Answering Service Blog | American Inbound

If anyone has looked at American Inbound’s main site, you can see that we are currently hiring for remote agents in the Bloomington, Indiana area. Well, I put up a job application online and we have been swamped with submissions. Honestly, our HR department has so much on their hands, they’ve asked for help from some of our other employees.

I run across all kinds of operator hiring guides online, so I wanted to post up listings I found for a few of them. Hopefully, it helps them out!

1. How To Hire Better Call Center Agents - Every Time!
2. The Science of Agent Selection: Assessment Tools Help Centers Find the Right Fit
3. New Call Center Hiring Tips from FurstPerson
4. Hiring Customer Service Oriented Employees

Ben Wurthen has written a piece for the Wall Street Journal stating that data centers are fast becoming one of our biggest polluters. Studies have shown that data centers are responsible almost half the amount of emissions as the airline industry. As data centers become more and more common, this number will only increase.

No Jitter has given us a couple of energy-saving tips to help, and I encourage you to try some out! They name unoptimized cooling systems and server underutilization as key energy-wasting culprits.

Customer service reps like to throw around the word “sorry.” But is it overused? Derek Stockley believes so.

He explains that “I’m sorry” often comes across as insincere. This is true if the phrase is overused. However, I believe an agent would have a difficult time if it was banned completely.

What is Erlang you ask? A.K. Erlang was a Danish mathematician born in 1878. He laid the foundation of traffic engineering and queuing theory. For call centers, he devised the formula to determine the number of operators required to handle different call volumes.

Most if not all call centers aid their staffing concerns using an Erlang calculator. cc-Modeler was kind enough to offer a free download of one of these. Enjoy!

Top 10 lists on the internet? You don’t say. People love these lists online. They make issues seem very simple, even if the topic is not. With that being said, I found a couple of pretty good ones in the last few days.

Listening is one of the most important skills an operator can possess. Here are ten ways you can improve your listening skills and help your company keep customers!

Call center operators can be hard to manage. At times, I’m sure managers wish they could employ whips. Well, whips did not make Call Center Cafe’s list. Sorry!

Mobile instant messaging (MIM) is poised to take over SMS. MIM is very similar to SMS, in that you can send and receive text messages on your cell phone; however, MIM is capable of more flexibility.

MIM is simply an instant messaging program stored on your cell phone. Think of Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, AIM or MSN Messenger for mobiles.

MIM provides many benefits over SMS. SMS cannot store user information. When you send an SMS, you can only tell the telephone number you are texting. With MIM, configurable profiles are available. These can provide information such as names, email addresses, home addresses, or any other info the messaging service provides.

Matthew Kirk points out on Textually.org:

“Of every 100 messages - including texts, emails and picture messages - sent by users without mobile instant messaging from their mobile phone or computer, 38 are text messages. Once consumers start using mobile instant messaging, the number of texts falls to 23 per 100.”

This Sunday AT&T will be releasing a new service to transmit TV channels to your cell phone. The service will cost $15 a month and provides 10 channels for your viewing: CBS Mobile, Comedy Central, ESPN Mobile TV, Fox Mobile, MTV, NBC 2Go, NBC News 2Go, Nickelodeon, PIX (a movie channel), and CNN Mobile Live.

Unfortunately, the service is only available for two of the newest cell phones on the market: The LG Vu, and the Samsung Access. However, they mention that other TV-ready phones will be released in the future.

It is now possible to anonymously report crime tips to the authorities. mBlox, the largest mobile network, and Anderson Software, LLC, a leader in law enforcement tip software, are teaming to provide this service on a nationwide basis.

The application is very secure and it is encrypted, which allows the investigator to have two-way correspondence while maintaining the user’s anonymity.

TipSoft is currently deployed in 16 Canadian cities and they are currently launching in 32 US cities. Service will also be available soon throughout the UK.

Diet.com has unique service for mobile phone users. Anyone with a cellphone can text a quick message containing a restaurant item to DIET1 (34381), and they will text you back with its nutritional content.

A text with the message of “mcdonalds southwest chicken salad” will give you data on its calories, fat, carbs, and protein content. It’s true that most of restaurants keep nutritional information behind the register, but many times it is inconvenient to check. When ordering take-out on the road, for instance.

Skype has released a ‘mini’ beta version of its service, this time, for cell phones. As of now you can only place outgoing calls if you live in Brazil, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Sweden, or the U.K.

Skype expects beta testing to last several months, and there is no word when all service locations will be able to receive full functionality.

Interested parties should visit Skype’s site and download the beta version of the program available for their cell phone.