CX Demo

Author: Franz Malten Buemann

  • Call Center Security: A Guide to Keeping Your Data Safe

    The great migration of contact centers transitioning from on-site to hybrid work environments isn’t slowing down–and an air-tight call center security strategy has never mattered more.
    There’s a staggering amount of sensitive information that flows through a contact center every day. The personal email addresses, passwords, and credit card numbers that are all in a day’s work for a call center, are very desirable to cyber criminals.
    Keeping your company’s data secure is essential, but it can seem like an overwhelming task. With so many interconnected touchpoints, remote agents, and constantly changing goal posts, it’s hard to know where to begin.
    Fear not! There are effective tools, training, and technology you can implement to make sure private data stays that way. And employing the right solutions WILL keep your customers and your business safe.
    Read on for a quick overview of call center security, or take a deep dive on the topic with our comprehensive white paper.

    READ THE FULL GUIDE:
    Contact Center Security: A Guide to Keeping Your Data Safe
    (It won’t cost you a penny, we promise.)

    Why a Data Security Strategy is Essential
    Let’s start at the beginning. You likely have a few ideas about why data safety matters, but may wonder what targets you’re trying to hit. There are industry standards to guide you.
    If you collect any payment information from your customers, you must meet the extensive security requirements set by the PCI Security Standards Council. They require all vendors to have secure networks and systems, strong access control and regular testing, among other requirements.
    Call centers working in the health care industry and handling patient data have their own strict security guidelines set by the US Department of Health and Human Services. But it’s not just an industry regulation. Your customers expect you to keep their data safe too. And more than ever, they’re making their preferences known with their pocketbooks and moving their allegiance to businesses who are transparent about their robust security practices.

    DID YOU KNOW?:
    86% of people say they care about data privacy and 47% say they’ve switched companies over their data policies.

    Understanding the Threats to Call Center Security
    Who hasn’t received a robocall from an unknown number, claiming you’re in deep trouble with local authorities and need to call back right away or face terrible consequences like jail time? Annoying! That scam may be easy to spot (though many people are fooled), but there are others that aren’t so simple.
    Account Take Overs
    An Account Take Over (ATO) describes a situation where a hacker poses as a customer while talking to a call center agent and tries to gain access to another person’s personal information. These attacks are becoming more common and more convincing. Often the cyber criminal will pose as another employee or even your boss, using psychological manipulation to intimidate you into revealing or sharing personal data.
    Understaffed Security Teams
    Like many North American industries, contact centers are suffering staff shortages. Skilled IT staff who are well-versed in current cybersecurity trends are hard to find and difficult to keep. It’s one of the biggest challenges facing contact centers today. With insufficient technical staff, it’s difficult to keep employees up to date on security risks and maintain vigilance against cyberattacks. In this case, what you don’t know certainly can hurt you—and compromise your company’s data, too.  
    Remote Workers
    Now that many agents are working remotely, the personal and the professional are starting to overlap, especially when it comes to technology. IT teams must take precautions around the use of personal devices for work calls, email and data management. Personal devices may lack proper encryption, making sensitive customer data that much more vulnerable. Practicing good password hygiene, implementing role-based access, and using a secure VPN service for remote workers are among the tools and techniques to help keep data safe in a remote call center.  
    Developing a Comprehensive Security Strategy
    Once you understand the threats your company may face, your team can develop a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. Your plan should layer up security best practices, tools and technologies. The specifics will vary depending on your unique needs but a comprehensive call center security strategy will include: 

    Physical security measures
    Multi-factor authentication (MFA) and password control
    User access control (UAC)
    IVR security
    Zero Trust
    Comprehensive employee training

    Developing and executing a security plan takes time, effort, frequent updates, and constant training. But it’s important to remember that many security breaches are preventable. You can vastly improve your company’s data security by hiring trained staff, testing your vulnerabilities, and embracing a robust data security strategy that works for your call center’s specific needs.   

    READ THE FULL GUIDE:
    Contact Center Security: A Guide to Keeping Your Data Safe
    (It won’t cost you a penny, we promise.)
    The post Call Center Security: A Guide to Keeping Your Data Safe first appeared on Fonolo.

  • The obligation of the honest skeptic

    Objections are helpful. We object by holding back action or support because we question one or more pieces of data.

    But the other half of this is the obligation: if the data ends up meeting the standard of proof we set for it, we have to change our minds and spend as much energy supporting the idea as we did opposing it.

  • The Best Way to Send Bulk Emails

    Email marketing is an effective channel to use for communication with groups of all sizes. Emails are easy to write and send and are unintrusive for the recipient. Because of this, sending bulk emails has become a popular way to scale marketing efforts.  But how do you send bulk emails? And how do you know…
    The post The Best Way to Send Bulk Emails appeared first on Benchmark Email.

  • What happens when you press the button 🔴🟡🟢?

    submitted by /u/barakkassar [link] [comments]

  • Just Say NO to Hard-Coded ID

    Last Updated on October 31, 2022 by Rakesh GuptaBig Idea or Enduring Question: How can you avoid hard coding of ID in Salesforce Flow?  Objectives: This blog post will help us to understand the following Understand how to use custom Labels to avoid hard code of ID in the Flow
    The post Just Say NO to Hard-Coded ID appeared first on Automation Champion.

  • Just Say NO to Hard-Coded ID

    Last Updated on October 19, 2022 by Rakesh GuptaBig Idea or Enduring Question: How can you avoid hard coding of ID in Salesforce Flow?  Objectives: This blog post will help us to understand the following Understand how to use custom Labels to avoid hard code of ID in the Flow
    The post Just Say NO to Hard-Coded ID appeared first on Automation Champion.

  • Should I contact you or ?

    FYI For all of you using this subject line, every single time I see this I feel actual rage. RAGE. It may help your open rates but it cannot possibly be a good longterm revenue strategy because people like me, who would normally ignore you or maybe even look at your offer, are going the extra mile to mark you as spam, unsubscribe, and talk sh*t about your brand to other professionals. Just stop. Be respectful FFS. submitted by /u/Chubby_Pessimist [link] [comments]

  • Research on customers&chatbots. You’ll find insights on what to improve in your customer service automation

    Hi, there! My team prepared the report on what customers love and hate about customer service chatbots.Together with our project managers, and marketers we analyzed data of thousands of conversations with real users, and made thi reserach with insigts, stats and recommendations on how to overcome struggels. This research would be helpful for: Companies that have a chatbot that isn’t performing well and they don’t know why Companies who want to implement a chatbot but are unsure about the best ways of creating a chatbot. Important things! Here’re more details about our research: Use case: Customer support Platform: Website Language: English Locations: Europe, USA Industries: E-commerce, Retail, Retail health ​ Here’s the link to the general article on the best chatbot practices and there you’ll find the research. submitted by /u/Avandegraund [link] [comments]

  • How We Made Our Hybrid Meetup Inclusive

    In early September, our team scheduled and organized our first in person meetup in Lisbon, Portugal. The initial plan was to gather in person and spend a week together, getting to know each other better and invest time into strengthening our team. However, due to a mix of reasons, from family leave to health, only half of our team was able to attend in person. I am the Engineering Manager for the Core Foundations team at Buffer, and we build and maintain the core elements for accessing, scheduling, and publishing to your social channels for our web application. Love being able to schedule Instagram Reels? We built that! Getting on board with our new TikTok channel? That’s also on us. Happy that your account is secure from imposters? We do that! We are a team of eight, including five engineers (Arek, Dace, Heather, José, Mick), Product Manager (Amanda), and our Designer (Sofia), and we are located across Europe and the USA. Over half of our team joined since we had to pause our annual retreats in 2020, which means that most of us had never met in person. While we firmly believe that we can do our jobs well remotely, we understand that there is still so much to be gained from meeting in person and naturally forming stronger bonds. Amanda (our PM) and I were responsible for organizing and facilitating the meetup. Taking into account travel time, we were left with three days of team time. We dedicated one day to sightseeing and two days to have hybrid team sessions which involved everyone’s attendance. I have significant experience designing and facilitating workshops for teams as an Agile coach, which I leaned upon when planning this one. The main difference is that all of my prior workshops have been either fully in person or fully remote. I’ve also worked with globally distributed teams in an organization that had a co-located company HQ office and smaller satellite offices or remote workers. Here I learned about the experiences that people based outside of HQ had in meetings with those co-located — they typically felt excluded. As someone who cares passionately about inclusivity, I took this feedback seriously and did my best to make all environments that I have influence over as inclusive as possible. In the past, I mandated in person workshops and dismissed hybrid options as being too hard. Since that isn’t an option anymore, I have had to learn! Why hybrid meetups?Hybrid (a combination of remote and co-located) workplaces have become the new norm as companies transform from the necessary remote working conditions of the pandemic. With over 85% of employees stating that it is their preferred way of working and no productivity reduction, it seems unlikely that this will change. This flexibility has led to employees working from anywhere, which leads to timezone differences. Additionally, business travel has remained less than in pre-pandemic times, with companies wanting to continue to capitalize on the environmental and financial benefits realized during the pandemic and rise of remote collaboration tools, and people’s personal travel preferences changing. Meetings and workshops are still valuable forums for timely collaboration, and so now we must consider how we can make them effective when we can’t have everyone present in person — we have to think, how do we do this hybrid?What I’ve learned about hybrid facilitation1. Design the agenda and set up for whoever will find collaboration the most difficult.When you have co-located and remote people participating in a meeting or workshop, it is hardest for anyone who is remote. Even our team, who are used to working remotely, naturally defaulted to focusing and talking to the people who were present in the room. Therefore, it’s critical to be intentional about designing workshops to be inclusive and to communicate the importance of that to everyone participating. Some measures that I took were:Highlight the situation and stress the importance of ensuring that our remote team member would feel included and able to be heard.Create a sense of psychological safety by establishing ground rules at the beginning, including: Have a ‘safe word’ to call out if you feel like discussions are going off-track — ours was pineapple. Anyone can take a break without having to ask for permission. Ask everyone to be fully present (no phones or Slack open) or be upfront with other commitments that would require them to be otherwise.As the facilitator, keep track of how often remote joiners are speaking and regularly ask them directly for input – it is also a good idea to make this intention clear from the beginning so that everyone is aware of the situation and also isn’t caught unaware.Using the first day to do activities that helped us get to know each other’s personalities better, as we couldn’t rely on social dinners etc., to do that.Everyone individually joins the Zoom calls rather than having our co-located group join one.Use online tools — more coming on this later!2. Recording sessions/conversations allowed anyone not attending to still contribute asynchronously.We had five people in person in Lisbon, two in New York, and one in Ireland — that meant catering for three people joining remotely, and we were spread across two different timezones with a five-hour difference.We wanted to be respectful of everyone’s working hours i.e., not force everyone in NY to start at 5 am or everyone in Europe to stay until 10 pm. So we broke up the days into two blocks – 10 am-1 pm CEST and 2 pm-6 pm CEST/9 am-1 pm CEST. This fit well around standard meal times and allowed our US teammates to dial in for a full second session. To enable them to participate in content that we discussed in the first session, we recorded them via Zoom and asked them to participate later by watching it and recording their own response, which we could watch later. Because they were in the same timezone, I asked them to do the activities together, which made it a more collaborative half-asynchronous/half-synchronous session. 3. Lean into your online toolsWe use Zoom as our standard video conferencing tool and Loom for short messages. Using a digital whiteboard makes collaboration and note-taking simple — we use Miro to do all of our digital brainstorming, and I absolutely love it for its templates, ease of use, and the broad range of features. While using physical stickies and whiteboards is a lot easier in the moment for those there in person, this was much easier because a) everyone could contribute easily independently (no having to write things down for remote contributors) and b) there was no need to take photos and later digitize them!Pre-preparing everything in the Miro board (plus a few extra options) made it easier for Amanda and me to collaborate, and I felt more confident about how to facilitate everything on the dayOne of the Miro boards we used to determine discussion topics4. Using our own devices set meetings on even groundEveryone used their own laptops and cameras and joined the Zoom call; even those meeting in person made it feel less ‘me and them’ for anyone joining remotely. The way that we did it was to have one person leave their laptop microphone and speakers on while everyone else muted. Session facilitators shared their screen via Zoom for presentations and discussions, and during activities, everyone worked on the Miro board through their own browsers.Although the people in the room tended to still face each other when speaking, one remote teammate (Mick) also mentioned that it made it easier to understand conversations when the audio was unclear!It is easier for people who are present in person to contribute to verbal conversations – directly asking remote joiners for their opinion ensures they get the opportunity. The mics on our laptops are good at picking up sound but not great — next time, I will bring a conference microphone and speaker! Also, our laptop’s mic/speakers/video weren’t in sync, which wasn’t awful but did make conversations feel disjointed sometimes.Over to youHybrid facilitation is harder than in person, or even fully remote, facilitation, but not impossible! With some intention and clear communication with everyone involved, you can still have effective team workshops and meetings. However, it won’t be the same as a fully in person meetup, and it’s not fair for organizers or the team to claim otherwise. There will still be some elements missing for anyone joining remotely for a meetup like ours — we can’t record every interaction, and conversation that happens and so they miss out on those natural conversations. Also, any learnings that you get from seeing people in person and their body language that Zoom calls just don’t provide. The main thing to remember is that there is still value in including everyone, and with some consideration, it can bring a lot of value to your team.We’d love to hear your experience with hybrid meetups! Send us a tweet or join our community.

  • The Top 6 Search Engines, Ranked by Popularity

    Oftentimes, marketers focus heavily on Google when vying for traffic.
    It makes sense considering Google is undoubtedly the most popular search engine, with over 80% of the search market share. But that popularity makes it the most challenging search engine on which to rank highly. You might be missing critical opportunities for traffic if you neglect the other search engines.

    Here, we’re going to explore the top six search engines worldwide, so you can discuss some other potential traffic sources in your next SEO meeting.
    Note: To compile our list, we looked at the worldwide market share of search engines on desktop and mobile from August 2021 to August 2022.

    1. Google

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    With over 80% of the search market share, Google is undoubtedly the most popular search engine. Additionally, Google captures almost 95% of mobile traffic. The large traffic potential makes Google a viable option when aiming to capture organic or paid search — the downside, of course, is almost everyone is competing for the same traffic.
    Also keep in mind Google’s algorithm, like featured snippets, aims to fulfill users’ needs directly on Google, so they don’t need to click any links. These features , and Google’s popularity, might make it hard for you to capture the website traffic you want.
    2. Bing

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    Bing, Google’s biggest contender, rakes in 15% of U.S. searches and also powers Yahoo, the U.S.’s third biggest search engine. Bing’s search pages look remarkably similar to Google’s, with the same categories and a similar white background, with blue links and green URLs. However, Bing additionally offers “Rewards”, a program that gives you points when you search or shop on the engine, and then allows you to redeem those points for gift cards, nonprofit donations, and more.
    3. Yahoo!

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    Admittedly not the sleekest search engine interface, Yahoo! still manages to capture third place in our list, with just under 3% of the worldwide market share. Yahoo! is powered by Bing, so search results are incredibly similar between the two search engines. However, it’s still an important search engine in its own right, with over 600 million total monthly users.
    4. Yandex
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    Russian search engine Yandex has roughly 2% of worldwide market share. However, it is the most widely used search engine in its home country, with Google holding the number two spot. If you do business globally and are looking to reach Russian customers, there are a few things to keep in mind.
    For example, Yandex has a number of quality indicators or badges it can display alongside search results. One of the most prominent is the site quality index or SQI which indicates how useful your site is to users.
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    Like Google, Yandex also takes into consideration whether or not a user’s query has local intent and will display regional dependent results. To account for this, you’ll need to go into Yandex’s webmaster tools and set a site region.
    5. DuckDuckGo

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    If you’re uneasy about targeted ads or don’t want your search data stored, you might want to try DuckDuckGo, which touts itself as “The search engine that doesn’t track you”. It doesn’t track, collect, or store any information, so you’re safe to search for shoes without feeling bombarded by subsequent Macy’s Shoes ads. It’s worth noting there are still ads on DuckDuckGo — just not personalized ones.
    Additionally, DuckDuckGo has a clean interface and only one search page, making it easier to navigate than other search engines. With an average of 94,758,414 daily direct searches as of September 2022, it’s slowly gaining steam in the search market.
    6. Baidu
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    Baidu is China’s largest search engine, capturing over 63% of China’s search market. The search engine looks similar to Google (besides being in Mandarin), with a white background, blue links, and green URLs. Like Google, Baidu aims to incorporate more rich features in the SERPs.
    If you have an interest in appealing to the Asian market, Baidu is a good option to consider. However, the search engine censors certain images and blocks pro-democracy websites, so if you’re comparing search results, you’ll find a more comprehensive results list on Google.
    Emerging Search Engine Trends
    The top search engines may have another competitor vying for user business in the near future as Ahrefs has announced they are working on a search engine of their own. Currently in beta, Yep, is unique from other platforms as it shares 90% of its ad revenue with content creators. With this model, Yep aims to encourage more people to share their knowledge and high-quality content.
    Google is also working to prioritize good content with their 2022 Helpful Content Update. HubSpot’s Head of SEO Content Aja Frost says the update has huge implications for the industry.
    “First, Google is sending a strong signal that content written by humans is preferable to content by computers. (Ironic, given virtually all of the SERPs are algorithmized.)”
    Frost also points out that this update should encourage SEOs to take a more comprehensive approach to site performance.
    “This update is also reinforcing the idea that your domain is one entity, and content on one part of your website will impact the performance of another part of your website,” Frost explains. “With this in mind, SEOs should be looking at their site as a whole—not isolated sets of pages.”
    Think Beyond Google
    Ultimately, it’s essential to consider alternative traffic opportunities besides Google when creating an SEO strategy. By diversifying your sources, you’re more likely to capture the first page on SERPs, and you’re in a better position to find a truly ideal target audience.
    This article was originally published in September 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.