Frontier Airlines closes Las Cruces call center

For the first time in nearly nine years, Las Crucen Etta Hough won't go to work tomorrow at the Frontier Airlines call center on Hickory Loop. That's because with today's final shift -- set to end at midnight -- the facility will close its doors.

Hough said she is sad to see this day come.

"Very much so," she said. "We have a very tight-knit group. Everybody has been wonderful to work with."

There are still about 100 workers left at the facility, which at one time employed as many as 200. The airline opened the customer support center in the summer of 2000 and Ruben Servando Valdez has been the facilities manager ever since the first day.

He said that even after Frontier's parent company, Indianapolis-based Republic Airways Holdings Inc., announced earlier this year that the Las Cruces facility would close, the employees kept their heads up.

"People have continued to work hard, we have a remarkable group of people," Servando Valdez said. "I'm blessed to have worked with these people."

The genesis of the closing can be traced to April 2008, when Frontier filed for bankruptcy. This past summer, Republic Airways Holdings won a bankruptcy court auction for Frontier, with a plan to buy the carrier after a bid by Southwest Airlines was rejected. The deal was finalized in October and Republic announced it would consolidate functions between the airlines, including the call centers.

Las Cruces employees were given the opportunity to stay with the companyAdvertisementand move. Servando Valdez said 11 local workers have accepted and will relocate to Denver, where Frontier is based. As for himself, the only manager the Las Cruces call center has ever known said he plans to stay in the area.

"I'm going to be seeking employment here, in the El Paso-Las Cruces area," said Servando Valdez, an El Paso resident.

Hough said that representatives of the New Mexico Workforce Connection's Las Cruces office visited the call center to help workers who would soon be laid off. Usually, the state will put together a rapid response team to help the workers who will lose their jobs. The team offers information on training, unemployment benefits and other services.

"They were excellent," she said.

Source: lcsun-news.com

The Tricky Business of Call Center Metrics

Not long ago, I wrote about a DataInfoCom webcast with Dick Hunter, the former VP of global consumer support services at Dell. I was fascinated with Hunter's forthrightness in discussing how Dell made the transition from focusing on call length in its call centers to how often problems were actually resolved. While measuring customer satisfaction rather than transaction time is seemingly a no-brainer, not many companies do it.

That's not such a surprise, though, says Cheryl Coppens, a director at Customer Operations Performance Center (COPC), a group dedicated to contact center benchmarking, and one of the sources quoted in a destinationCRM story. If companies are still struggling with satisfying customers' basic needs, it's a mistake for them to try to emulate such customer-service champs as Zappos.com.

A well-known anecdote about Zappos, related in this Inc. story as well as others about the online shoe retailer, involves a woman seeking help in returning some shoes she'd ordered for her husband, who died in a car crash. The call center agent ordered flowers for the woman. But offering such touches will backfire if agents aren't able to solve common problems. Said Coppens:

To throw "wow’" campaigns on top and expect bottom-box people to move up because you’re nicer is not going to do it.

Source: itbusinessedge.com

Tradeshow Marketing Company Selects LiveOps for Inbound Call Center Services

Tradeshow Marketing Company, Ltd. (Pink Sheets: TSHO) today announced the selection and engagement of contact center industry leader, LiveOps, to handle the inbound contact center services for their upcoming direct response television (DRTV) campaign.LiveOps, based in Santa Clara, California, provides the industry's only full-service, virtual call center solution through a network of more than 20,000 independent at-home agents. The LiveOps independent agents will be answering all of the inbound calls generated through the upcoming Tradeshow Marketing DRTV launch. LiveOps is yet another best-in-class campaign partner to join Tradeshow Marketing's DRTV production/creative partner, Cesari Direct, helping to round out the marketing team. In the DRTV market, LiveOps handles over 80% of the calls for the top ten direct response programs. With high-quality independent agents and unique Results-Based Routing capabilities that help increase conversion and upsell, LiveOps has a reputation as the best performing inbound call center, generating up to 33% more revenue per campaign than traditional call centers. Additionally, LiveOps' cloud-based business model allows for unlimited scalability for each campaign that minimizes call abandonment and allows for more orders to be taken even when a company engages in aggressive media and campaign ramping.

Luniel de Beer, President and CEO of Tradeshow Marketing, commented that, "This selection and engagement of LiveOps marks another key milestone towards the launch of our highly anticipated DRTV campaign. We are actively negotiating the additional vendor agreements needed for our campaign and we hope to finalize these before the end of next week." He continued that, "The process of selecting and engaging key vendors such as LiveOps is indispensable as it directly contributes to our readiness to launch the campaign on national television and will ultimately contribute to the overall success of the campaign."

Source: auto-mobi.info

US firms shift call centre ops back home from India

Two weeks ago, AGL Resources Inc., an Atlanta, US-based natural gas distribution company, decided to shift its call centre operations from India to the US. The centre was operated by India’s third largest information technology (IT) services company, Wipro Ltd.

Along with similar instances of Delta Airlines Inc., United Airlines Inc. and Chrysler Group Llc reported earlier in the year, this could raise a flag for Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) firms which earned nearly $15 billion (Rs69,450 crore today) from such back-office work in the year to March.

In-house services: A file photo of a TeamLease Services call centre in Bangalore. Some US states have legislation that requires public utility companies to locate their customer call centres within the service area. Hemant Mishra / Mint

In-house services: A file photo of a TeamLease Services call centre in Bangalore. Some US states have legislation that requires public utility companies to locate their customer call centres within the service area. Hemant Mishra / Mint
The move comes as the downturn in the US and subsequent government bailouts, combined with rules that require service centres to be located locally, are persuading companies to move jobs back home.

How To Test The Actual Work Rate Of Customer Care Representatives?

The actual work rate: a test, such as customer service representatives are planned, as in their method of on the job.


The actual work rate calculation is a percentage, which is equal to customer service representatives to sign into the system prepared to answer the phone (actual time) divided by customer service representatives to answer the phone according to plan should be the total time, and then multiplied by 100. The percentage of the actual work rate data are usually from the ACD, and should be every day to make a report, according to weekly and monthly tracking.

I have worked in the operation of a project to make outbound test: Each customer service representative of the actual work the best rate should reach 92% or more. If the employee is the actual work rate below the set targets should be investigated and I will provide the elements that should be taken care of on next post.

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