While administrative concerns are obviously important to any business, nothing compares in importance to a company's product. The product call centers produce for public consumption is verbal conversations. Customers and patients are not interested in hiring practices, software, or other administrative issues. Their only concern is how they are treated during each second of their telephone call. From the customer or patient perspective, that call is the company's product, a

The call center industry is dominated by narratives espoused by experts in articles, convention presentations, and podcasts that greatly influence how our field views most everything related to training. Many are misguided. I will go through some here. 1) Conveying empathy and offering more personalized service adds to the length of calls and requires more physical and mental effort than not doing these things. This is utterly false yet espoused by many experts as a forego

Some of the hottest new buzzwords in the call center field include empathy, humanness, and emotional intelligence, often associated with Covid-19 and the tough conversations agents are now having with patients regarding it. 2020 has certainly been the year of the virus, but it is also when both the call center and software fields have begun to realize that years-long software industry efforts to produce programs able to improve the patient experience by improving agent perfor

BCI is not a software company, but I believe the role of software in call centers is essential and evolving. I recently viewed a commercial for St. Jude Children's Hospital, and on the television screen was a QR code viewers could scan with their phone to make a donation rather than dial the hospital's call center. I think this is amazing as are other digital tools. I also follow call center-related podcasts and read articles wherein software industry folks sometimes discus