Introducing “Contact Center Best Practices for the Real World”

For those with even one foot in the digital doorway, chances are you may have heard some breaking news around the watercooler at the beginning of 2018: A revival is being planned for a well-known social networking platform: LinkedIn Groups.

If you have ever belonged to a handful of LinkedIn Groups, or just one, your experience was probably alternately positive and negative; this reflects its reputation in the marketplace, too. LinkedIn Groups have the ability to offer meaningful opportunities for discussion, collaboration, and relevant industry news. In the past, though, they have faced criticism for becoming impersonal, laden with spam, or worst of all: deadly silent.

Recently, the company announced that, after eliminating the iOS app for Groups in February of this year, it would be revisiting LinkedIn Groups and “re-integrating Groups back into the core LinkedIn experience”, making it a resilient feature within the mother platform itself. The changes they hinted at included: a) optimizing the search engine to more easily hone in on the most relevant groups to your brand; and b) the ability to share video and other mixed media (a nod to the ever-evolving digital era, to be sure). These changes should be embraced and celebrated for companies interested in:

• Expanding their networks
• Interacting with a relevant, specialized digital community via meaningful debate
• Keeping their fingers on the pulse of breaking industry news and annual trends, and
• Understanding how comparable companies are adapting new technologies, practices, and strategies to better their overall business.

Finding the right groups to join proves difficult when the LinkedIn Group market is an entirely flooded one. The key to locating the ‘right fit’ is to turn the mirror on one’s own business and narrow down which topics or industries are of greatest importance to your company’s future and survival. The more obscure, the better: Break down your interests into microcosmic categories to ensure you’re distilling your LinkedIn Groups to the best and brightest in the customer service, customer experience, and contact center industries.

For our part, we are on the LinkedIn bandwagon and have begun shepherding our own LinkedIn group with a niche emphasis on call centers, call-backs, and other call center technology trends and related news. The end goal? To become a forum for meaningful engagement, for brainstorming solutions, for sharing relevant industry news and trends, and for inviting partners to collaborate with us and each other in bettering the contact center industry.

Some of the content we have already begun sharing includes:

• Industry news
• ‘State of the Union’ analyses of call center technology
• Annual news roundups on call center earnings
• Insightful reports you should be reading
• Tips and tricks of the trade

… and some other fun things, too. Please join us on our LinkedIn Group journey by visiting us here. We look forward to having the conversations that matter to the greater contact center world, and having them with you.