Castel Blog

From telemarketing to collections, providing customer satisfaction is at an all time high in the contact center industry. Check any top 10 list of call center complaints by customers and you’ll find rude or unprofessional agents somewhere on that list. Certainly there are opportunities to train agents, have them complete a diversity course, perhaps a class for proper phone etiquette and conflict management. However, without the right tools to monitor agents, natural behavior may slip agents back into the everyday grind, leaving freshly trained and practiced agents back to where they started. What’s next?

Since installation at Northstar Location Services Buffalo NY contact centers in October, the results were even better than expected. Aaron Castle, COO stated, “We were very aware of the application’s benefits prior to installation, however the immediate effects have transitioned into department-wide improvements, including increased employee morale and decreased customer complaints.” The call centers are now experiencing a 54% decrease in customer calls to their Quality Assurance Team (Resolve It! Professionals). Agents are managing escalated customers much more effectively through the use of the Castel Detect™, as its agent dashboard appears right on the agent’s screen. In addition, unresolved customer issues have decreased as well.  Castle adds, “This application has enabled our agents to better identify escalating issues which equates to more quickly resolving issues, collecting payments more efficiently, reduced call time and stronger agent/customer relationship.”

Data hygiene is an essential part of effective call center management. Also called data cleansing, data hygiene is a series of procedures employed by call center supervisors and managers to ensure databases are up-to-date and run efficiently for the purposes of maintaining a smooth operational call floor. Read on to learn more about the importance of data hygiene, its availability, and its data enhancement.

High call volumes, limited staffing, and budget constraints in the call center environment are all too common occurrences in today's business marketplace. One solution is the use of interactive response applications or IVRs. An IVR application improves call center business operations and enhances customer experience, giving your call center the leading edge.

President Barack Obama has selected Richard Cordray, former Ohio Attorney General, as Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the strongest consumer watchdog group of its kind. Cordray, most recently served as the bureau’s Chief Enforcement Officer, handing out penalties to financial institutions such as rating agencies and payday lenders, for poor conduct. The Financial Protection Bureau is responsible for many reformations in the consumer market to date and Cordray will no doubt assist the bureau greatly in the furtherance of its goals.

Miss a payment, maybe two and you may receive a call from your creditor. What if the only number you provided to your creditor at time of application was your cell phone number?

Most of, if not all, collection and predictive system companies are working on some sort of a program or application to identify and scrub for cell phone numbers to eliminate them from predictive and power dialing.  Penalties for using such are severe and enforced based upon recent TCPA rulings affecting creditor collection and bank account receivables businesses.