CenterSoft, Inc., a software development company which creates innovative applications for call centers, recently announced the release of its newest call center tool – Shift Logic, an employee scheduling tool featuring skills ranking, attendance management, and payroll forecasting.

“Products like Shift Logic allow the managers to put the right agents in the right time slots to better handle their calls,” said Joe Sleeman, CEO of CenterSoft, in a release. “This skills ranking feature equates to increased profitability for the centers. Surprisingly enough a great deal of call centers still use spread sheets to schedule their employees or have purchased software that is too complex to be practical for small to mid-size centers.”

A paperless system containing tools that generate and manage staff schedules to suit both the overall business requirements and the culture of the organization, Shift Logic can be utilized by managers, planners, and HR staff – with the ability to limit which functions are accessible to each person based upon their role in the company, according to the release.

“I’ve wanted this kind of tool for 5 years now” said Mark Sawyer, owner of Seacoast Marketing Group, a call center based in Maine.
Shift Logic’s target market is small- to mid-sized call centers with 25 to 300 agents.

Source:http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/call-center-software/articles/197837-centersofts-shift-logic-staffing-software-strengthens-call-center.htm

Proposal Software, Inc. (PSI), The Leader In Proposal Productivity™ bid management software, and developers of PMAPS® the leading Proposal Management and Production System, in cooperation with Synergy, a leader in target support solutions, has launched a best-in-class U.S.-based call center, featuring Microsoft-certified and trained technicians offering 24|7|365 access for its PMAPS WebPro® customers worldwide. The Call Center offers translation capability for support calls in 150 languages.

“Our leading-edge U.S.-based call center affords our PMAPS WebPro customers immediate assistance from anywhere in the world, anytime,” said company CEO, John Laurino. He added, “Our Call Center representatives are all Microsoft-certified technicians and have extensive training that is unmatched in the proposal software industry.” According to Laurino, each call is recorded, and all calls are integrated into a CRM dashboard that leads to more efficient call handling and faster call resolution.

Our selection of Synergy was very deliberate for the quality of their people and supporting technologies. “Synergy has been providing custom high-touch user support for 40 years,” said Synergy President, Clark Crook. He added, “We are thrilled to partner with an organization that is equally dedicated to best-in-class customer service.”

According to Beta Research Corporation, 80 percent of customers reveal that the quality of service they receive from call center representatives reflect the quality of the company and its products or services.

Proposal Software Inc. (PSI) provides the best-in-class comprehensive and enterprise-enabled proposal management platform in more than 220 of the world’s largest and most successful financial services, asset management, healthcare, legal, business services, manufacturing and technology organizations over five continents. These companies rely on PMAPS daily to run their mission critical B2B new business processes from responses to ‘major account’ RFP/RFI/RFQ’s to everyday product and service sales proposal fulfillment.

Source:http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101130005438/en/Proposal-Software-Launches-Best-in-Class-U.S.-Based-Call-Center

Large business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations are shifting the focus of their call centers to become revenue generators rather than simply answering customer queries or executing transaction requests, according to research findings unveiled today by Portrait Software, a leading provider of customer interaction optimization software and now a part of Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI). Conducted by Loudhouse Research, the independent study surveyed strategic decision-makers at UK and US in-house call centers and found that 69% of large B2C organizations view their call centers as business-critical revenue generators.

To meet this growing demand for call centers to deliver revenues, 60% of respondents cited the need for better integration of inter-departmental customer data as a key focus for the next 12 months. In particular, the need to integrate call center data with online customer service was seen as a primary focus for the next 12 months, with 54% of decision makers citing this as a key challenge for the year ahead.

The changing role of call center employees With more and more consumers opting out of outbound marketing (mail, email and telephone), organizations are looking to maximize all inbound customer interactions. Call center staff are increasingly expected to pursue new real-time cross sell and up sell opportunities; however, 86% of respondents stated that call center staff need a broader range of skills to deliver these revenues. A further 85% of respondents claimed that call center interactions with customers are drivers for conveying their organization’s brand values, making the role of call center staff even more critical in developing profitable relationships with customers.

“Organizations are realizing that traditional, outbound marketing, particularly via the telephone, offers diminishing returns for the business,” says Luke McKeever, CEO, Portrait Software. “As such, the future of the customer relationship resides in sustained, informed and tailored customer service and the call center is a critical factor in this process. Whilst customers may not expect to be sold to, they expect to be understood and for their needs to be met at all times. For progressive organizations this represents an opportunity to build loyalty and revenues at all levels of customer engagement. Looking ahead, as markets continue to become more competitive, it will be those organizations that use intelligent, company-wide data to fully understand the needs of their customers and to make relevant and timely offers, that will ultimately succeed.”

Source:http://www.marketwatch.com/story/call-centers-becoming-profit-centers-according-to-portrait-software-research-2010-10-19?reflink=MW_news_stmp

Choosing the right call center software for your business can be tough with all of today’s options that are available. However, one of the features that you definitely need to look for in the software your company uses is reporting. This type of feature allows the management to look over every single statistic in the call center, which can seriously increase productivity in a few ways.

The reporting feature of call center software isn’t there primarily to get individual employees in trouble for not working fast enough or taking the right calls. Good people management should teach your employees to use the system in an efficient way. Instead, the reporting feature can be used to spot overall trends in the call center and to help make those trends better in specific ways.

For instance, if you notice that people are calling in and staying on hold way too long, you might have to improve functions by adding a couple more employees. Maybe more people are calling into the center than ever before, which is good for business, but may also require growth in order to cope.

If your call center is struggling with first call resolution and you notice that customers are being transferred way too often, then you may need to institute an intelligent routing system. This type of system is a more effective way to get customers to where they need to go on the first try so that your call center can run more efficiently and get more problems taken care of on the first try. Your call center software should also have an intelligent routing option you can use to help improve this aspect of your call center.

Another way that reporting can help your call center is by helping you see where training needs to take place. This is particularly important when you’re dealing with changes in the software that you’re using on a daily basis. You can’t expect employees to know how to use a system perfectly well right off the bat. Instead of assuming this, you can use reporting features to see where the struggles are so that you can spend less time in trainings that are more intense and more focused on the specific needs of the call center. This, in turn, keeps your training costs lower and your employees happier in the long run.

Source:http://www.burbank.com/story/Increase-Efficiency-with-Reporting-Features-on-Call-Center-Software/150391