The annual ICMI Contact Center Expo provided valuable lessons for the future of call center operations. This year’s International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) Contact Center Expo was a little bit different than in years past. Instead of gathering at a large convention center in a major city, hundreds of contact center industry experts gathered at their computers to connect digitally.

With the arrival of the Internet of Things comes several innovations that help companies save time and money. One of the coolest of these is the rise of the ‘cyber secretary,’ or virtual assistant. Rather than paying a hefty salary, offering bonuses, and dishing out more benefits to an in-house employee, you can now reduce costs by hiring remote employees by investing in virtual assistant software programs to streamline your processes.

Working remotely has become the new normal because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With so many employees working from home, team managers need a remote work plan or policy to ensure that their employees stay productive. But how do you create an effective remote work plan? In this article, we’ll tell you how to build a remote work plan and what to include in it. We’ll also share a free downloadable remote work plan template to help you get started.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is one of the most widely used customer service metrics. Companies send short CSAT surveys after a support interaction—but these are tied to your customers’ most recent interaction with your company and can be skewed if they had an issue or poor experience. And because CSAT surveys are kept short to make it easy for customers to respond, they don’t tell you why customers feel the way they do.

As a customer service agent, being a great communicator means everything. But your ability to communicate well goes beyond listening to what your customers and team members say. You also have to recognize how they’re expressing themselves and adapt your responses accordingly. Understanding the various communication styles can help you improve your relationships with customers and colleagues alike.

With the changing times, workplace norms and employee demands have evolved as well. Employees now prefer a flexible work arrangement like the compressed workweek or remote work over the standard nine-to-fiver. And if you’re considering allowing flexible working hours or flextime for your employees, you should set guidelines that clarify how it works in your company. How do you do that? By creating a flex time policy.

Today, many business owners face a dilemma — should you prioritize core tasks or answer customer calls? Fortunately, by hiring a virtual phone assistant, you can ensure you have enough time to focus on core activities while still attending important business calls. It can be IVR (Interactive Voice Response) or real people taking calls on your company’s behalf so you can focus on critical activities.

We think docker and container technologies are great and are here to stay. However, there are concerns about Docker Hub (hub.docker.com) and we want to make sure that if anything happens we can continue to provide docker images seamlessly. Additionally Docker Hub provides us with very limited information on pulls and we would like to understand more about how images are consumed so we can provide a better service.

Is there anything worse than opening up your inbox and seeing a bunch of unread emails or messages you haven’t followed up with? Email management is overwhelming at best and demotivating at worst. In fact, people who deal with more email experience lower job satisfaction and report feeling emotionally drained, frustrated, and exhausted. A messy inbox is also a time suck.