By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. Your call center may be an in-house operation or an outsourcer processing calls and contacts for other organizations. If you are an internal call center, you will be viewed either as a profit center or as a cost center (outsource call centers are always profit centers); also you could be […]
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Call Center Credentials
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD You say and believe that your call center is good, but can you prove it? What you need is a credential. A credential is the verifiable recognition from an independent third party that you have earned and met a standard level of performance. Credentials fall under three, sometimes overlapping, classifications: […]
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Call Center Benchmarking
A Path to Self-Improvement By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. Benchmarking is the comparison of your call center with statistical results from the norm of industry peers. These numeric measurements are called metrics. Metrics can be in the form of financial figures, operational quality and efficiency, human resource efficacy, or whatever is deemed the most valuable […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. This fall, the thoughts of school age children everywhere are focused on returning to school. Some approach the new school year with dread and trepidation, a few with excitement and high expectation, and others with inevitable acquiescence and acceptance. Regardless of their personal perspective, many will be faced with the […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. Telephone answering services are by definition a subset of the call center industry. However, while the greater call center industry has a history spanning more than 30 years, telephone answering service has an 80-year history. In the 1920s, and the decades that followed, enterprising entrepreneurs began opening localized telephone answering […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. The first annual Reach for the Stars Pediatric Telehealth Conference was held April 30 through May 1 in Bloomington, MN. The conference, organized by Children’s Physician Network of Minneapolis-St Paul, MN, focused on Achieving Clinical Excellence in Telephone Triage. With nearly 300 participants and a dozen vendors represented, attendance exceeded […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. AnswerStat magazine (AS): Joe, you own and operate Mediconnect, a telephone answering service for the healthcare industry. How did you get started and how long have you been in business? Joseph Sameh (JS): I was a business/clinical practice manager beginning in 1976. Growing practices was among my primary responsibilities. Each […]
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Shoot the Puck
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. It’s only been a few years that I have been following the sport of hockey. Before that, a myriad of other athletic diversions captured my attention. As a youngster, I did what many of my peers did and played Little League baseball. Not that I was good at it or […]
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PBX Attendant Consoles
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. PBXs (and ACDs) are generally configured with an attendant console. Though a console can take on different forms and appearances, at its most basic, it is a fancy telephone which is given “permissions” to do advanced features that cannot be accomplished by other phones and users on the system. Traditional […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D. It was an emergency run to the eye doctor. Being far-sighted and using a computer all day makes my glasses an indispensable tool – one that I treat with the utmost care. Imagine my dismay when in the midst of my morning cleaning routine, I heard the frame snap and […]