A good call center provides live information and assistance, to fix and maintain products and to acquire goods and services. This book will help you to successfully create call centers to supply those functions cost-effectively to satisfy your corporate goals and to meet your customers' needs. You'll gain an understanding of all key aspects of opening and expanding a live agent call center, including facilities and workstation design, site selection, communications and business continuity, finding the right property, and staff recruiting, training, retention, and management. You'll also receive advice on call center maintenance and security.

The author guides you through the many choices of ways to deliver call center services: live agents, interactive voice response, or Web self-service; voice, e-mail, chat, fax, or video; your own organization or outsourced; employees or self-employed contractors; in traditional offices, in former supermarkets, factories, or in homes; in your own country or abroad.

New and expanded topics include:
• Effectively integrating self-service into call center operations
• Planning a call center to serve foreign markets
• Integrating home workers into your call center
• Meeting the needs of the Hispanic market
• Onshoring vs. offshoring and nearshoring: balancing cost, customer satisfaction, and business impact

'Bottom-Line Call Center Management breaks new ground by addressing key skills and techniques in assessing and implementing effective management practices to maximize the human and capital resources at the call center manager's disposal. Drawing on the author's unique data sets and years of research experience in the industry, 'Bottom-Line Call Center Management' helps call center managers evaluate their current status, implement cost-effective changes, and measure results of their changes to ensure a culture of accountability within the call center at all levels increasing the bottom line.

The processes include an evaluation of current customer service representatives, defining, delimiting and assessing the labor shed of the center, and exploring the customer service representative's unique skills and leveraging those skills into a unique and dynamic work environment. Likewise, the process also determines the learning skills and competencies necessary to meet and exceed the basic requirements for all call centers. Furthermore, each step has a pre, in-process, and post evaluation to ensure projects are progressing according to plan. Lastly, all evaluations are measured against the bottom line through a return on investment (ROI) model.

The framework for this book uses the culture of call centers, defined and lived through the customer service representatives, as the lens to view all processes, measurements, accountability and return on investment. This framework is critical since there has been much emphasis on technology-as-a-solution which treats the employees as a hindrance instead of the enablers of positive change. Likewise, customer service representatives eventually act as strong determinants of success with the call center and thus the bottom line.