Call center articles by Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
The Way Companies Deal with Customer Issues Has Future Implications By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD A day and a half into my week, and I’ve already endured three major customer service issues from three vendors. Their responses could not have been more different. One issue was with a global company that whisks money around the […]
Be Ready for Artificial Intelligence to Revolutionize Your Call Center By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD One of the spaces I inhabit is the call center industry. Another of my worlds is writing. These two areas intersect in this column. Another commonality is how technology, specifically artificial intelligence (AI), will affect both sectors. Futurists in the […]
Pursue Big-Picture Solutions, Not Incremental Improvements By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD There’s a lot of talk about customer experience and ways to enhance it. Though this is the right outcome, too often the approach to get there is shortsighted. Making incremental changes to improve one metric may help a bit, but how many metrics must […]
Customer Experience Is More Than a Buzzword—It’s the Path to Success By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD People love to share their stories about their experiences when interacting with various companies. They post things online, which can have a far reach and may go viral. They also tell people face-to-face, which doesn’t have the reach but […]
How to Survive When Receiving Twice the Calls or Having Half the Staff or Both By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Running a call center is hard, at least doing it right. Even under normal conditions, managers struggle to balance traffic and staffing levels while maintaining high quality and minimizing complaints. But what happens when conditions […]
We Celebrate the Many Companies and People Who Make Connections Magazine Possible By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD With this issue of Connections Magazine, we start our twenty-seventh year of continuous publication. It started in July 1993 when Steve and Chris Michaels founded the magazine. I took over in September 2001, just a few days before […]
Consider the implications of the call center versus contact center debate By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD In Connections Magazine we use the terms call center and contact center interchangeably. Some authors who write for us are content to use the more traditional label of call center, while others prefer the more accurate label of contact […]
September 2001 I entered the publishing world when I bought Connections Magazine from its founder, Steve Michaels. As a result, I don’t know what day the sale was official, but what I do know is that the package of publication’s records and files arrived on September 10, 2001. Early that next day, I dove into […]
Companies Focus on New Customer Acquisition and Then Encourage Customers to Leave in Two Years By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD My family just completed our biennial cell phone switch. We’ve been doing this like clockwork for two decades. We pick the company that offers the best price and switch to that one. Two years later […]
Imagine you’re in a nondescript room, sitting in a circle with a bunch of strangers, waiting for a meeting to begin.Finally, it is time start and one of the strangers hesitantly confesses: “My name is Fred, and I’m addicted to…email.” Does this strike you as humorous or do you see a bit of yourself in […]