BlueOcean

DECEMBER 18, 2023

Customer care QA processes are moving from limited sampling to real-time, holistic analysis thanks to emerging conversation intelligence technologies that impact every corner of the contact center for the better. At a recent industry conference, the session on quality assurance began with the keynote speaker taking the mic, and boldly announcing: “when it comes to QA, monitoring one percent of one percent is BS, and we all know it.

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Contact Center Average Handle Time Customer Care Technology 177

BlueOcean

NOVEMBER 29, 2023

The fact that silos are the enemy of business success is nothing new. That they happen anyway is one of the biggest business challenges a leader must navigate. At Blue Ocean, we have long held the position that the customer experience and the employee experience are inextricably linked. We’ve said it so often it’s become cliché, but we stand by the concept that happy employees make for happy customers, and in outsourcing, happy customers make happy clients.

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BlueOcean

NOVEMBER 13, 2023

Keep your finger on the pulse of the industry. From AI and VoC to EX and TX, here are some resources to inspire for the new year. As customer care teams start planning for 2024, we’ve seen how easy it can be to get stuck in a rut. The quickest way to get re-inspired is by getting a finger on the pulse of current news and customer service trends in the industry.

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BlueOcean

OCTOBER 23, 2023

(This is updated version of our most popular blogs: 52 RFP Questions (2013), 51 RFP Questions (2016), 60 RFP Questions (2020)) Every few years we update our recommended list of contact center RFP Questions. With every evolution in technology, workforce trends, and consumer expectations, the questions shift—which is testament to why generic, boilerplate RFPs never work for outsourcing customer care.

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Customer Care Contact Center Culture Measurement 177

BlueOcean

OCTOBER 17, 2023

The first mainstream mention of ESG as a concept came from the United Nations in 2004 in their report titled “ Who Cares Wins.” The report urged stakeholders to consider environmental, social, and governance factors in their financial processes and investments. Simultaneously, worldwide attention on issues of sustainability and diversity began to take off and haven’t faded yet.

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Government 2004 Automotive Customer Care 177

BlueOcean

OCTOBER 4, 2023

When one in five of your customers speak something other than English as their first language, providing bilingual customer support is critical. Without it, you risk taking a hit to your CSat scores, your brand loyalty, and your bottom line. But what mix of live agents versus AI is best for your business? And how do offshore solutions, interpreters, and texting play a role?

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Contact Center Customer Care Average Handle Time Consumers 310

BlueOcean

SEPTEMBER 18, 2023

The RFP is the slog you need that 3 rd cup of coffee to get through—especially when it’s an RFP for outsourced customer care. After all, we’re talking about a complex, customer-facing solution that needs to align seamlessly with your brand. In our experience, technology, attrition, and business continuity are the hot three areas of any contact center RFP—and yet these are the sections we consistently find some of the most outdated or cookie cutter questions that fail to paint an accurate picture

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BlueOcean

JULY 20, 2023

It seems so long ago now that Lockdown Life has faded into some barely-remembered bad dream, but the global changes it triggered are still top of mind, especially the ongoing dialogue/debate about the relative merits of work-at-home versus work-in-office. In our world of outsourced customer care solutions, one of the big challenges we continue to wrestle with on the sales side of things is the significant change in the contact center RFP process.

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Contact Center Travel 2020 Culture 294

BlueOcean

JULY 13, 2023

Every year, this national sports association holds their annual pro championships. However, along with everything else in the world, the pandemic forced them to cancel the 2020 event. In 2021, the championship went forward but with many restrictions. By 2022, fans were starved for action. As a result, record numbers of attendees and, consequently, record-high inbound customer service volume were projected for the 2022 championships.

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Sports Customer Care 2022 2021 276

BlueOcean

MAY 5, 2023

We’ve said it before and we’re not afraid to repeat it until the cows come home: using a boilerplate RFP in the process to find a new customer care outsourcer is a quick road to failure. You’re looking for a strategic partner who will interface with your customers day in and day out. That requires a custom RFP. And in the wake of the pandemic, that RFP also needs to be tailored to address the ways in which our world, industry, and business has shifted.

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Customer Care Contact Center Government Culture 156

BlueOcean

APRIL 20, 2023

We had another member of the wonderful ONQ family on the podcast: Sean Hammerle, who is the company’s Chief Operating Officer and an award-winning motivational leader and speaker. I first met Sean back in June of 2022 when he was awarded the title of Best Contact Center Executive at The Contact Center World Awards in Orlando, Florida. The win came as no surprise—Sean is one of the most authentic, engaging, and hilarious people I’ve ever met in this business.

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Contact Center Culture 2013 Airlines 156

BlueOcean

APRIL 14, 2023

What if you could learn about a new technology just by directly asking it questions? That’s not always an option, but in the case of ChatGPT, the AI chatbot taking the world by storm, it made all the sense in the world. So with this concept in mind, we decided to approximate a podcast interview with ChatGPT on the latest episode of Deep CX. Amy Bennet, our intrepid host, wrote ChatGPT some probing questions about the customer experience, which generated some intriguing answers.

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Government Customer Service Representative Technology Definition 156

BlueOcean

MARCH 13, 2023

Talk of ChatGPT is everywhere from your LinkedIn feed to the evening news to, yes, this blog. For many, the buzz about ChatGPT is evoking the same exploratory wonder they once experienced when the Internet itself first debuted. Like most people in the customer care sector, we are diving deep into where ChatGPT fits, or might fit, into the contact center world.

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Contact Center Customer Experience Average Handle Time Customer Care 156

BlueOcean

JANUARY 31, 2023

Attrition seems like it should be an easy enough term to define, and determining which bidders’ attrition results best match your own requirements should be easy enough in a contact center RFP. In this article, we are making the case that it’s not always so straightforward. Not all attrition is created equal, and there are many ways to calculate attrition rates – so the way you frame your attrition questions in the RFP is essential to getting useful data that can inform your decision.

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BlueOcean

JANUARY 20, 2023

2020 marked the workplace like no other year in recent history. For more than two years, everyone worked to settle into new patterns of working and communicating, and we’re finally seeing a return to “normal.” We rejoiced when our favorite coffee shops re-opened, and we got all dressed up again when the commute to work once again involved more than a walk down the hall … and yes, that RFP was finally back on your plate.

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Contact Center Customer Care Culture Technology 156

BlueOcean

DECEMBER 15, 2022

We often hear from our readers how helpful our published content is when they are in the decision-making process for partnering with a new contact center outsourcer. We were excited to see that the readers and award committee of the 2022 Customer Contact Central MVP Awards agreed! Our article, How to Launch a Successful Outsourced Contact Center Implementation, won second place in their quest to spotlight the highest-value content from industry thought leaders.

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Contact Center Leadership 2022 Article 31

BlueOcean

DECEMBER 15, 2022

We have another great episode of Deep CX: A Blue Ocean Podcast for you this month! We were lucky to sit down with Tony Won, a leading specialist in player support and our very first guest in the gaming industry. Tony has built up quite the gaming résumé over the years, working with industry giants like Riot Games and Epic Games—he even worked on the smash hit cross-platform game Fortnite!

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Books Consulting Blog Customer Experience 156

BlueOcean

DECEMBER 13, 2022

Check your wallet (digital and/or physical) – do you have loyalty cards for your favorite retail outlets? Gas, grocery, fashion, technology… and probably more. Salesforce research says consumers like us belong to 4.3 loyalty programs on average. And you’re probably spending a decent amount of money at those places. If, for example, you’re a member of Nordstrom’s loyalty program, Nordy Club, you’re among a group of customers who are likely to spend three to five times more than non-members,

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Loyalty Programs Loyalty Social Media Rewards Programs 177

BlueOcean

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

I’m so excited for you to listen to our latest episode of Deep CX: A Blue Ocean Podcast. I got to sit down with Lucas Fuentes, Vice President of Training & Development at ONQ, a global leader in outsourced revenue cycle management. With employees in Panama, Kenya, and India, ONQ handles complex business processes for healthcare billing and a lot more, which means the work Lucas and his team do to prepare employees for the frontlines is mission critical.

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Contact Center Healthcare 2021 Culture 156

BlueOcean

OCTOBER 4, 2022

Are you ready for the customer of the future? Today’s 6 th graders —who are playing video games on a TV while their laptop shows someone else playing video games on YouTube all while talking with friends through a PlayStation headset—are tomorrow’s customers. And it’ll happen faster than you could ever expect. That’s just one bite of insight coming out of last month’s CXOutsourcers Mindshare event in Las Vegas.

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Entertainment Employee Experience 2023 Contact Center 156

BlueOcean

AUGUST 30, 2022

“I love building RFPs!” Said no one ever. We get it. When you’re evaluating new outsourcers for your contact center, you know that a boilerplate RFP isn’t going to cut it. But writing a new RFP is a headache. That’s why, at Blue Ocean, we’ve never been shy about sharing what we believe are the best contact center RFP questions. In fact, we’ve even offered a downloadable template in the past.

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Contact Center Download 156

BlueOcean

JULY 27, 2022

Have you ever stopped and thought to yourself: “How will contact centers navigate the post-COVID world?” It’s a question we contemplate often here at Blue Ocean, and we’re glad to say we didn’t stop there. After much thought, deliberation, and research, we’ve come up with the quintessential guide for your post-pandemic contact center. And we’re thrilled to share it with you as a free download.

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Contact Center Download Culture Management 156

BlueOcean

OCTOBER 10, 2022

The launch of your outsourced contact center implementation may be a strenuous time – there's so much at stake for your business. That said, it shouldn’t be a headache.

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Contact Center 300

BlueOcean

JUNE 22, 2022

Just a few short years ago (say, 2014 or 2015) when it came to technology, outsourcers were happily touting the cost benefits of their telephony platforms and on-prem systems, showing prospective clients how, instead of having to invest in and maintain their own IT infrastructure, it was a real value add to the client to be hosted on their partner’s telephony platform.

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BlueOcean

JUNE 21, 2022

If you know me or any of my stellar Blue Ocean colleagues personally, you know we can talk for days about customer experience. And why wouldn’t we be excited to chat? We hold the keys to CX, one of the biggest differentiators brands have at their disposal today. As champions of the call center, it’s up to us to remove every pain point we can from the customer’s path.

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BlueOcean

MAY 18, 2022

Blue Ocean, an award-winning provider of customer care solutions, is delighted to announce the promotion of Amy Bennet Roach to Vice President, Sales and Marketing. As Blue Ocean continues to position itself for growth in the post-pandemic era, Amy will play an integral leadership role in this effort, leveraging her extensive knowledge of the business to power sales and marketing initiatives.

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BlueOcean

MARCH 31, 2022

If you’ve been a reader of Blue Ocean’s blog for any length of time, you probably know we love sports and particularly baseball. The common thread between what workforce management experts and what the manager of a pro sports team might do when the game is on the line is pretty obvious once you think about: we both depend on both statistics and relentless practice to make informed decisions and react to changing dynamics.

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Contact Center Sports Management Customer Care 296

BlueOcean

MARCH 24, 2022

When it comes to complex B2C customer care, the customer is anything but a faceless number in a sea of consumers. These are real people with real lives that inform their expectations and define their needs with every shift and change of the world around them. B2C brands had their worlds turned upside down by the pandemic, but what does complex customer care look like now things are leveling out?

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BlueOcean

OCTOBER 10, 2022

How do you continue to offer seamless customer service and experience in this new world of remote work? Blue Ocean offers some insights on how to create a contact center location strategy in a remote world.

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Contact Center Insights Customer Service Customers 300

BlueOcean

FEBRUARY 17, 2022

In the current landscape of customer service , brands must put themselves in the shoes of their end-users to stay competitive and differentiate themselves. The customer experience reigns, and frontline agents must deliver on customer expectations with reliability and consistency. But what about when crisis hits? If the pandemic has taught us anything it’s that reliability and consistency matter and the best way to ensure that your foundation remains solid when the unexpected happens is to invest

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Contact Center Customer Care 2020 Measurement 156

BlueOcean

JANUARY 20, 2022

In a world where the customer experience matters more than ever, the decision to outsource your customer care has significant impact on your brand and its reputation. In 2022, the RFP process holds even greater weight. But it’s also a process that has evolved in the wake of the pandemic. Are you dreading it? Let us lighten the burden. Here are a few things to consider before you dive in.

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BlueOcean

DECEMBER 21, 2021

As the year comes to a close, we hope you find yourself working towards a very restful, well-deserved holiday season. But don’t set that “out of office” notification quite yet. Before you unplug and spend time with the people you care about, let’s look back on some of the most important contact center topics from 2021. Below you’ll find five of our very favourite articles from the Blue Ocean blog—we hope you find them useful!

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Magazine Travel 2021 Hotels 31

BlueOcean

OCTOBER 4, 2021

Once upon a time, we could count the number of subscriptions we had on one hand (the newspaper, a magazine or two, and that trusty gym membership). These days, we’ve lost count (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Stitch Fix, Costco, Blue Apron, Hulu, BarkBox, plus the usual magazines, gym memberships, and more). And that’s not including the business scene, where you can add on subscriptions to Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, HubSpot, Docusign, and hundreds more.

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Customer Experience Magazine 2012 Customer Care 194

BlueOcean

OCTOBER 8, 2021

As the Vice President of Client Services for Blue Ocean, I am fortunate to work with a wide variety of companies. Clients of all types turn to our company to make sure their customers receive a high level of service excellence. Not everyone gets to follow their passion at work, so I consider myself lucky. But as some of you may already know, pursuing customer experience mastery can sometimes mean aiming at a moving target.

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2021 Customer Experience Contact Center Government 177

BlueOcean

OCTOBER 7, 2021

Few industries are quite like travel. Can you think of any other industry where anxiety is baked into the product or service? Even before the pandemic, customers found themselves faced with myriad rules, restrictions, and bottlenecks to navigate before reaching their destination, leading to many a meltdown at checkpoints and terminals around the world.

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Travel Customer Experience Call Center Books 218

BlueOcean

OCTOBER 4, 2021

Once upon a time, we could count the number of subscriptions we had on one hand (the newspaper, a magazine or two, and that trusty gym membership). These days, we’ve lost count (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Stitch Fix, Costco, Blue Apron, Hulu, BarkBox, plus the usual magazines, gym memberships, and more). And that’s not including the business scene, where you can add on subscriptions to Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, HubSpot, Docusign, and hundreds more.

Customer Experience 156

Customer Experience Magazine 2012 Customer Care 156

BlueOcean

SEPTEMBER 27, 2021

Customer experience is pretty much the hottest topic in the contact center and customer care space these days. We’ve been focused on designing and delivering best-in-class experiences for decades, but customer experience is an expansive, evolving topic, and staying current on trends and the latest thinking in customer experience is always a challenge.

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Customer Experience 2028 Contact Center 2020 177