In Action: Recruiting and Retaining Call Center Employees

What's your strategy to remain competitive?

Trainers realize that recruiting the right people with the right skills and providing them with great training is key to creating a great business. With the arrival of measurement and return-on-investment calculations for these key business activities comes the realization from business professionals that performance management does not make a difference in profits, sales, and customer satisfaction.

With a company's need to recruit and keep the best talent, performance mangement is its best strategy for remaining competitive in the global marketplace in which employees have more choices than ever before. Performance management is used to improve both personal and organizational skills.

Recruiting and Retaining Call Center Employees illustrates the various ways employees can reach their potential and thereby contribute to the bottom line, made all the more profitable by creating stronger and more stable companies that can offer higher wages and excellent benefit packages. Combining theory with practical advice on training, recruiting, and evaluating programs, this book provides the trainer with practical models and guides. Plus, cases on process and technology provide a full range of solutions in creating a call center that is well ahead of the competition.

About the Editors

Series Editor, Jack J. Phillips is a world-renowned expert on measurement and evaluation and developer of the ROI process, a revolutionary process that provides bottom-line figures and accountability for all types of training, performance improvement, human resources, and technology programs.

He is the author or editor of more than 20 books--eight focused on measurement and evaluation--and more than 100 articles. His most recent books inlcude The Human Resources Scorecard: Measuring the Return on Investment (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2001); The Consultant's Scorecard (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000); HRD Trends Worldwide: Shared Solutions to Compete in a Global Economy (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, previously published by Gulf Publishing); Return on Investment in Training and Performance Improvement Programs (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, previously published by Gulf Publishing, 1997); Handbook of Training Evaluation and Measurement Methods, 3d edition (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, previously published by Gulf Publishing, 1997); and Accountability in Human Resource Management (Butterworth-Heinemann, previously published by Gulf Publishing, 1996).

Editor, Natalie L. Petouhoff works as a principal investigator with Jon Anton, who is director of benchmark research at Purdue University's Center for Customer-Driven Quality. She creates articles, books, and white papers that provide companies mission-critical information to enhance their customer service strategy through hinbound call and e-business centers using the latest in telecommunications (voice) and computer (digital) technology. Petouhoff also specializes in using the Internet for external customer access as well as intranets and middleware. In addition, she is a partner at LMR associates where she specializes in return-on-investment (ROI) for "soft skills" and is a program manager for change management program as well as a trainer of work style behavioral change.

Natalie Petouhoff has published 10 technical papers in industry journals. She is a popular speaker at the Women and Technology Conference in Santa Clara to an audience of over 6,000 technical women about her latest ideas in technology as applied to customer service and career development.