Friday, July 23, 2010

Nothing Casual About This Massachussets Company’s Growth

Recently I visited Casual Male XL in Canton, MA and toured their corporate headquarters. I was really impressed by the catalog showroom, located next to their call center hub.

Casual Male XL is transitioning its’ call center agents to become "wardrobe assistants", where they have stocked a fully-inventoried showroom to provide the agents with a means of making stylish suggestions and complimentary add-on offers to customers placing orders. "It really helps to have all of the materials and colors in front of you," said Christina Shortall, Call Center Director at Casual Male XL.

Casual Male XL has expanded quite a bit since it’s early days. They operate 5 different lines of business featuring upscale, contemporary & economical clothing, shoes accessories, all for the big & tall male shopper, a growing demographic.

Casual Male uses Virtual Observer to assist in training the agents, or "wardrobe assistants", as Shortall’s staff of supervisors score calls and provide feedback and reporting back to the agents on where they can improve.

"Since Virtual Observer is very scalable, it helps during the peak holiday seasons, when both call volume and staffing spike," Shortall added. "Virtual Observer also helps us in our training sessions, as we can play back calls so employees can hear themselves on the phone."

Christina also mentioned big plans for the business, announcing plans for a combined superstore in Chicago, Houston, Memphis and Las Vegas this summer. The store, Casual Male DXL, is a new lifestyle super-store which caters to all big & tall men's needs under one roof. We actually shared exciting announcements as I discussed the Virtual Observer product roadmap with her.

As I left, I felt very proud of the way Virtual Observer had helped Christina meet aggressive performance goals and how her team of supervisors and agents were handling their transition to becoming "wardrobe assistants".

More information relative to the new super store announcement can be read here.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Monday, July 19, 2010

Innovation in the Call Recording Space

Potential new customers may not ask "How Innovative Are You?" during the sales process, but perhaps they should.

Businesses who innovate well and often, such as Apple and Google, don't typically need to be asked because their audience just knows they do, from the constant PR and web buzz that surrounds each new release.

At CSI, we're excited about the next wave of product announcements and innovations we have planned for our customers, partners and potential new customers.

These announcements are truly groundbreaking.

I can tell you this, right now, there will not be one call center supervisor or manager who won't want to get their hands on these new time-saving features.

For a long time, CSI has kind of flown under the radar, content to be the "best kept secret in the call recording industry." However, we have been doing this innovation thing for a long time.

Let's quickly review:

Virtual Observer was one of the first integrated call recording and quality monitoring solution designed to deliver robust QA features AND call recording.

At the time, the industry giants were priced way beyond the reach of the small and mid-sized call centers.

We saw our opening.

The marketing opportunity is not where the innovation was, however. The innovation was in designing our system with a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), meaning we'd be delivering an enterprise-ready solution for everyone.

SOA makes Virtual Observer a true enterprise-ready solution, translating to an extremely scalable platform for mid-sized centers with seasonal spikes in activity or global multi-location enterprises who are adding locations through growth and acquisition.

Delivering true enterprise scalability and aggressive quality assurance feature set truly shook up the call recording industry, which previously froze out the non-fortune 500 companies from similar  suites because of an amazingly expensive price point and upgrade path.

Virtual Observer’s competitors have since multiplied as the industry has noticed the success of our business model.

Virtual Observer was also the first vendor in the call recording space to offer lifetime free full software upgrades for customers on active maintenance contracts.

Bringing customers along to the latest release of our products made sense, and was in direct contrast to the "re-buy" proposition upgrade path offered by our larger competitors.

Many other vendors in our space have copied this model as well.

Virtual Observer was the first call recording suite to assist customers in becoming PCI Compliant by encrypting recorded media. We’ve broken through again with additional tools to assist in the PCI process and we will continue to stay at the forefront of the standards committee, as they continually update their rule set.

Virtual Observer was the first quality monitoring suite to include an advanced real-time supervisor-agent assistance tool, called "VO Live", which enables supervisors to view thumbnails of all agent desktops where they can then assist via chat or by taking control of the desktop.

Competitors are still attempting to knock this off.

We will continue to blaze trails for call centers, giving them the tool sets needed to exceed quality assurance objectives and meet organizational goals.

Stay tuned on this blog and on our Twitter page for all of our exciting forthcoming announcements.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Popular Posts