CX Demo

Author: Franz Malten Buemann

  • New Product Alert: Salesforce Rebate Management

    Today, Salesforce has announced their Rebate Management solution. This new product will allow companies selling through distributor channels to automate and leverage AI-driven insights for their rebate programs, all built on the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. Typically, rebate programs are often stuck inside back-office ERP… Read More

  • Why You Should Use Early Bird Registration for Your Next Event

    A few years ago on Thanksgiving, my entire family flew to my sister’s house, except for me. I couldn’t afford the plane ticket, so I stayed home. When I looked at their pictures on Facebook, I was upset that I missed out on the trip.
    That concept is called the fear of missing out (FOMO). FOMO, while upsetting when I missed my family trip, is actually a great marketing tool to use when you’re planning an event.

    Usually, people don’t start registering for events until the last minute. As a marketer, you’re probably wondering, “How can I get them to register earlier?”
    A great way to sell more tickets faster is to use FOMO as a way of motivating your audience to buy tickets through early bird registration.
    Today, let’s learn how early bird registration can help you sell more tickets to your events.

    The idea behind early bird registration is that people won’t want to miss out on a deal. Plus, this tactic taps into your audience’s sense of urgency. So if you have people on the fence about whether or not they want to go to your event, then an early bird registration might be all you need to nudge them in the right direction.
    However, for an early bird discount to work, it needs to be of great value. The package shouldn’t just be slightly cheaper. In addition to the discount, maybe early bird registrants get access to more content, or perhaps the discount is really steep. Either way, it needs to be worth it, otherwise, people won’t feel like they’re missing out if they don’t partake.
    Ultimately, this means you can sell more tickets and attract more people to your events.
    Additionally, using early bird registration could help you project how much interest there is in your event and your marketing materials. If you have a hard time getting people to buy early bird tickets, then perhaps you need to switch up your marketing tactics before the event. It’s kind of like a test run for your promotional plan.
    If all goes well, you’ll also get attendees excited about your event and give them time to talk about it on social to help you spread the word.
    To get people excited about early bird tickets, you can promote your keynote speakers, and market the value of the event. What will people get by attending your event?
    Now that we know more about what early registration is and why you should use this tactic, let’s dive into the logistics of running early bird registration.
    How long should early bird registration last?
    For early bird registrations, you can set a certain time period or you can limit the number of purchasers. For example, you can have the early bird discount available during the first week of sales or you can only offer a discount to the first fifty registrants.
    Additionally, you might consider only offering early bird discounts to members or subscribers. This is a great benefit and encourages people to sign up for your service. Or you can reward repeat attendees. If you hold an event every year, perhaps repeat customers can get access to early bird discounts before anyone else.
    When you’re strategizing about how long the early bird registration will last and what the package should include, it’s important to factor in how many tickets you can sell at a reduced price without hurting your profits. So before you decide on the time frame or the number of tickets, think about your projected attendance.
    When your early bird registration ends, it’s time to take advantage of the momentum you’ve built. Use the marketing materials that were successful for a big push before the event.
    Early bird registration is a great way to accelerate and improve your sales for your next event. By utilizing urgency, relying on scarcity, making early bird registrants feel like VIPs, and creating a fear of missing out, you’ll create buzz and excitement around your event.

  • The Only Call Center Agent Performance Metrics You’ll Ever Need

    Tracking is vital to providing a great customer experience and running a call center.
    But most metrics that contact center managers use to measure agents focus on optimizing them rather than encouraging them. And they usually end up doing neither.
    Top Contact Center Trends 2021
    Your contact center runs on technology, but it’s your agents doing the running. And if you want them to improve, you need to be holding the right yardstick.
    Here are the critical call center agent performance metrics.
    The 4 Most Important Call Center Agent Performance Metrics
    1. Agent Satisfaction
    Gone are the days when occupancy rate and average handle time were used to browbeat agents.
    The customer service industry got turned on its head in 2020. We’re hoping that CX leaders realized the key to outstanding service was ensuring their employees were happy.

    Gone are the days when occupancy rate and AHT ruled the roost. CX leaders are finally realizing the key to outstanding service is happy employees. #cctr #cx Click To Tweet

    You can implement as many processes, procedures, and incentives as you like, and they’ll all crumble in the face of one unengaged employee.
    Look after your people. They’re the key to your contact center’s success, and their agent satisfaction needs to be at the heart of everything you do.
    2. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
    Customer satisfaction is, of course, the reason we’re all here. This call center metric is an essential gauge of customer perception — how they perceive your product and service.
    But it’s also a great way to measure your agents’ performance, so don’t forget to ask customers, “How satisfied are you with the service you received?”
    Why You Should Hire Agents Based on EQ not IQ
    Unsurprisingly, when you have happy and productive people working for you, they pass on that love to your customers, and CSAT goes up.
    Hurt people hurt people, and happy people help people. Simple.
    3. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
    Net Promoter Score is an ingenious way of measuring how customers feel.
    Chances are, people won’t be able to gauge ‘satisfaction’ in anything more than a nominal way. But it’s far easier to make a call on whether you would recommend this product or service to friends and family.

    One of the secret ingredients to excellent customer satisfaction is reducing friction at every point. Customer Effort Score is a great way to do this. #cctr #cx #cesClick To Tweet

    You can also ask for an NPS rating after a customer interacts with a rep, “How likely are you to recommend our brand after talking with this agent?”
    It’s important to remember that people don’t read carefully. So — as with all post-contact measures — not all low scores are directly related to the agent’s performance.
    Let’s put the humanity (and reality) back into KPIs and avoid the meaningless sliding scales.
    I’m personally in favour of a more straightforward NPS system: Yes or No.
    And for agents, I would suggest reframing it to: “Would you want to speak with this agent again?”
    4. Customer Effort (CES)
    Customer Effort is a reasonably new metric in the call center and one that is sadly under-utilized.
    One of the secret ingredients to excellent customer satisfaction is reducing friction at every point. Friction in the customer journey is anything that increases customer effort.
    Whether they’re making a purchase or getting an answer from a human being, the idea is to alleviate hurdles, minimizing the effort required by the customer to get what they want.
    How to Effectively Set Goals with Your Call Center Team
    CES is a good measure of how willing the agent is to go above and beyond. But remember, ‘effort’ is as subjective as ‘satisfaction.’ Peoples’ expectations of how much effort they’ll have to exert to get something will vary wildly.
    As with many of these call center metrics, CES is a good indicator but rife with nuance.
    Other Common Operational Agent Performance Metrics
    These are the more traditional metrics for call center agent performance.
    We call them ‘operational metrics’ because that’s what they’re really for.
    They’re able to indicate how your agents or team is operating. Still, they’re not very good at telling you why that is, or how best to improve.
    Occupancy Rate/Auxiliary Time
    Occupancy rate is a crucial metric in the call center and a great indicator of how busy your agents are. Still, many managers use this back to front.
    It’s common for leadership to equate high occupancy and ‘auxiliary time’ (time not working) with agents that are skiving off during shifts.
    The Smart Contact Center Manager’s Guide to Managing High Call Volume
    But the real value of occupancy rate — if you’re looking to improve agent performance — is forecasting demand and ensuring that agents aren’t overworked.
    If your occupancy is consistently high, expect both CSAT and agent satisfaction to sink.
    Schedule Adherence
    Schedule Adherence is another old but still useful measure of how well agents are turning up for work.
    Set a lower bar for schedule adherence, make sure everyone on the team knows what it is, and then determine why agents are missing the mark. Likely, it’s because they’re struggling with something else too and need help.
    Escalation Rate
    Escalation Rate is another operational KPI in the call center that can be used to measure agent efficacy.
    If an agent is escalating more inquiries than the expected average, that is an area that probably needs to be addressed. Likely, the issue isn’t laziness on the agents’ part but a breakdown in your internal processes.
    6 Things Contact Center Agents Are Too Afraid to Tell Their Manager
    The agent could perhaps do with better training. But it could also be that you haven’t empowered them to resolve the issues they’re facing. That could also mean something on your front-end is broken that shouldn’t be, which is impacting the customer experience all the way back to your agents.
    Understanding Call Center Agent Performance Metrics
    To their detriment, many legacy call center managers take a ‘nose to the grindstone’ approach to agent performance metrics.
    Average Handle Time is a terrible indicator of call center efficiency. And focusing on operational KPIs like Occupancy or Schedule Adherence will only show you who are the worst performers.
    A better approach is to focus on improving Agent Satisfaction. You will soon find that all other metrics fall into line because happy people help other people.
    Easy!The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

  • Full Shopio Review 2021

    https://szdebrecen1.medium.com/full-shopio-review-2021-6b952059207c
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  • A letter to your future self

    We often send metaphorical letters to our past selves, berating the choices we’ve made. We express regret about missed opportunities or past mistakes. It’s easy to blame our younger selves for the mess we’re in.

    What would you say to your future self? And how would you feel when you read that letter in a few months or years?

    Maybe you’d discover that the crisis or cataclysm you’re facing right now didn’t turn out quite as badly as you feared. Maybe you’d express some optimism that you could turn into action. And maybe you’d develop some empathy for your past self, who was just doing the best you could.

  • Bridging the Engagement Capacity Gap

    Brands are caught in a maelstrom of change, the impact of which will be felt for years to come. The pace of digital transformation has accelerated dramatically, and with it has brought increased consumer demand for self-service and social media-based interactions, on top of human assistance as required. This is compounded by an ever-rising expectation…
    The post Bridging the Engagement Capacity Gap appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

  • Digital Marketing Agency in Hyderabad | Digital Marketing

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  • Experience Management Survey – With the steady demands to accelerate the digital customer experience, I am interested in gathering your insights and perspectives for the current experience management landscape. I enormously appreciate anyone taking 5 minutes to provide their unique insights.

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

  • Hack-Week: Embedding Our Values and Causes in Our Product

    Towards the end of 2020, the Buffer engineering team held a two-day hack event where the team explored ideas that aligned with both our personal and company values. Whilst we strive to bring our personal and company values into the things that we build, sometimes it’s good to take a step back and really focus on those things that are important to us. These two days of hacking allowed us to do just that, building out a collection of projects that clearly embedded our values. ❤️Leading up to the days, the team spent some time collating ideas in Trello. Here we discussed ideas, found projects that we wanted to work on and collaborators who we could work with on these projects!
    With the projects laid out, we entered the hack-days with a clear vision of what it was we’d each be working on. Overall, a total of 14 projects were built. Some of these have already been shipped, whilst others need some more work or will be left as proof of concepts. Let’s take a dive into these projects and see what the engineering team built!

    Emoji skin-tone support
    Status: We have shipped this update to our engagement features but it still needs more work before we can add it to our publishing features.Within our publishing and engagement tools, we currently support the ability to select emojis to be inserted into the content input areas.
    However, the existing implementation does not support the skin-tone functionality that the emoji ecosystem utilizes. In order to allow individuals to express themselves in the way that they want, this feels like an important aspect of emojis to support.
    During hack-days Ana and Hamish from the Publish team took a dive into getting this support added to the Publish Composer. The result looks awesome and adds full support for the emoji skin-tone attribute.
    As well as getting this into our Publish Composer, Boris and Sol from the team working on our engagement features added support to this in the composer under the engagement tab. Now, users across both of these areas can utilize emoji skin-tone support.

    Hate speech detection
    Status: We have not shipped this yet to any of our products, but are exploring the technical details for how we can make it possible.
    When it comes to social media scheduling, there can be a lot of responsibility with the content that our users can send out to their networks. When it comes to facilitating this content currently, there is a manual process in place where accounts will be looked into if they breach our policies. David, Mike and Joe took a look to see if there was a way that we could automate some of these checks and prevent users from creating updates that breached certain policies of ours.
    For this, David created an endpoint in our API so that clients could check whether textual content contained hateful speech. This was done using HateSonar and Perspective. This endpoint would return a score which would depict whether some text is deemed as offensive or hateful. With this endpoint available, Mike hooked it into the post creation flow for the composer in our publishing tool, meaning that when the user attempts to create an update that may contain hateful or offensive text they will be presented with an error message.
    Joe took this same endpoint and hooked it into the snippet creation flow within our publish tool. Now, if a user attempts to create a snippet group that contains offensive or hateful hashtags, an error message will be presented and the group will not be created.

    Creating a carbon footprint page
    Status: We have not shipped this yet to any of our products, but are exploring the technical details for how we can make it possible.
    Two of our charitable contributions last year were for climate focus organizations, so it was to be expected that there would be a project focused on the climate. Gisete, Phil, and Dan took a look at creating a page to display the carbon footprint of the servers that Buffer uses. This page not only shows a graph of the emissions, but also a breakdown of the server emissions, and some calculated equivalents. With this in place, this gives us the data and foundations required to start putting change in place for making our servers greener.

    Diversifying campaign color options
    Status: We have shipped this update to our mobile publishing features but it still needs more work before we can add it to our web publishing features.
    Within our publishing tool, users are able to create Campaigns to hold a collection of upcoming posts. When creating a campaign, a color can be selected to be associated with it, however, this palette of colors did not include the color black. For Campaigns that might be focused around causes for Black people, this is a missed opportunity for inclusion. To fix this, our internal-tools engineer, Mick, added support for the color black in our publishing tool for both web and the Android app. With one of our iOS engineers, Jordan, adding this to the iOS app.

    Snippet group suggestions
    Status: We don’t have any plans to ship this to our publishing features in the near future, it will remain as a prototype for now.
    Currently in our publishing tool, we offer the ability to create groups of hashtags, allowing our customers to re-use collections of hashtags across their posts. Currently they are required to create these groups themselves, so Joe took a look at how we could align some of his values with this feature. He added a new section to the feature that allows users to view a pre-defined collection of hashtag groups. This change allows us to display groups for any current events, allowing us to support these causes and raise the visibility of posts for them.

    Fact-checking shared links
    Status: We have not shipped this yet to any of our products, but are exploring the technical details for how we can make it possible.In our publishing tool, users have the ability to share external links directly into the composer of our mobile apps. When these links are imported, the composer body is generated based on the content of the provided link. Currently, any links could be shared into the composer, which could allow our users to fall victim to the sharing of false information to their networks. As a solution for this, Prateek and Michael worked on a project that allows us to check the links that are imported into the composer of our publishing tool. This checks whether the link has come from a source known to provide false information and if this the case, the app informs the user before they add the content to their queue.

    ‘Support Black’ brand badges
    Status: We don’t have any plans to ship this to our publishing features in the near future, it will remain as a prototype for now.
    Our Shop Grid feature enables brands to present multiple link-in-bio URLs in the form of a shoppable grid. Whilst this feature is used by many different kinds of small businesses, Char wanted to think about having a way for these brands to present their own values directly on their Shop Grid page. Char built out a quick prototype for what this could look like, by adding a Support Black-Owned Brands badge directly into the page. Not only would this allow shops to show support for Black-owned businesses, but it could be easily extended to allow further values to be shown on the page. For example, a brand could show that they are a Black-owned business or that they are carbon neutral business.

    Adding alt-text to Facebook and LinkedIn media
    Status: This needs more work before we can add it to our publishing features.At Buffer, we use our accessibility statement to not only share our value for accessibility, but also to give us some clear direction of how this is represented within our projects. When it comes to this, it’s not about the accessibility within our own products but also how we can support the accessibility features that are supported by networks that we share content too. Currently our composer supports adding alt-text to Twitter as this was available early in the Twitter API. For hack-days, Amy-Lee added alt-text support to images shared to Facebook and LinkedIn, which is support that was added more recently to the APIs for these networks. With this work in place, alt-text will be available to add to three different networks that we support, helping to make content shared by our publishing tool more accessible.

    Adding badges to attached media
    Status: This needs more work before we can add it to our publishing features. Within the composer for of our publishing tool, users are able to attach media attachments to be posted to supporting networks. Once these media items are attached, we offer the ability to crop these images but allow for no further customization. To offer some flexibility here and also provide a way for users to express their own values, Andy implemented a sticker feature for the publishing tool’s iOS app. This feature allows users to select a badge/watermark to be applied to an image before being shared to the desired networks.

    Accessibility dashboard
    Status: This will be shipped soon as an internal tool, but will not be released publicly in the near future.As mentioned earlier in this article, our accessibility statement defines and shares our value for accessibility along with some requirements that we strive for our products to meet. Joe wanted to take a look into how we might be able to monitor our accessibility errors and warnings for our web products, as this could help us to keep track of issues and spot any commonalities across our products. For this, Joe used the pa11y dashboard to spin up an internal service for a collection of pages across Buffer products allowing us to get daily reports of accessibility errors and warnings.

    Running a federated social network
    Status: We don’t have any plans to ship this, it will remain as a prototype.Our business is built around social networks, these are complex applications that have many different moving parts. One key thing that often arises around these networks are privacy and the control over your data. With this in mind, Eduardo decided to look into creating our own Buffer federated social network, using Plemora to do so. Whilst this is something we could use for retreats and other company gatherings, creating our own internal social network allows us to have control over our own data, as well as exposing us further to more in-depth concepts around social networking.

    Theme support for the Safari extension of our publishing tool
    Status: This has been shipped and is available for use with our publishing features.
    Our publishing tool offers browser extensions that allow users to share the current browser page directly into the composer of that tool, removing the need to manually copy and paste the site URL. For the safari extension, we only supported a single icon theme; meaning that the black Buffer logo was always displayed. When using a dark theme in the browser, this resulted in the icon not being accessible as against the dark background of the browser, this icon was barely visible. To fix this, Andy added support for a light icon for when the dark theme is in use, resulting in an accessible extension icon regardless of the browser theme you are using.
    With these 14 projects, the engineering team were able to focus in on our values and explore how they could be represented within our products. As you can see, this has been done in many different ways, along with many different goals being tackled.
    I found it really inspiring to see everyone come together and build so many great features in such a short space of time. Whilst we strive to embed our values into our everyday work, it’s refreshing to take that time to step back and really focus in on what’s important to us. This helps us to nurture a pro-active mindset when it comes to the topics, as well as create a space to educate ourselves further in these areas. With this, hack week continues to prove a valuable investment in our engineering team.Do you engage in hack weeks for your engineering team? We’d love to hear what works for you if so! Send us a tweet anytime! And you don’t have hack weeks, it could be worth reflecting on how this time could contribute to your team and product. ❤️

  • GetResponse Vs Wishpond Comparison

    https://szdebrecen1.medium.com/getresponse-vs-wishpond-comparison-e8b4e77d7c27
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