Follow our employees, clients, and interested industry individuals as they provide insights into FurstPerson products and solutions as well as trends and issues in the contact and call industry.
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Published: August 02, 2010
We examine key competencies for successful customer care agents working from home and how they differ from those doing the same job in a brick-and-mortar contact center. |
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Published: July 27, 2010
In part 2 of our series, we look again at one job family, Customer Care, and see how some key competencies for successful customer care agents differ between those who are successful in a brick and mortar environment and those who do well in an at-home environment. |
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Published: July 19, 2010
Beyond the job description, which lists the specific tasks, functions and responsibilities for a position, competencies are the skills, abilities, or other behavioral characteristics needed to successfully perform the tasks, functions and responsibilities of a position. Data recently gathered by FurstPerson consistently found that compliance is the competency most often rated as #1 in importance for successful customer care performance.
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Published: June 25, 2010
The home agent model continues to gain more traction and buzz within the contact center industry. Contact center executives are seeing 30% lower cost to operate the home agent model than a traditional brick and mortar model. Some analysts estimate that the home agent market will continue to grow by 40% annually.
What happens when you send high performing agents home? |
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Published: June 21, 2010
A recent survey of contact center respondents concludes that there are signs of “strong confidence in the industry”. Now it is more important than ever for contact center leaders to employ methods that will cut costs, improve productivity and lead to better, more profitable service. |
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Published: May 18, 2010
Mike Trotter, VP Customer Experience at Vonage, and Jeff Furst, President and CEO at FurstPerson discuss the methodologies used in effective pre-hire assessments and how Vonage has leveraged these technologies to improve the hiring process and link it back to Vonage’s drive to improve the customer experience. |
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Published: April 28, 2010
Earlier this month, in an eBroadcast coordinated with Frost & Sullivan, Keith Dawson, Frost’s Principal Analyst for Information and Communication Technologies, Mike Trotter, VP of Customer Experience at Vonage, and Jeff Furst, President and CEO of FurstPerson, discussed how leveraging the agent hiring process can lead to improved customer experience results. |
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Published: April 14, 2010
What Was the Average Cost and Rate of Contact Center Attrition in 2009? |
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Published: April 07, 2010
What Were the Top Reasons for Employee Turnover in 2009? |
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Published: April 06, 2010
April 8 Webinar Hosted by Contact Center Experts Frost & Sullivan
Read the full article here on MSN's MoneyCentral |
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Published: March 30, 2010
What Were the Average Wages for Contact Center Employees in 2009? |
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Published: March 23, 2010
What Are Hiring Projections for 2010? |
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Published: March 16, 2010
Recruiting speed and hiring for quality are two of the biggest challenges facing firms that employ contact center agents. Why does quality of hire and recruiting speed matter? |
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Published: March 10, 2010
Recently, FurstPerson published findings from our 2009 Contact Center Recruiting and Compensation Survey, which was completed by over a hundred contact center leaders from throughout North America. The benchmarks in this report allow contact centers to compare current practices against contact centers across the United States and Canada. |
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Published: March 02, 2010
Step 8: Don’t forget about the Team Leaders - Use the same process for Team Leader hiring |
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Published: February 17, 2010
The reality of high volume agent selection systems is that the use of valid assessment tools is only part of an effective recruiting process. |
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Published: February 10, 2010
Step 7: Rinse, repeat, and quantify for results improvement and to determine the financial payback |
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Published: February 01, 2010
1stSolve and 1stHire recognized by Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine |
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Published: January 29, 2010
Step 6: Create a proactive recruiting and sourcing strategy |
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Published: January 25, 2010
Frost & Sullivan awards FurstPerson 2009 North American Customer Value Enhancement Award for Hiring and Assessment Services in Contact Centers |
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Published: January 19, 2010
Step 5: Validate the relationship between the hiring process and the business outcomes |
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Published: January 12, 2010
Step 4: Identify predictive assessments that evaluate job candidates on the important worker characteristics |
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Published: December 04, 2009
Step 3: Understand and define the job families (call or contact types) |
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Published: November 30, 2009
Step 2: Understand which performance metrics relate employee performance to achieving the desired business outcomes |
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Published: November 20, 2009
Recently we wrote a whitepaper that outlines 8 steps for great contact center hiring. Over the next few weeks, we will break-out each of these steps. |
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Published: October 08, 2009
If you are attending the 2009 ACCE conference in Las Vegas from October 5th through October 9th, please join Brent Holland for his discussion on hiring great customer care agents. |
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Published: August 04, 2009
In September 2008, Jeff Furst, FurstPerson's founder and CEO, presented at the 2008 Istanbul Call Center Conference in Turkey. |
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Published: June 26, 2009
McKinsey, the global consulting firm, offers an interesting article comparing customer satisfaction and speed of answer. |
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Published: June 10, 2009
Debbie Biggs posts an article on the ICMI Knowledge Center discussing the case for hands-on evaluation. |
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Published: June 04, 2009
Wall Street Journal has a great review on the call center industry in the Philippines. |
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Published: May 11, 2009
TMCNet.com offers an interesting article based on research provided by Datamonitor on the potential impact to the call center outsourcing industry. |
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Published: April 28, 2009
Do "common practices" dominate the call center industry? |
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Published: April 26, 2009
Interesting article from the HR Tests blog by Bryan Baldwin. |
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Published: March 30, 2009
Dr. Charles Handler mentions our CC Audition simulation as a leading example of a simulation assessment in a recent article. |
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Published: March 02, 2009
The Society of Workforce Planning Professionals recently discussed turnover and how to reduce it. |
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Published: February 26, 2009
With more candidates knocking on HR's hiring door, call centers can reduce turnover. |
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Published: February 04, 2009
A new white paper from FurstPerson identifies key metrics and success factors for companies and their call center hiring managers in the United States and Canada. |
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Published: January 19, 2009
Test for Dwindling Retail Jobs Spawns a Culture of Cheating - The Wall Street Journal |
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Published: January 11, 2009
The Disney Princesses remind us what it takes to deliver customer satisfaction. |
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Published: January 11, 2009
Contact center agents are leaving in massive numbers -- attrition and absenteeism run rampant -- but there are ways to stem the tide.
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Published: February 25, 2008
Kevin Wheeler, the noted HR consultant, provided a list of Hot technologies, products, and firms for 2008 in his column at ERE.NET. We're pleased that our CC Audition realistic job simulation was included. |
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Published: February 25, 2008
We all know the stereotype of the gamer personality but some interesting research at Harvard Business School by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas and IBM makes the case that gamers might be your best employees. |
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Published: January 31, 2008
Absenteeism is one of the biggest challenges facing contact centers. It is also one of the most perplexing to solve. The cost is significant and probably haunts all Workforce Managers into the wee hours of the night. |
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Published: January 31, 2008
We just returned from Call Center Demo in Miami. The show is sponsored by the same group that publishes Call Center Magazine. A few general observations: |
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Published: January 31, 2008
Recently, several articles and industry people have questioned the value of personality testing. As an example, an article in Workforce Management claims the five Industrial Organizational (I/O) Psychologists state that personality testing is overated and does not provide value to pre-hire candidate evaluation. |
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Published: January 31, 2008
On TV and in newspapers, many commentators are claiming that the United States is in recession or heading into recession. We won’t debate that point here. However, we find that talk about recession does cause many organizations to start rethinking potential investments. It makes us wonder if a recession proof investment exists. |
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Published: November 14, 2007
The Wall Street Journal ran an article on the challenges facing call centers in small towns. The article focused on two centers operated by 1-800-Flowers. In summary, the article referenced high attrition combined with a small labor market creating operating challenges. 1-800-Flowers adopted some interesting strategies to combat this. Two of the three are working for them. |
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Published: November 12, 2007
Tracey Schelmetic, Editorial Director at Customer Interaction Solutions, recently wrote about a study released by our hometown, Rockford, IL. You can read the original article here but we’ve pasted the story below. Rockford is the classic blue collar town that is trying to remake itself. For decades, Rockford led the world in certain types of manufacturing capability. Now, the city is trying to shift jobs to knowledge based work. We wanted to highlight the study for you. |
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Published: November 06, 2007
Several years ago, we attended a call center industry conference where one site director discussed how they had reduced their headcount by 50% using technology. If an article featuring Netflix is any indication, people might be replacing technology. You can read the article via this link with Yahoo!. |
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Published: September 18, 2007
Over the last five years, we’ve supported a number of site selection projects by evaluating local labor markets in terms of candidate quality and candidate quantity. Many of our clients have a global perspective with off shore, near shore, and domestic centers. The growth in the home agent model combines the economics of a near shore cost environment with the advantages of a domestic team. |
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Published: August 08, 2007
Contact Babel, a leading research firm, recently released their 2007 US Contact Center Operational Review report. The report is a comprehensive look at the US call center industry. The free, 250 page report, is available at their website. The report is well done and is an important read for Contact Center Executives. |
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Published: July 31, 2007
Many call center hiring managers still rely on the typing test as a tool during the job candidate evaluation process. We've often wondered why? Explanations have included: |
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Published: July 30, 2007
FurstPerson joined a panel disussing contact center industry trends at Frost and Sullivan’s Call Center East in April. We wanted to share some thoughts we discussed during the panel. |
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Published: July 30, 2007
FurstPerson joined a panel disussing contact center industry trends at Frost and Sullivan’s Call Center East in April. We wanted to share some thoughts we discussed during the panel. |
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Published: July 17, 2007
Dr. Wendell Williams has an interesting article over at ERE on buying tests versus buying solutions. You can find the article here. |
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Published: June 24, 2007
Our job analysis work tells us that multi-tasking is important but what kind of business results can hiring individuals with better multi-tasking ability generate. Our experience has shown that adding the evaluation of a job candidate’s multi-tasking ability during the hiring process can help increase early stage retention and improve overall new hire job performance. |
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Published: June 13, 2007
Continuing our series on multi-tasking's importance to hiring front line representatives, we explore how multi-tasking can be measured in the hiring process. |
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Published: June 12, 2007
Increasingly, working as a contact center representative requires working on a number of tasks at the same time with greater frequency of task-switching. While each contact center organization controls the amount of task-switching to some degree (based on their call-routing strategies), multi-tasking ability has become more important over the last five to ten years. |
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Published: April 25, 2007
When we interview an organization to understand their hiring challenges, the most commonly mentioned concern is how to measure multi-tasking competency during the staffing cycle. A short discussion to define multi-tasking usually follows. To detail and expand upon the basic definition of multi-tasking, we present a summary from a client job analysis and comments from two academic papers. |
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Published: April 24, 2007
About a month ago, John Sumser wrote on Electronic Recruiting News about effective screening for call center hiring. We’ve been reading John’s website since 1997 when we first started our company. At one point, he consulted with us on our business plan and model. We admire and respect his writings and appreciate his direct methods, even if they might be pointed at us. |
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Published: March 21, 2007
The latest issue of Forbes discusses an elaborate drug dealing ring in the New York City area. You can access the story here but may need to register (which is free). The story, Inside Dope, tells a fascinating use of distributed technology to manage this high tech drug dealing operation. Called the Cartoon Network, this technology driven business used a distributed workforce with highly trained workers, sophisticated databases, and remote call technology to run the business. The call center was relocated weekly, sometimes daily, to avoid detection by the police. While we’re not advocating the use of the end product here, it is interesting how the leading users of technology are sometimes outside main street business. |
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Published: March 21, 2007
In the March 10th issue of The Economist, an article in the Technology Quarterly section discussed the sue of “chatbot” technology to automate the handling of customer calls. |
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Published: February 27, 2007
These sessions were the well attended and created the most discussion at the show. Traditional brick and mortar firms are considering hybrid models. Hiring home agents offers unique challenges. |
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Published: February 22, 2007
We’re attending the Call Center Demo show in Miami from February 21st - February 23rd. This show incorporates content from ICMI’s consulting unit. We’ll report back from the floor later. |
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Published: February 15, 2007
My two year old daughter loves Snow White. With the challenges facing hiring managers today, a magic mirror that answers our questions would be helpful. But, as the wicked Queen discovers, we may not always like the answers. |
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Published: February 02, 2007
We’re strong supporters of the home agent concept. We’ve been supporting home agent hiring since 2002. We’re pleased to announce our new hiring platform designed to help select the right candidate for the home agent position. |
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Published: January 27, 2007
Several clients and various HR sites have referenced an article about Google implementing a testing process for hiring. We’re big fans of Google and use their tools to support our Recruitment Process Outsourcing business as well as various marketing activities for our business. |
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Published: November 27, 2006
When we first started our business in 1998, we were amazed at the number of software solutions for the call center industry. We were more amazed at the small showing of solutions focused on people working in call centers, especially since labor is 65% of a call center’s budget. |
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Published: November 27, 2006
Welcome to our blog. We’re hopeful that you’ll find interesting content and ideas that you can use in your business. Our intent is to share content – ideas, research, opinions, and observations – with you. In the recruiting world, we’re late to the blog game. In the call center world, we’re a little early. Since call centers pay our bills, I guess we’re in a good position. |
