If you’re a health insurance company dealing with a global pandemic like COVID-19, you may be experiencing higher call volume to your call center at this time. There are likely to be thousands or even tens of thousands of people calling to ask about your company’s specific benefits and coverage policies, especially as they pertain to telehealth services or home health visits, during the coronavirus.

Call centers are all at the center of a global pandemic outbreak right now, and are more than likely experiencing higher call volume at the very moment that governments are mandating social distancing and other measures. In a worst case scenario, you may be ordered to close physical call center operations in the interest of combating COVID-19’s spread.

Whether you’re taking precautions due to pandemics like COVID-19 or natural disasters such as tornadoes, hurricanes and blizzards, it is crucial to have a thorough disaster recovery plan prepared for your call center.

Your facility could experience outages that last for weeks. During that time, your business could lose thousands of calls, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. One hour of a power outage can cost businesses between hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in revenue.

No matter what your industry, getting an advantage on your competitors is something every business wants. Wouldn’t it be great if you had access to something that could give you that advantage - all without breaking the budget? If you have consumer data - and every business does - then you already have everything you need!

The problem is that many companies don’t understand how to utilize the consumer data they have access to. That information is useless if you can’t put it to work for you, so being able to do so is imperative to the success of your center.

Here’s how to really get the most out of consumer data and use it to its fullest potential to improve your facility and better serve your consumers - all while outpacing your competitors!

Your call center staff handles a lot, every day. From irritable consumers to stressful deadlines and goals, your agents may sometimes seem like superheroes, getting it all done. And who leads those teams of courageous agents? If you’re lucky, it’s an equally full-mettle team of call center managers.

What are the biggest problems facing your call center managers - and how can you help alleviate some of them? If you’re looking to streamline daily operations and make life easier for the team members pulling the most weight, check out this list of call center managers’ biggest problems and how to address them quickly and effectively.

Are there small tasks that you wish your employees didn’t have to handle? From answering phones to handling payments and many other small jobs, these everyday tasks are the things that keep employees busy while they’re on the clock. They’re also the kinds of things that can eat away at your labor costs, if you’re spending it all paying employees to handle them instead of more meaningful duties.

How do you solve this problem? By handing those tasks over to a BPO organization. Here’s what you need to know about doing so - and whether or not this kind of partnership might work for you:

Call recording is an ideal solution for contact centers to improve both training approaches and customer satisfaction levels. It can be used to create training materials based on actual calls that have transpired in the center, as well as to train individual agents based on their own unique strengths and weaknesses. It can also help to create goals that can be used to improve overall agent performance and work toward improving the customer experience. These are just some of the reasons call recording is so widely employed in call centers around the world today.

However, there are laws that govern the use of recording technology. Understanding call recording laws and their place in the world of the call center will help you make your facility its best - all while staying well within the law.

Today’s most successful companies focus a lot on brand experience. This is a combination of user experience with brand-specific products and services, as well as the delivery on the brand promise. A brand promise is simply the way a company boasts that users will feel or experiences that they will have while using their products or enjoying their services.

Brand experience isn’t always something grandiose. When you hear the word “experience”, you may think of a custom-tailored approach to service, but sometimes a good experience is as simple as having your interaction with a company go quickly and smoothly. Sometimes, delivering on that kind of promise is more than enough to delight a consumer.

April fifteenth is just around the corner. Is your contact center ready?

This is the question on many minds of call center managers as they work toward readying their staff and their center for the often-dreaded tax deadline. This year, though, that deadline doesn’t have to spell doom - or even stress - for your center. Prepare your call center for tax time with these tips and be ready when Uncle Sam asks for their cut.

What happens when this virus hits those who work in densely populated facilities like your call center? Not only is it a public health hazard to continue operations as normal during these times, but it can also spell disaster if your company doesn’t have a workable disaster recovery strategy in place.

This year, your call center disaster recovery strategy may be more important than ever. In early 2020, a prolific virus known as the novel coronavirus - or COVID-19 - began spreading from its origin site in the Wuhan Province of China to other nearby areas. Travelers to China began carrying the virus elsewhere, and within two months’ time, it has come into the worldwide news as a pandemic threat.

Here, we’ll give you a few pointers for ensuring your center is prepared for any kind of disaster - including a worldwide viral outbreak - and how to keep it from impacting operations in your facility.