Donna Fluss

Donna Fluss

Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, is an expert on contact centers, analytics, and back-office technology. She has 30 years of experience helping organizations build contact centers and back-office operating environments and assisting vendors to deliver competitive solutions. She can be reached at Donna.Fluss@dmgconsult.com.

Articles by Donna Fluss

Survey customers about channel preferences and then interact with them on those channels.
Posted November 22, 2024

Applying the right AI-enabled solutions in contact centers and self-service environments should yield quantifiable benefits, but it might take more time.
Posted September 19, 2024

The two-solution set is outdated and creates unnecessary redundancies.
Posted July 18, 2024

AI will position companies to employ a higher level of agent to deliver truly unique and hyper-personalized customer experiences.
Posted May 31, 2024

More advanced workforce management empowers employees and improves CX. (Featured on SmartCustomerService.com.)
Posted April 25, 2024

Contact center WFM solutions must include adaptive intraday capabilities to meet changing demands in real time.
Posted April 04, 2024

Agents are commonly only guilty of doing what they were trained, or constrained, to do.
Posted February 08, 2024

Customer journey analytics are instrumental in capturing, analyzing, and measuring employee and system performance at every customer touchpoint.
Posted December 21, 2023

The ability to analyze live conversations as they occur helps the customer and employee experience. (Featured on DestinationCRM.com.)
Posted November 10, 2023

We are only at the beginning of what generative AI and other AI technologies are expected to contribute to contact centers and customer service organizations during the next few years.
Posted October 26, 2023

Real-time guidance applications are essential for contact centers as they empower agents with the right customer information and best practices.
Posted September 22, 2023

There are plenty of potential use cases for contact center-as-a-service solutions, and many of them are not the traditional ones.
Posted August 04, 2023

For AI and agents to work together effectively, the data fed into the models needs to be accurate and up to date.
Posted June 29, 2023

Companies have to expand their perspective of what and who is involved in the customer service experience.
Posted May 19, 2023

AI is helping contact center managers better meet employee needs and preferences, reducing costs and attrition rates.
Posted April 07, 2023

Contact centers need a new name that better reflects the value and contributions they make to companies and their customers.
Posted February 24, 2023

These innovations are ready to be rolled out and are positioned to help contact center managers achieve their departmental and corporate objectives. (Featured on DestinationCRM.com.)
Posted February 10, 2023

These solutions can be a company's eyes and ears on both customers and employees. (Featured on DestinationCRM.com.)
Posted January 18, 2023

Artificial intelligence underpins all the technology advancements that will help companies improve the customer experiences they deliver.
Posted October 27, 2022

Company cultures need to foster an environment where contact center agents feel a sense of pride and joy in what they do every day.
Posted September 01, 2022

An artificial intelligence framework will be needed to monitor and optimize the performance of technology, people, and processes in the contact center of the future.
Posted June 30, 2022

Some customer service challenges have existed for decades, but companies are finally recognizing them and starting to explore ways to address them.
Posted May 05, 2022

Prior reasons for not adopting video for customer service have slipped away in the past few years.
Posted April 14, 2022

With uncertainty still looming, contact centers should continue the staffing policies that have worked so far.
Posted February 24, 2022

Companies that want to hire and retain great agents must listen and respond to their needs and create a more flexible and engaging work environment.
Posted December 10, 2021

Organizations need to take a fresh look at their self-service offerings and put in motion a technology refresh.
Posted October 15, 2021

The right tools can have a positive impact on customer experience and the success of a brand.
Posted September 03, 2021

New-generation workforce management solutions offer real-time capabilities and artificial intelligence-enabled forecasting.
Posted July 12, 2021

Supreme Court ruling is a necessary, but only a first step in reforming the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
Posted May 21, 2021

The contact center WFM market is transforming to address the needs of the digital generation
Posted April 01, 2021

Contact centers are making the right moves to sustain themselves for the long-term.
Posted January 29, 2021

If there's one thing we've observed, it's that business agility has become a requirement for success today.
Posted November 19, 2020

Consumers increasingly want to self service, but companies need to let them do so on the channels of their choice.
Posted September 24, 2020

The right metrics around customer experience measure both explicit and implicit data throughout the full customer journey.
Posted July 31, 2020

Customer journey analytics can help companies build effective strategies that engage customers cost-effectively throughout their lifecycles.
Posted June 05, 2020

Clearly, using work-at-home employees would be the safest way to staff contact centers during this pandemic. If companies aren't properly set up to handle this scenario, starting a WAH program will be tough but not impossible.
Posted March 19, 2020

Include planning for pandemics like the coronavirus in your disaster recovery/business continuity plans.
Posted February 14, 2020

Companies need to move into omnichannel service offerings to truly undergo needed digital transformations.
Posted November 14, 2019

Call tracking improves marketing effectiveness while making the contact center an essential corporate contributor.
Posted August 16, 2019

Traditional key performance indicators need to be combined with new technologies, like customer journey analytics, to allow companies to anticipate and meet customer needs.
Posted May 30, 2019

The short answer is yes, because AI-based systems improve quality, productivity, and the overall customer journey.
Posted April 04, 2019

Traditional QA systems have gotten more robust, but companies aren't using them.
Posted October 26, 2018

AI is not going to take over the world, but it will improve worker productivity in the next few years.
Posted August 24, 2018

Bots will soon outnumber human employees, but that doesn't mean higher unemployment rates.
Posted June 29, 2018

Even with a cloud deployment, you can't expect the vendor to do everything all of the time.
Posted April 27, 2018

An apology can de-escalate a bad situation, but it has to be sincere.
Posted February 23, 2018

Bots and IVAs aren't necessarily mutually exclusive; they perform different functions, so they can coexist.
Posted December 15, 2017

IVAs, RPA, and biometrics form an alphabet soup that can really save contact centers time and effort.
Posted September 29, 2017

IVAs have much greater potential than IVRs, but vendors still have work to do to move the technology beyond the hype stage.
Posted July 21, 2017

Consumers have clear channel preferences when it comes to specific issues with companies.
Posted May 05, 2017

2017 is expected to be a better year for customers as companies prioritize better service.
Posted January 27, 2017

Using video in the contact center extends the sense of connection between customers and agents.
Posted November 11, 2016

End users should review their contracts when their contact center system vendors are acquired.
Posted September 16, 2016

Speech analytics, when combined with other analytics types, can provide real benefits in real time.
Posted August 12, 2016

The technology is 35 years old and it needs to change for the millennial workforce.
Posted April 08, 2016

Omnichannel customer experience environments are now expected. Here's some advice to get you started.
Posted January 08, 2016

Customer journey analytics holds great promise for improving customer interactions.
Posted October 16, 2015

Customer service is at a pivotal point. Business as usual is not satisfactory for customers. The following trends are going to play an increasingly important role in contact centers during the next few years.
Posted June 19, 2015

Preference management solutions can be used to drive proactive customer care initiatives.
Posted March 30, 2015

Think you offer great customer service? Maybe not. Customer journey analytics lets you know if you're on the right track.
Posted January 14, 2015

Back-office WFO has the potential to deliver on unfulfilled promises of business process management.
Posted July 16, 2014

Employees can be among the most valuable and powerful investments managers can make. Are you doing all you can to engage them?
Posted March 05, 2014

From improving the customer journey to reducing operating costs, here's a look at the top trends in contact center spending in 2014.
Posted February 03, 2014

Speech analytics gives companies the power to alter the outcome of a call. Although these applications are still immature, their potential is great.
Posted October 30, 2013

If you haven't updated your outbound dialing solutions recently, take a look at the current generation of applications. Cloud-based outbound solutions and an increasing number of inbound contact center infrastructure solutions have added preview, progressive, predictive dialing, and blending.
Posted August 08, 2013

Speech analytics is a sophisticated enterprise application that can provide valuable insights, but it takes a great deal of effort and the right people to make it work.
Posted April 30, 2013