
avalanche of social media analytics tools. But
effective analytics is not going to be easy.
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May 2011
title:
summary:
Tape-based answering machines have long been displaced by digital technology where messages played to callers are indistinguishable from live voice,
rendering many answering machine detection (AMD)
algorithms unreliable at best. But enthusiasm for
the use of AMD remains strong even though some leading users have realised that the costs outweigh the benefits.
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Apr 2011
title:
summary:
First call resolution has become the Holy Grail of customer service in recent years. But how has the advent of other media types such as SMS, email and chat changed this?
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Mar 2011
title:
summary:
Customers expect first-class
service, no matter what is going on behind the
scenes at the call center, and no matter what the
channel of contact. To earn the label 'first-class',
we believe customer service must be 'joined-up' in
the key areas outlined here.
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Feb 2011
title:
summary:
Most of us use SaaS every hour of
the day. It's not a revolutionary idea, and if the
hosted call center services model follows anything
like the trajectory of the mobile/ smart phone
model, we can expect large-scale take-up in
increasing volume.
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Jan 2011
title:
summary:
The needs of a call center
supervisor in the area of performance measurement
are similar to those of a pilot in thick fog. In
order to fly without fear of disaster, he must have
instant access to up-to-the-minute metrics. This
blog looks at these needs in more detail.
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Dec 2010
title:
summary:
How well is your contact center
set up to cope with the disruption of the winter
season? Now is the time to review your technology
capabilities.
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Nov 2010
title:
summary:
When contact center software and
hardware fails, what level of technical support and
customer service do you expect?
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Oct 2010
title:
summary:
No call center in the world wants
to be left out of the multimedia IP revolution. This
blog maps a viable and graceful migration path for
contact centers heading toward IP.
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Sep 2010
title:
summary:
This month’s blog looks at the
current and forthcoming challenges faced by contact
centers at the agent desktop, and outlines a way
forward for contact centers struggling to cope.
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Aug 2010
title:
summary:
What makes a successful hosted
contact center operation? If you are considering
becoming a hosted call center supplier, consider
these tips carefully.
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Jul 2010
title:
summary:
How should your technology be empowering your CSRs to deliver top class customer service? Here's a list of 10 must-haves.
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Jun 2010
title:
summary:
Could it be that the future of
networking is currently being trialed in call
centers across the world?
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May 2010
title:
summary:
Watch out for predictive dialer
vendors claiming over 90% (sometimes over 95%)
detection rates for answering machines. This is not
real life, and here's why.
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Apr 2010
title:
summary:
In the software development
business, 'change is inevitable, change is
constant'. So how do you manage sustainable software
development in a constantly changing environment?
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Mar 2010
title:
summary:
To aid the assessment of unified communications, the contact center industry
should be asking its UC vendor community for detail on how their technology
can provide solutions to challenges specific to the contact center.
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Feb 2010
title:
summary:
If current trends in applications and increasingly data storage
are anything to go by, premise-based installations are losing favour and we are headed
for hosted and cloud-based nirvana. But do current trends provide a reliable forecast?
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Jan 2010
title:
summary:
There is plenty of evidence out there to show that
unified
communications has substantial
business benefits to offer the contact center. But how do you separate the actual benefits
from the hype, and how have contact centers coped for so long without it?
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Dec 2009
title:
summary:
Hands up who’s bought a
predictive
dialer on the basis of a manufacturer’s claims,
without getting independent verification of
performance. Verification of
predictive dialer performance is something
that customers are entitled to demand. If they
don’t, then this can mean big trouble, if compliant
predictive dialing is required.
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