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Scheduling can be a complicated and daunting task, especially for companies that manage many employees. Between family, illness, and absenteeism, employees may choose to take time off work, leaving Contact Center managers scrambling to find coverage.

Has this ever happened to you?  How often?  

In all these cases, employees not only want to work and get paid, but they also want flexibility in their jobs. In contact centers specifically, staffing needs are consistently inconsistent, making it hard to plan for these situations.

This is where shift bidding comes in. Shift bidding allows agents to self-select when they would like to work by going online or by using an app on their mobile devices. These applications then use algorithms to determine the type of work or skills that are required for coverage and identify the most qualified bidders to cover each shift.

Read on to learn how shift bidding has evolved to help companies better schedule employees, boost engagement, and improve the customer experience.

In order to ensure you are delivering an excellent customer experience, you need to capture data and insights that illuminate how customers perceive your services — and, even more importantly, you must ensure you’re capturing the right data.

When assessing an organization’s workforce management (WFM) program, there is one area where the benefits and ease of use seem to far outweigh current practice. That area is employee scheduling.

By 2020, customer experience (CX) is expected to surpass price and product as a key brand differentiator. With an increased focus on CX, companies must now work to optimize their workforce to provide the best service. While many enterprises still manually schedule their employees, automated processes and better WFM help to ensure that scheduling is fair and accommodating, which can ultimately boost employee satisfaction and customer service.

Read on to learn more about the current scheduling landscape and how you can streamline operations to deliver better customer experiences.

Traditional workforce management (WFM) involves spreadsheets and manual time recording, which are onerous processes that decrease customer satisfaction. Contact Center Managers need a way to schedule people optimally, when the work is available for them to complete. This complexity of the randomness of work coming in, combined with the needs of the individuals completing the work, leads us to the need for more advanced solutions for scheduling.  

Today, forward-thinking managers are adopting a smarter, more streamlined approach to satisfy employees, which helps provide a better customer experience (CX). By better scheduling employees with WFM solutions, the center will be optimized as the work will be handled with the right amount of employees at that time. Many times, we see the exception to this on both sides…agents sitting around waiting for work, or so overworked that they quit.

Have you ever started an upgrade to your network only to find out that your licenses are too old? Has your IT maintenance contract ever lapsed, then when you try to add equipment back onto a contract, you learn that the manufacturer no longer supports the product? Are you left banging your head against your desk wondering why you weren’t aware of this before now, and now that it's too late?

When performing an IT upgrade, there's a variety of circumstances where you could find yourself left with an unsupported environment. That's why it's important to familiarize yourself with the correct terminology to ensure that you never lose coverage.

The enforcement period for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) began on May 25, 2018, bringing significant changes to organizations in the European Union and beyond. Though a piece of European legislation, the GDPR impacts any organization that processes the personal data of those who reside in the Union, regardless of geographic location.

VPNFilter Infects 500K Networking Devices + Growing

Over the course of the last several months, researchers have investigated an advanced persistent threat known as VPNFilter, which has already infected 500,000 devices across 50+ countries, specifically targeting home office networks (or places utilizing small office and home office devices) as well as network-access storage (NAS) devices. The threat is believed to be sponsored by or affiliated with a nation state, which generally leads to well-funded, well-executed persistent threats that are properly managed with a defined end-game.

Based on research recently released by Cisco Talos, the US Department of Justice is urging anyone who owns small office home office (SOHO) and NAS devices to reboot their devices immediately. 

The VPNFilter malware operates via three unique stages, which are described below at a high level.

ConvergeOne is proud to congratulate Kathy Sobus, our Director of Customer Experience, who was recently included on CRN’s annual Women of the Channel listing which recognizes influential women leaders with extraordinary expertise and vision. This is Kathy's second consecutive year on this prestigious list.

Here's why Kathy is a Customer Experience Rock Star!

Kathy's passion lies in helping customers enhance their contact centers to more effectively respond to ever-changing needs. As an expert in her field, Kathy regularly develops and shares thought leadership and strategy, and is a staple at industry tradeshow and events. Kathy has been awarded thirteen patents, mainly in the area of identifying, routing, and reporting on events that happen within a business. She has also held roles that included global contact center lead, contact center strategist, and inventor.

We sat down with Kathy and asked her to share a few insights from her journey in customer experience so far. Here's what she had to say.

"Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters."

—Albert Einstein

We’ve all heard the old saying, “Be careful of the company you keep.” This is true for both people and technology. Consider blockchain. For many Americans, the immediate word association is “Bitcoin.” In fact, I would venture to guess that quite a few people think that they are one and the same. While this connection might be favorable for Bitcoin, it has become a bit of a boat anchor for blockchain.