Netflix contact center stresses personal touch

I actually found two articles related to Netflix's customer service operation. The gist is that they have removed email-based customer service and are pushing customers to call and talk to a human. This is designed to differentiate them from competitor Blockbuster.com

Here is a excerpt from the International Herald Tribune: Netflix set up in Oregon, avoiding other lower-cost places in the United States and overseas, because it believed that the Oregonians would present a friendlier voice to its customers. Then last month, Netflix took an unusual step for a Web-based company: it eliminated e-mail based customer service inquiries. Now all questions, complaints and suggestions go to the call center, which is open 24 hours every day of the week. The company's toll-free number, previously buried on the Web site, is now prominently displayed on the "help" page. Let's hope this trend continues!

...read the full article here

You can also choose to read about this Netflix story and comment on Slashdot.com

Home agent field growing rapidly

As opposed to outsourcing call center operations to international companies, many companies are now "homeshoring" to united states-based firms. If you extend this trend to the emerging South American and Latin American call center market, you can see industry analysts claiming there's a revolution occuring.

Spurring this trend to homeshoring, or "homesourcing" is the availability of technology to properly train, network and manage home-based agents. This allows the outsourced call center to rapidly expand operations, and the number of agents used, while maintaining low overhead costs.

In a story on TMCnet a leading distributed contact center technology and services provider in the U.S., announced today that the company is contracting with more than 16,000 home-based customer service and sales agents, or home agents. The company expects that number to reach 20,000 agents by year-end.

CSI has recently implemented Virtual Observer in a number of outsourced call center environments, allowing them to record calls and manage quality assurance.