Taking Agent Training Beyond The Classroom
By Joe Fleischer, ICMI
Joe Fleischer, editor of ICMI's Customer Management Insight interviews Ulysses Learning's President and CEO, Mark W. Brodsky about how companies can link training to call center agents' overall professional development to help ensure their top performance over the long-term.
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Off-shoring call centers: A huge cost savings or one of the biggest expenses your company will ever face.
By Mark W. Brodsky and Dina Vance, Ulysses Learning
How to ensure international call center success through best practices in hiring, training and management.
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Making Sense of On-Demand Learning in Contact Centers Today
By Mark W. Brodsky, President & CEO, Ulysses Learning
On-Demand Learning holds the promise of improving workforce performance and productivity. Done correctly, it can arm employees with powerful "just in time" skill and knowledge reinforcement. Mark W. Brodsky examines this emerging trend and identifies best practices for leveraging this learning methodology in the contact center environment.
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How to Exceed Your Contact Center's Annual Financial Goals (Part 3 of 3)
By Cheryl O'Donoghue
This article is the last in a series of three focusing on the success of the contact center team at Harris, N.A., a Chicago-based financial services provider ($38.3 billion in assets and part of the BMO Financial Group with $282 billion in assets). In the first two articles, we explored the “will building” and “skill building” strategies Harris implemented to instill a high-performance culture built on trust..
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Capitalize on Contact Center Coaching in 2007
By Dina Vance and Jay Williams, Ulysses Learning
Top consultants share what contact center executives are focusing on now to ramp up coaching initiatives in 2007. Three smart strategies to improve center performance are highlighted.
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How to Exceed Your Contact Center's Annual Financial Goals (Part 2 of 3)
By Cheryl O'Donoghue
This is the second in a series of three articles focusing on the success of the contact center team at Harris, N.A., a Chicago-based financial services provider ($38.3 billion in assets and part of the BMO Financial Group with $282 billion in assets).The Harris contact center exceeded all its 2006 performance goals early in the fourth quarter using a well conceived and executed performance improvement plan built on a solid foundation of trust. Also in 2006, the Harris team received industry recognition when they were named the “2006 Center of Excellence” in which they were rated #1 against 17 other large, U.S. financial services companies.
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Beyond a Sales Culture
Learn what top industry thought leaders - including Dina Vance, Senior Vice President of Ulysses Learning - have to say about the service/sales evolution of contact centers. Also featured are best practices from Ulysses' client and 2006 "Center of Excellence" award winner - Harris Bank's e-Channel Services team.
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Performance Optimization and e-Learning: The Critical Link
By Mark W. Brodsky, President & CEO, Ulysses Learning
Performance optimization is more than a buzzword, it's the #1 goal on the minds of contact center executives around the world. In this executive roundtable discussion with top contact center thought leaders, you'll learn major performance optimization trends as they relate to e-Learning and performance improvement that can dramaticaly increase contact center productivity and profitability and raise customer satisfaction and loyalty in the process.
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Contact Professional Interviews Ulysses Learning's Dina Vance
Rhonda Proctor, Editor for Contact Professional Magazine explores the "softer side" of workforce management in an interview with contact center thought leader Dina Vance, Senior Vice President for Ulysses Learning.
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Contact Center Research Report on e-Learning Best Practices
To date, little, if any original research has been conducted on the use of e-Learning to improve contact center performance...until now.
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How to Exceed Your Contact Center's Annual Financial Goals (Part 1 of 3)
By Cheryl O'Donoghue
I recently had an opportunity to interview Hilde Betts, SVP in charge of the
Harris, N.A. contact center operation...and a longtime client of Ulysses
Learning, a leading sales, service and coaching training company based outside
of Charlotte, North Carolina. Harris, N.A. is a Chicago-based financial services
group with $38.3 billion in assets (its parent company is BMO Financial Group
with $282 billion in assets).
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The Race to Sales: What We Forgot Along the Way
By Dina Vance, Senior Vice President, Ulysses Learning
There continues to be a growing trend in contact centers once primarily engaged in service: to sell to as well as service customers over the phone. For good reason, too-there is significant strategic value in treating the contact center as a profit center, responsible for generating revenue.
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E-Learning Implemetation: Your Roadmap to Success
By Mark W. Brodsky, President & CEO, Ulysses Learning
Implementing an e-learning initiative can be very rewarding.and equally tricky if you've never launched one before. There are myriad decisions to be made and important considerations to be built into the implementation action plan. The greatest determinant of success can be summed up in two words: Be prepared.
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The Sales and Service Tightrope - A Balancing Act Without a Net
By Dina Vance, Senior Vice President, Ulysses Learning
Just over a decade ago most contact centers were primarily focused on service; the hot debate at the time was whether to add sales activities under the contact center umbrella. Now, just about every company selling a product that is convenient to buy over the phone or Internet is selling (and servicing) it in a contact center.
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Four Blended e-Learning Blunders (And How You Can Avoid Them!)
By Mark W. Brodsky, President & CEO, Ulysses Learning
The use of blended e-Learning strategies - the thoughtful combination of e- Learning with other training methods - is on the rise. This is due, in part, to the fact that an increasing number of companies that relied more upon traditional training methodologies are seeing the need and benefit of building in the "e" component at the same time those that relied more upon technology-enabled methods are seeing the need and benefit of infusing traditional methods into the mix.
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Contact Center Coaching Best Practices: Top Lessons from Top Coaches
By Dina Vance, Senior Vice President, Ulysses Learning
Which contact center coaching practices work best? Why do some practices work even better than others? Which practices appear to have little, if any positive impact on performance? These were just a few of the questions discussed at Ulysses Learning's most recent Master Coaching Best Practices Forum.
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Stop the Madness! Finding the Right Mix of Measures and Processes to Raise Contact Center Performance
By Mark W. Brodsky, Ulysses Learning and Sarah Kennedy, SQM Group
Everything is so easy to measure in contact centers that it's easy to understand why so many things get measured. Some of the measures du jour are merely passing fads while others indicate important trends worth noting.
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When 15-Minute e-Learning Doesn't Work
By Mark W. Brodsky, President and CEO, Ulysses Learning
Fifteen-minute e-learning, delivered to learners via an intranet or the Internet at their workstations, has received much positive publicity lately, but little attention has been given to its drawbacks and limitations. When implemented correctly and used appropriately, 15-minute e-learning is a very powerful emerging training strategy. Unfortunately, some organizations have denied themselves the benefits of this exciting new tool by jumping on the bandwagon with little forethought or for the wrong reasons. It's important to understand what 15-minute e-learning can and cannot do.
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Six Strategies for High-Performing Contact Centers
By Dina Vance, Vice President
What are some of the best-in-class contact centers doing today to drive efficiencies, enhance productivity, improve performance and strengthen loyalty? What contributes most to their success? You might be surprised.
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Trends in E-Learning: Preparing for the Future
By Mark W. Brodsky, President and CEO, Ulysses Learning
New developments are occurring in e-Learning training at a breakneck pace. What trends are hottest, and which will impact your business most? Find out what leading experts, Mike Flanagan, Vice President of Research and Consulting for Lguide, Paul Stockford, Chief Analyst with Saddletree Research and Gloria Gery of Gery Associates have to say as they turn on their high beams and look into the future 18 to 24 months out (a realistic fast-forward given the rapid change of technology and business practices today).
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Designing From the "Outside-In": E-Learning that Fits the Business
By Mark W. Brodsky, President and CEO, Ulysses Learning
In Kurt Vonnegut's book, Player Piano, engineer Ed Finnerty complains, "If only it weren't for the people always getting caught up in the machinery, earth would be an engineer's paradise." Of course, Finnerty misses the point. Technology exists for people; people don't exist for technology. When it comes to designing e-Learning programs this quote is particularly meaningful. To help keep learners from being "caught in the machinery" and to ensure learning truly fits a company's goals and objectives, consider the four cornerstones of E-Learning design.
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Making Sense of Self-Service E-Learning Simulations: Fun or Functional?
By Mark W. Brodsky, President and CEO, Ulysses Learning
Self-service training applications that simulate business experiences, such as sales or customer service, are e-Learning solutions with compelling rationales. Self-service training applications provide opportunities for learners to practice what they need to learn most, at their own pace, in their own friendly environments. They offer learners an opportunity to succeed or fail, and to benefit from this experience in an environment that in many ways surpasses "on the job" training.
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Greater Charlotte Biz Magazine: May 2001, Cure for the Killer Caller
Jerry Stahl reports Ulysses Learning is carving out a special niche in the growing field of e-Learning by developing customer service and sales training that businesses "crave".
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Economic Value of E-Learning Solutions - An Analysis of Ulysses Learning's CallMentor®
By Anthony Sarno, ProveIT
With its exclusive focus to improve business performance through the practical application of learning technology, Ulysses Learning has developed a broad range of contact center learning solutions designed to provide clear, tangible and measurable results.
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