Call centres and contact centres form an important and rapidly growing part of today's business world. They present a range of management challenges, from strategic decisions about how to develop a customer strategy, business planning, through to detailed considerations of staffing levels and appropriate technology. This new handbook, the first of its kind, provides a unique insight giving expert opinions on how to get the most out of your contact centre operations. Natalie Calvert, a specialist in the field, has brought together a team of 35 experienced practitioners who provide invaluable knowledge, share their experiences and draw on real-life examples to suggest practical solutions on a wide range of topics. This handbook is an indispensible guide and reference for call and contact centre managers, HR specialists and senior executives responsible for marketing, sales or customer services. The handbook is divided into six parts: I The business plan II The people factor III Contact centre technology IV Standards, processes, and outsourcing V Building profitable customer relationships VI The future.

Call centers today have emerged as not only a biggest employer but also as adynamic industry. Everyday thousands of people become part of this growingfraternity. This book helps in unveiling the hidden secrets of thisindustry from a practical perspective. It tries to cover the latesttrends, happenings and the changes happening in this industry.

This comprehensive and intelligent guide has been written by top interviewers who have extensive experience within the Customer Services and Call Center sectors. They include model answers to 96 questions and four actual job interview scripts. (Careers/Job Opportunities)

This book gives an accessible overview of the role and potential of mathematical optimization in call centers. It deals extensively with all aspects of workforce management, but also with topics such as call routing and the scheduling of multiple channels. It does so without going into the mathematics, but by focusing on understanding its consequences. This way the reader will get familiar with workload forecasting, the Erlang formulas, simulation, and so forth, and learn how to improve call center performance using it. The book is primarily meant for call center professionals involved in planning and business analytics, but also call center managers and researchers will find it useful. There is an accompanying website which contains several online calculators.

This Special Issue is concerned with the working conditions at call centres, which harbour jobs of different levels of qualification.

Over the past ten years there has been a massive growth in call centres worldwide. These centres are said to represent the most dynamic growth area in white-collar employment internationally since the mid 1990s. Yet the footloose and global nature of the industry means that jobs will always be susceptible to outsourced operations, ICT developments, public sector subsidization of business restructuring and re-location, and cheaper operations elsewhere. This book conducts a thorough analysis of this modern phenomenon.

This volume covers the field of linguistic (im)politeness in a particular mediated, customer-oriented setting. It is the first book to do so across telephone, email and social media. It offers key insights into a unique customer service setting through authentic and spontaneous data analysis. The book looks at how customers and agents of a large public transport company engage in transactional services and impolite behaviour. This text is directed at scholars and practitioners working in communication, business discourse, (socio)pragmatics, interaction studies, and social media interactions. It is also of great value to students in applied linguistics and scholars of Slavic languages, particularly Slovenian. The cross-media study is also of value to public/private institutions to reflect on their work practices, helping them improve existing customer–service provider relationships. The diverse readership and appeal are essential features of this book. Examines mediated institutional talk and impoliteness in the Slovenian language Covers mediated service interactions, such as requests and complaints across three different media Provides in-depth insights into communication within a contemporary business environment