Exploring the future
of conversations.

A virtual phone number is a real telephone number that is not tied to a specific phone, SIM card or physical line. Calls are routed over the internet or a carrier network to destinations you choose, such as mobile phones, laptops, desk phones or call queues. Businesses use virtual numbers to give distributed teams one […]

Talk time gets scrutinized. Hold time gets scrutinized. The minute after the customer hangs up tends to be treated as dead space to be squeezed, which is a mistake, because that minute is where your reporting data comes from. What Is Wrap Up Time in the Call Center? Wrap-up time is the period between one […]

Every list of contact center measures reads roughly the same. Service level, handle time, resolution, satisfaction. Useful enough, and almost entirely written for operations that answer to themselves. Outsourcing changes the nature of the exercise. A number that a manager uses to run a team becomes a number a client pays against, and that single […]

Nobody fails an audit because they lacked a policy. Policies are the easy part, drafted once, filed, and produced on request looking entirely satisfactory. Findings come from somewhere else: the gap between what the policy says and what anyone can prove happened on a specific call, on a specific date, involving a specific customer. This […]

Almost every comparison you’ll read on this subject was published by somebody selling one of the two options. That doesn’t make them wrong, exactly. It does mean the cost model underneath tends to be assembled in a way that reaches a conclusion before you started reading. What follows is an attempt at the other thing: […]

Here’s the uncomfortable thing about this metric. A customer who found their answer in thirty seconds and a customer who gave up in frustration produce the same entry in your reporting. Both didn’t reach an agent. Both count as deflected. One is a success and the other is a failure, and the number cannot tell […]

Standard evaluation criteria were written for operations where one customer holds one account and calls about their own business. Logistics does not work that way, and vendors demonstrating against generic requirements will pass an assessment that never tested the things most likely to fail. What follows is the set of questions I’d want answered before […]

Most security questionnaires arriving at a contact center vendor were written for generic software. They ask about encryption at rest and password policies, then stop. Fine as far as it goes, and it misses nearly everything that makes this category risky. What follows is built for the specific thing you’re buying. Why Generic Questionnaires Miss […]

Search this term and you’ll find a dozen confident definitions that don’t quite agree with each other. There’s a reason for that, and it’s the most useful thing to know before you start measuring anything. What Is Agent Effort Score? Agent effort score measures how difficult it is for your agents to do their jobs: […]