Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 13, 2013

I spent more than four hours listening in to client support calls at the call center. To say they were surprised is an understatement: Many CEOs never visit the call center, and virtually none do it their first afternoon on the job. So, what I do on my first day?

Call Center 12

Call Center Learning-by-Doing CEO Planning 12

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

USAA Bank offers a voice-activated virtual assistant for mobile devices with a “tap to talk” feature that connects customers to a call center and allows agents to see what the customer was doing just before he or she called. Finance Internet Retail'

Banking 10

Banking Retail Open-book Finance 10

Harvard Business Review

JULY 19, 2013

Plan for a realistic amount of sales and interest so you can conservatively manage your finances. What is markedly different about the company is these rates are only available through the Getaroom.com call center. Others travel sites outsource their call centers overseas and really push all interactions to be electronic.

Entrepreneur 9

Entrepreneur Hotels Travel Call Center 9

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 2, 2014

You have front-line employees who create what you sell or who deal directly with customers: software developers, sales reps, call-center staffers, and so on. You also have support staff, including the people in marketing, finance, HR, and other functions.

Cost 12

Cost Span of Control Management Bureaucracy 12

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 29, 2012

And the bottom dropped out of the Indian outsourcing industry, which contracted as much as 80% while the Indian firm Aegis outsourced its call center — to Dallas. FINANCING THAT VACATION HOME IN VANUATU. All of which points to a 2013 that looks nothing like 2012. A Rip-Roaring Trade in Corporate Secrecy (The Guardian).

Outsourcing 8

Outsourcing GDP Bottom-up Call Center 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 5, 2016

They see disrupted incumbents from retail, finance, health care, transportation, professional services, and manufacturing requiring radical restructuring of assets, productivity , and innovation. This clean-sheet customer experience prioritization over more traditional call center KPIs had a huge effect.

Levitt 8

Levitt Disaggregation Kaizen Call Center 8

Decker Communication

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Leadership is something that’s required at every level of an organization—from a new call center associate to a department head. Being a leader today is more difficult than ever because it means being excellent at something—communications— that transcends the traditional business skills in finance, marketing, or strategy.

Decentralization 81

Decentralization Blanchard IPO Call Center 81

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 13, 2013

Finance has homes in New York, Hong Kong, and London. Finding talent and financing isn’t the only hurdle to overcome on the road to startup success; it’s the first of many. From engineer to call center employee, people loved being at Zappos. Energy is still the domain of Houston and Dubai. The list goes on and on.

Entrepreneur 8

Entrepreneur Venture Funding Finance Engineering 8

Strategy Driven

MAY 26, 2021

The suite comes with many impressive AI applications that you can integrate directly into your deployment and productivity pipeline almost immediately: Contact Center AI; allows you to automate your call center interactions with customers.

Tools 94

Tools Analysis Software Document 94

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 5, 2014

Point solutions, such as focusing on the call center, the store, or the website, no longer cut it in a multichannel environment, not when delivering excellent customer journeys can increase revenues up to 15 percent and cut costs by up to 20 percent.

P&L 10

P&L Banking Marketing Call Center 10

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 23, 2012

Once the shining example of call-center customer service, they dropped to nearly last in the industry in customer satisfaction in 2007. So early on, Finance and HR collaborated to simplify the process, reducing the number of data metrics. How can we share insights and innovations that allow our employees to be more productive?

Metrics 12

Metrics Parcell Call Center Productivity 12

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 28, 2017

Machine learning and its most prominent subfield, deep learning, have attracted a lot of media attention and received a significant share of the financing that has been pouring into the AI universe, garnering nearly 60% of all investments from outside the industry in 2016. There’s no one-size-fits-all AI solution.

Survey 11

Survey Execution First-mover Advantage Technology 11

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 28, 2016

They’ve redesigned their core processes in the area of procurement (online shopping), talent acquisition (marketplaces), collaboration (social networking), market research (peer reviews), finance (mobile payments) and travel (room and ride sharing). Have you reinvented your core processes to the same degree?

Loyalty 8

Loyalty Peer Review Efficiency Call Center 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 9, 2011

Frontier Communications, for example, has found that work-at-home agents are 25% more productive and have double the retention rate of work-in-the-call-center agents. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that lattice ways to work can actually raise productivity. Managers need training to help them see the benefits and accept this change.

Productivity 14

Productivity Products Real Estate Bottom-up 14

The Horizons Tracker

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are disrupting the finance world, as exemplified by Morgan Stanley’s experimentation with an OpenAI-powered chatbot to assist their financial advisors. As LLMs progressively permeate the finance industry, it is crucial to thoughtfully embrace and adapt to this transformative shift.

Finance 117

Finance Power Early Adopters Call Center 117

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 6, 2017

You can use old technology like a land line to enter your SSN or you can relay it to a call center employee in India who can verify it. There is a beauty in the simplicity of the nine-digit SSN. The SSN is easy and low tech.

Crisis 9

Crisis Insurance Technology Credit Scoring 9

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 9, 2011

We call these people Cost Center Consumers, and they come in two flavors. They tie up your call centers, incur costly returns, and generate other costs that occur below the gross margin line, which is harder to see. Divas: These are high maintenance consumers who drive costs up after purchase.

P&L 14

P&L Supply Chain Retail Price 14

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 4, 2011

A finance manager's proposal to reduce staffing in a customer call center, for example, may reduce expenses but handicap the organization's ability to respond to customer needs — and present a hurdle to completing a major new customer sale.

Proposal 11

Proposal Cialdini Execution Influence 11

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 31, 2018

They were employed in midlevel to upper-midlevel management positions in strategy, finance, marketing, legal, operations, and technology functions. The participants were American women whose racial and ethnic identity was African American/black, Asian American, Latin/Hispanic, or any combination of these races and ethnicities.

Management 13

Management Tacit Knowledge Diversity Leadership Pipeline 13

Harvard Business Review

MAY 8, 2017

Transformational CEOs Tend to be “Insider Outsiders” The list is topped by companies headed by visionary founders with no prior experience in their industries; Jeff Bezos came from the world of finance, and Reed Hastings from software. ” They Develop a Road Map Before Disruption Takes Hold.

Franchising 15

Franchising CEO Business Model Strategy 15

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 13, 2017

Chatbots are increasingly becoming commonplace in every type of setting, including enterprise and customer call centers. This plays a critical role in ensuring accuracy, particularly in regulated industries like healthcare and finance that possess a high volume of confidential membership and customer information.

Technology 9

Technology System Learning-by-Doing Video 9

Harvard Business Review

MAY 2, 2012

Everyone from product managers, to call center reps, to the front-line worker in the branch or store uses information to make decisions. When Bill in Finance generates his monthly Top Line report, Craig in Marketing can leave a comment on the "Revenue" column inquiring, "Is this billed revenue or booked revenue?"

Business Intelligence 14

Business Intelligence Budgeting Report Library 14

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 27, 2015

call centers). The energy, finance, and technology sectors tend to tweet using a male-biased tone of voice. Similarly, in finance, payment providers and investment banks such as Schroders and Goldmans Sachs Group fared badly while retail insurance and banking such as PNC Financial Services Group performed well.

Company 8

Company Airlines Brand Analysis 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 21, 2015

And while there are lots of executive programs in “Accounting and Finance for Nonfinancial Managers,” there aren’t any that I know of on “Analytics for Non-Quantitative Managers.” MOOCs and traditional academic courses mostly focus on methods.

Analysis 8

Analysis Supply Chain CRM Banking 8