Posts Tagged ‘Costs’

Ganpro Direct Fed Microbial Lowers Feed Costs Through Improved Feed Efficiency and Feed Intake

Ganpro Direct Fed Microbial Lowers Feed Costs Through Improved Feed Efficiency and Feed Intake
CLEVELAND As corn prices top 7 per bushel, Ganpro direct fed microbial DFM provide poultry, swine, dairy and cattle producers a much needed option for lowering feed expenses while increasing feed efficiency and livestock weight gain. Manufactured by Ganeden Biotech, one of United States leading probiotic manufacturers, Ganpro is all-natural, appropriate for livestock of all ages and is easy…

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Giva, Inc. Launches IT Help Desk/Service Desk Visual Reporting Tools to Lower Labor Costs and Rapidly Identify Trends …

Giva, Inc. Launches IT Help Desk/Service Desk Visual Reporting Tools to Lower Labor Costs and Rapidly Identify Trends …
Giva® announces the industry’s first visual reporting tools for Information Technology Help Desk/Service Desks. Real-time reports with high volumes of complex data sets can be generated within seconds, allowing managers to instantly identify emerging trends and patterns to facilitate better and faster decision making. Most of the real-time visual reports run in ten seconds or less with …

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Reduce Data Center Costs with a Remote Power Management System

As today’s networks are growing, becoming most expensive to operate and even more complicated, the number of distributed networks and remote branches are also increasing rapidly, creating a need for efficient console servers.  And with budgets for network management staff dwindling, it is becoming even more important to build in capabilities to improve the response time to an outage or other problem  This makes remote power management a key element in efficiently managing your data center.

While some businesses are utilizing UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), a substantial number are not implementing a remote power management solution to provide them with the full range of protection and cost savings available to them via a remote console server.  These power management console servers are network-managed devices that allow remote control of the power on a per-receptacle basis, allowing remote cycling of equipment and other management capabilities.

For many equipment issues, cycling power can be the fastest – or only – way to correct problems. Through a remote console server, technicians can monitor power, perform a remote reboot and control individual power receptacles. If a system freezes, the technician can remotely reboot power and quickly return the network to operational status.

The benefits of remote power management include:

reduction in required site visits;
quick recovery from software lockouts;
ability to activate standby equipment and remotely shut down defective equipment;
remote monitoring of power consumption to identify any changes;
reports to audit power before making the decision to add equipment;
ability to control power sequencing.

The single most important justification for remote power management is the cost savings related to site trips previously required to alleviate common issues, including:

restoring network connectivity via remote reboot of key servers or network equipment after a failure;
remotely activating standby equipment and shutting down primary equipment;
increases in power consumption from attached systems that can indicate an impending hardware failure;
knowing in advance whether equipment expansion or upgrades can be done within a rack pdu’s power level;
sequencing power to outlets on power up to eliminate current inrush and maximize use of circuit ratings;
maximizing runtime by shutting down non-critical equipment.

A UPS is sometimes considered sufficient protection for equipment, but a complete power management solution provides control in addition to power outage protection. Advanced power management is often integrated with other remote management resources to simplify management and reduce the number of interfaces.

These technologies are called out-of-band management or out-of-band networking and are implemented on console terminal servers. The most common interface used for out-of-band management is a serial connection to the service port of servers, storage, routers, switches, and other types of network equipment. Through a single interface, an administrator can manage power, console terminal servers and environmental and security management for a wide variety of applications.

Complete power management – beyond the protection of a UPS – can be a critical element of network management for today’s businesses. A properly-configured power management system can provide around-the-clock remote power access and real-time monitoring that allows the data center manager to address a large number of common network problems without the need for a site visit. With this capability, businesses can greatly reduce the cost of network downtime without increasing network management staffing costs.

Reducing Costs in the Contact Center With a Postseason Review

One of the best ways to plan for future success is to conduct a postseason analysis. I’ll explain how to perform a postseason analysis of your center as a baseline for customer service, process improvement and cost reduction.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to the postseason analysis.

1. Form a postseason review team. Because your efforts are directed at customer service, process improvement and potential cost reduction, form a team that can bring different disciplines to the process. While much of the work will fall to contact center management (managers and supervisors), broaden the group to involve a few good reps. Also include general training and quality training, human resources, center scheduling, telecom traffic, IT, marketing, and returns and replacement if all of these areas are within your responsibilities.

Clearly, contact center management drives the process. But this effort should draw on the opinions and input of all. Challenge them to assess how things could be done differently, and make them answer the question, “How can costs be reduced without lowering customer service?” These meetings should occur sometime between mid-January and mid-February, giving you enough time to plan and achieve early results.

2. Review your metrics. Begin by reviewing your key performance indicators and how performance measures up against your standards and plans. The major metrics include contacts per hour; service level; abandon rate; attrition/turnover rate; call-handle time; talk time; after-call work time; contact-to-order ratio; transaction volumes for Internet, phone and mail; non-phone volumes and others. How accurate were marketing’s projections and your projections for calls?

Labor is 50 percent to 70 percent of the contact center’s costs. So it’s important to see how well you performed in terms of staffing-level accuracy, schedule adherence and occupancy percentage.

3. Review hiring and training practices. Labor’s cost, quality and availability is becoming an issue for many call centers, particularly in seasonal businesses where the selling curve is more compressed. Review your advertising media costs and results, and exchange information with other human resource departments. Review your pre-hiring testing, employee selection criteria and practices. Is there a place for temporary agencies rather than relying completely on in-house hiring? Should more calls be shunted off to outsourced call centers?

From a training perspective, how well did you train the CSRs to take orders and provide customer service? In our experience, there’s a considerable cost ($3,000 to $10,000 per new hire) and loss of time by senior associates to hire and train new CSRs before they’re productive. How can this be improved (number of classes and trainers; develop better training approaches such as e-learning, post-training surveys, length of training)?

4. Evaluate revenue generation. As part of their mission, many contact centers are charged with becoming revenue centers in addition to taking orders and providing customer service. What do your reports show about your success with cross-selling, up-selling, outbound selling and increasing the company’s average order?

5. Consider process improvements. What does your quality and call monitoring show about your operation? As you walk through your system and operation, where are the bottlenecks? How can systems be streamlined? What functions and types of information can your system do more easily online? If you’re still processing batches of mail orders, can scanning reduce costs? How can live chat and e-mail management systems improve your operation? Do you need to move to the next level of call-scheduling software?

Trusted and Tried tips to Reduce the Costs of Call Centers

Call center managers have wrecked their brains to save the money that kept draining out of the process. For them, it is an unending proposition that kept challenging them at every schedule and in each process.

However, in this write-up and with the help of experience and expertise gained over the years, let me try to sum up some of the points that can not only save the money that had been dripping down but transform the whole process also.

The cost-reducing steps for call centers are:

1) Make-a- team: Be it inbound call center or outbound, the power of team can bring in overwhelming results. Assign team power and responsibilities alike. In failure or success, let them take over. This will help to increase the performance levels across all levels like- quality training, HR, Scheduling, IT, Marketing and sales that would increase the results and reduce the costs investments drastically.  Take the inputs and feedbacks from each team members to induce positivity in work environment. Let them answer on how to reduce the costs without affecting the quality of the services provided.

2) Count Achievements: Give the due appreciation and do not be partial while doing this. Include performance standards like calls per hour; time to handle, waiting or hold time, calls escalated, quality of calls, abandoned calls, overtime call and conversion calls.

3) Scores the Performances: Mark them on the scale of zero to ten.  Not only review the performance of score but also assess the costs invested on them as well in terms of HR expenses, selection and criterion. Are they giving you back the costs you have invested in them?

4) Report the Revenue: call centers -inbound call center and outbound call centers both need to know what kind of money they are generating for themselves and their clients. With a wide portfolio of services like cross-selling, up-selling, lead generation and appointment scheduling which are promising enough to bring the results for companies should be profitable for you as well to ensure smooth operations of call center.

On The Wrong Track – Exploding Costs Threaten German Rail’s High-Speed Future

On The Wrong Track – Exploding Costs Threaten German Rail’s High-Speed Future
A new report reveals that the controversial “Stuttgart 21″ rail project is likely to be the latest in a series of Deutsche Bahn ventures to go massively over budget. If the plug gets pulled on the project, it will cause enormous damage to Germany’s vision of a Europe-wide high-speed rail network.

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Cutting Costs in Call Center: How Smart Is That?

Reading about cost cutting measures all over the internet and business magazines may mislead you. Not every industry would allow provisions for cutting down by chopping manpower. A case in point is the call center industry. Handing out pink slips to BPO agents won’t help you cut down on costs. In fact, it can increase your expenditures, not to mention a thousand other complications cropping up before you finish calculation how much money you had intended to save! For an answering service industry, you have to think differently about your manpower. I am not saying that streamlining the workforce is a bad idea. You can make your team snap with agility. Here’s what can go wrong if you cut down on your business process outsourcing staff indiscriminately.

The sniping of call center employees affects the customer care services directly. Less BPO agents on the inbound call center team would mean that there are less people to take calls. The residual agents would have a tough time dealing with the call volume. Customers would be made to wait on calls for ages! Customers would be rushed through calls because the line would be beeping with a dozen calls in waiting. The call center services agents would find it difficult to get thorough with the calls. They will look for easier ways to deal with the callers so that they can meet their daily targets. Customers will definitely not like it when they are being pushed to end the call. This will reflect poorly on the sales chart as well. As for the customers, they will probably give in to telemarketing pulls from your rivals.

From the perspective of the call center agent, this will be a nightmare! With less people to handle calls, they will be in great deal of hurry. The breathing time between calls would come down to a pathetic few seconds. The BPO agents will feel the stress and that would affect their performance. Nothing makes it more difficult for telemarketing agents than dealing with calls when they are least disposed towards it. A large call volume is a pain anyway. With lesser manpower to deal with it, the situation could get from bad to worse. Burnout will be a certainty. Such a great deal of pressure will put off the inbound call center agents in a way that leads to higher attrition. A trained call center services agent quitting midway through the project is real bad news!

Let’s come to the perspective of the call center management/employers now. Yes, you will save on the salaries that you pay to BPO agents that you want to chop off. But consider this: wouldn’t your telecom prices shoot up when the inbound call center agents spend more time on each call? Suppose you are paying for the incoming calls by making the numbers toll free. Then you have more expenditure on your ledger. Other than the costs that you couldn’t control, your telemarketing services dip badly in quality because of a long hold time and plenty of abandoned calls. So all for cost cutting, what say?