Preparing for holiday and disaster call spikes

Depending on what type of call center you are, you may experience spikes in call traffic during the upcoming holiday season (yes, christmas is less than two months away...). Catalog companies are ready for this and are typically staffed adequately.

What if your call center is an Insurance company and the geographic region you serve is hit with a natural disaster such as New Orleans? Nothing can prepare you for the surge in calls in that case. Or is that true? Insurance companies must use predictive software to determine claim potential. Figure they have a few days' notice. They can probably bring in some temps to help answer the calls. It would be great to hear from some call center managers who went through the New Orleans experience - maybe they could share their planning secrets.

One thing we know for sure is that the combination of three software solutions help to make planning much easier: workforce management, CTI Software such as SimpliCiti and call recording and quality assurance solutions. They combine to provide a balanced, integrated, converged call center solution.

You can never really be prepared for a situation like New Orleans. You CAN be prepared for almost everything else.

Click here to donate to Red Cross Hurricane Relief

Click here for comprehensive Hurricane Links and Resources

Customer service training tips

These customer service tips are suggestions submitted to me by readers for inclusion in the Virtual Observations newsletter...let me know what you think:

- Schedule a benchmarking session with other call centers. Share tips, experiences and metrics. Implement any process changes that may be valuable. Track the change in performance. Share the improvements with your partner call center. You can also make a list of performance deficiencies and see if the other call center has addressed them. If not, maybe the two organizations can collaborate on solutions for common problems.

- Have your employees listen to themselves on recorded call playbacks. Often, they'll be amazed at what they sound like. “I said whaaaat?”

Why a hosted on-demand CRM solution makes sense

* Organizes data for you and makes it easy to locate critical information
* Access info securely from home, road, anywhere
* Allows you to truly leverage the life time value of your customer base
* Nothing falls through the cracks
* No synchronization headaches
* All customer related info is in the same place
* Generate scheduled, automated communications with segmented groups like "current customers", "partners", "non-supported customers"
* Automatically feed new account or prospect info directly from website to crm, saving keystrokes
* Customers can update info automatically from the web to crm, so you always have the most accurate billing information
* Tasks can be prioritized, assigned, shared and reported, all tied to a customer account or contact record
* Reports that have been manually created and updated can now be run automatically to save time
* A Hosted CRM Solution requires little training and is up in less than a day
* Hosted CRM Solutions add functionality as the market demands it, with no technical requirements on our end for updating, backing up, installing, etc.

Anyone have any more?

On demand crm applications we've looked at:

Salesforce
Salesboom
SalesJunction
ACCPAC

On demand crm applications found on Google:

CRM Software: Customer Relationship Management On Demand | Siebel Siebel CRM OnDemand is a hosted CRM offering delivered over the Web and accessible from an Internet browser.

Salesnet | Salesnet Launches Industry’s First Official Development ...

CRM software solutions - CRM ASP software - Uptilt hosted CRM software solutions for Global 2000 and middle market companies.

CRM as a service - Express Computer

Press Releases - NetSuite Launches NetSuite CRM+

Web based CRM software, CRM solution software and CRM software online