Category: Customer Experience

Over time, every system becomes increasingly complex. That’s because in order to make it better, we tweak it. We add exceptions. We do things that are urgent, essential or smart for a particular use case. We learn from what’s broken and we fix that broken spot.
New projects can’t possibly be as intricate as old ones. And so the campus at Oxford is going to be very different than a vocational school in a new building.
When we start a new system, it doesn’t pay to comment on the lack of patina, elegance or special case handling. Of course a new system can’t do any of those things. The part that’s worth noticing is the efficiency and design of the structure itself. Is it extensible? How will it respond to the need to become more customized, resilient or user friendly?
A clean sheet of paper is a wonderful sight, but it’s not nearly as useful as a dog-eared notebook. The only way to get to a dog-eared bit of utility, though, is to start with something fresh.

Following one of the most challenging years, 2021 has put leaders in front of a complex puzzle they are still trying to figure out. For our team, this is the tenth year that we’re grappling with hot business topics by researching, interviewing, writing, and monitoring the changes in the CX world.   Together with our contributors, we published over 200 articles addressing some of the burning issues such as sustainability in CX, supply chain crisis, metaverse, ethical AI, and many…
The post CXM’s most popular articles in 2021 appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Having the right apology email template on hand can take off some of the pressure – apologies can go a long way to resolving hard feelings and retaining loyal customers. Studies show more than a third of customers want companies to apologize for not living up to expectations and almost half are willing to take back a negative company review if they receive an apology. The following guide provides five apology email templates you can use with your clients when something goes wrong, plus tips on how to find the right words for saying I’m sorry to your clients: 5 Examples on How to Write an Apology Email to a Client
Negative Product or Service Experience Account or Billing Error Delayed Product or Service Delivery Customer Service Troubleshooting Delayed Communications
Writing client apology emails with templates like these for the most common situations you’ll find yourself in is a lot easier than writing them from scratch.
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It used to be easy to put off the future until after you retired or died. We could live with the world we had long enough to avoid dealing with significant cultural or technical change. Sure, teenagers might listen to loud music or have long hair, but that didn’t mean you had to.

And there were parts of the world where the future would arrive five years after it had reached California or Kenya. Plenty of time to prepare.

But now, thanks to the network and to wired culture, that insulation is gone.

The future is here. It’s not going away. And a new future is going to be here tomorrow.

Basket abandonment costs UK retailers billions of pounds each year – attracting a plethora of solutions that have hitherto struggled to dent the problem. In 2018, Barclaycard estimated the cost at £18bn and the figure is only likely to have increased in the last three years. This year, Statista found that in the UK, basket abandonment rates…
The post Behavioural analytics: preventing sky-high basket abandonment rates appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

I knew someone who bought skis to match their outfit–the entire set was coordinated, and it ended up being used once or twice.

And when you register for an old-fashioned wedding, they might try to persuade you to make sure your plates match your furniture…

For everything else, the coordination of a matched set is almost always replaced by the utility of things cobbled together over time.

Our career doesn’t follow a perfect arc.

The font on the website doesn’t match the one on the package.

The management team doesn’t look precisely like the stock photos would have us believe.

It turns out that acute angles, rough edges and the imperfect matches of diversity actually make things work better. Especially when we’re dealing with humans.

Markets often persuade us that we don’t have enough.

Communities remind us that we do.

Ockham’s razor is really useful: Generally, the simple explanation is the most likely to be true. Don’t invent complicating factors when none are necessary.

“It’s simple” is probably correct when describing how any individual mechanism works.

[For example, UFOs are unlikely to be piloted by aliens from light-years away, who just happened to show up in that period in between our invention of airplanes and the widespread use of digital cameras. It’s far more likely that they’re simply unexpected events that we turn into complicated stories.]

On the other hand, systems–where there are multiple mechanisms at work–are almost never simple. In those cases, it might be more useful to understand that, “it’s complicated.”

When an unexpected event occurs, we look for stories, coincidences, supernatural causes and other forms of solace to explain something that frightens or surprises us. But unexpected events are usually caused by simple mechanisms.

How we react and respond to these events as a culture, on the other hand, is complicated indeed.

Rapidly-growing, disruptive cloud contact center innovator partners with powerful scheduling and analytics provider to transform the employee and customer experience
SAN FRANCISCO – December 16, 2021 – UJET Inc., the world’s first and only CCaaS 3.0 cloud contact center provider, today announced its partnership with Assembled, a leading provider of workforce management software for modern support teams. The partnership equips UJET customers with greater insights and enhanced support team capabilities to provide timely, high-quality customer experiences at scale. 
“Effective customer support requires strong planning and can be a powerful brand differentiator, but only if businesses have actionable data on support team performance to drive customer retention and loyalty,” said Tom Puorro, Chief Business Officer of UJET. “Assembled centralizes this data for stronger analysis so that brands can continuously improve. Combined with UJET’s ability to unify consumer data for a more contextual and frictionless customer journey, support teams can engage with customers like never before.”
Through this purpose-built integration, UJET customers offering phone and/or chat support now have access to intuitive and automated scheduling at scale, accurate forecasting capabilities, and actionable reporting, all wrapped in a delightful, easy-to-use interface. The combination of modern workforce management software with a cloud contact center platform gives support teams what they need to be at the right place and right time, every time. 
Says Assembled CEO Ryan Wang: “We are building solutions that empower the modern support team, and customer experience partnerships are core to this strategy. In pairing up with UJET, we’re able to offer intelligent workforce management capabilities to the most innovative support teams, from agents to team leads to management.” 
The partnership enables UJET and Assembled to offer a truly seamless workflow in which CCaaS is supercharged by intelligent, productivity-driving workforce management. Teams working with UJET are able to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction while achieving time and cost savings, from increased agent adherence, increased customer follow through, as well as numerous productivity gains for agents and team leads alike. 
“Rather than building integrations for every contact platform, we’re focused on partners that share our philosophy around CX innovation, agent empowerment, and full team visibility. UJET is a prime example of this,” says Assembled Head of Product, John Wang. 
The partnership reinforces UJET’s commitment to seamlessly integrating technologies that make agents more productive and successful while improving a customer’s experience.
About UJET: 
UJET is the world’s first and only cloud contact center platform for smartphone era CX. By modernizing digital and in-app experiences, UJET unifies the enterprise brand experience across sales, marketing, and support, eliminating the frustration of channel switching between voice, digital, and self-service for consumers. Offering unsurpassed resiliency and the flexibility to deploy across leading public cloud infrastructures, UJET powers the world’s largest elastic CCaaS tenant at up to 22,000 agents globally and is trusted by innovative, customer-centric enterprises like Instacart, Turo, Wag!, and Atom Tickets to intelligently orchestrate predictive, contextual, conversational customer experiences.
Learn more at www.ujet.cx and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and subscribe to our blog!
About Assembled:
Assembled is the operational backbone of the modern support team. Our workforce management platform facilitates the planning and logistics needed to reliably deliver responsive, empathetic support. Today, our solution helps customer-centric brands like Stripe, Everlane, Webflow, Betterment, and GoFundMe craft world-class customer experiences at scale. Find out more at www.assembled.com. 
Media ContactVictoria Vichroski
Corporate Ink for UJET Inc.
617-969-9192ujet.cx@corporateink.com
The post UJET and Assembled Partner to Enable Seamless Customer Service and Intelligent Workforce Management appeared first on UJET.

A good call center leader understands the importance of customer service. So what if you have an incredible product or service? That means nothing if your customers are displeased with their experience with your brand.  

If social media part is not part of your contact center’s customer service vision, you’re missing out on valuable business opportunities, like: 

promoting sales; 
improving customer satisfaction; and 
enhancing your business processes. 

Creating a Customer Service Strategy that Drives Business Growth

If you’re not leveraging your social media channels to engage and support your customers, now is the time to start. Keep reading to discover the essential role this tool can play in your contact center’s success.

Why every business needs a customer service strategy. 

Customer service strategies are a key contributor to your business’ long-term revenue. A well thought-out customer experience will guide your users towards a purchase faster than good marketing. In fact, PwC reports 73% of customers cite customer experience as a top influence when making purchasing decisions.  

How to Develop a Customer Service Strategy for Your Contact Center

How social media fits in with customer service. 

Social media is one of the top communication tools for support  — in fact, 75% of customers use social media to engage with their favorite companies.

What’s more, 47% of customers expect companies to use social media as well. If you’re not responding to them, fair warning: they won’t be satisfied with a one-sided conversation for long. 

FACT:
75% of customers use social media to communicate with businesses.

When it comes to building a customer service strategy, social media actually offers many benefits to call centers.

Cost savings.

In the US, the average cost per call is $6 USD, while the average cost per social media interaction is only $1 USD. This makes sense, as paying an agent to solve an issue one-on-one with a customer is more costly than hitting “reply” on a social media post.

However, it’s important to remember that these free platforms have their limitations  — while they’re great for addressing simple queries, complex issues will need to be escalated to the voice channel. With that said, social media is a great way to take pressure off your phone lines and reduce the cost of addressing basic customer questions.

3 Tips to Reduce Cost Per Contact in the Call Center

Customer loyalty.

Call centers can use social media to engage with their audience and improve customer loyalty. These online platforms let you to have real time conversations with your users and humanizes their interactions with your brand.

By responding to their queries promptly in a friendly and professional manner, your customers will maintain a much more positive perception of your brand. Of course, this can backfire if your team doesn’t respond in a timely manner — much like leaving them on hold. If you are able to keep your customers engaged on your social channels, you stand a much better chance of retaining them in the long run.

Be wary of negative customer feedback.

Despite all the benefits, social media can be a double-edged sword for businesses. Any customer service professional knows that given the opportunity, customers will take every chance to complain about a poor experience.

The public nature of social media brings the risk of negative word of mouth. On top of that, it’s possible for your brand to go viral for all the wrong reasons. This risk alone should speak volumes to call centers: customer experience and satisfactions must always be a top priority!  

How to Create a Great Customer Perception Survey

5 Tips For a Great Social Media Customer Service Strategy 

1. Use an omni-channel approach.  

Phone communication and instant messaging aren’t enough for customers these days. 66% of customers prefer to shop at businesses that use multiple channels to provide customer service. 

A true omni-channel contact center incorporates the many different channels your customers use to contact your business and creates a seamless customer experience, regardless of any escalations or transfers that may occur during the interaction. Social media is one of those channels — others may include chat support, email, phone channel, etc.

Make sure you provide the same quality of customer support across all channels. Adopting tools like Scheduled Call-Backs and Visual IVR can help you ease transitions during a customer interaction, bridging them to the voice channel if needed without risking call abandonment.

2. Seek and reward customer feedback.

Customer satisfaction surveys and customer satisfaction scores (CSat) are integral to the success and performance of your contact center. Customer feedback offers valuable insight into the state of your service, and can help your team identify successes and areas for improvement.

Contact centers should collect this information across all channels, and social media is no exception. Expand your efforts by sending customer surveys through direct messages, or sharing polls where customers can vote for a particular answer. This lets your customers know they are valued and that their opinions matter.  

TIP:
Psssst. Voice Call-Backs are another great way to show customers that you care. Don’t leave them on hold during high call volume periods!

If you’re not getting the level of engagement you need, consider promoting a reward program to encourage customer feedback. For example, you could offer a small discount on their next purchase over $50.

 

Report on social media activities.

What kind of metrics do you include in your call center reporting? Most call centers choose to focus on KPIs like abandon rate, average speed to answer, and first call resolution. 

But are you reporting on social media activity? Your customer service strategy should measure two areas: engagement data (views, clicks, comments, etc.) and customer behavior (what kind of messages they’re posting, positive vs negative feedback, etc.). Using both quantitative and qualitative data will give you a more holistic view of your social media efforts and how your audience is responding to your efforts.

Compare with your competitors.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. If you’re stuck on your strategy, start looking at your most successful competitors’ social media channels, and start taking notes. Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you explore their online presence:  

What kind of posts do their customers share with them?
What type of tone or language do their use when communicating with their customers?
How frequently do they post?
What do they do well, and what can you do differently? 

Business coach Elise Mongomery puts it nicely: “…By looking to other industries, we step out of old patterns and set new standards.” 

Stay on top of customer activity.

When customers have an issue, they won’t simply call your call center. More often, they’ll go straight to social media to report their experiences and demand answers.

This is especially challenging because your agents will often need to address their issues in a public forum. As stated earlier, customer feedback is essential for your call center reporting. Not only should you collect it, but you should acknowledge it as well — especially if the feedback is negative.  

If a customer provides positive feedback online, be sure to thank them. If they provide negative feedback, apologize and communicate your plans to rectify the issue.  Close the loop by responding promptly and kindly, whether it’s on a public thread or private message. Your public responses should not only satisfy your customer’s need for attention or information, it should also promote your brand positively for all onlookers to see.  

Responding to customer inquiries and complaints on social media not only helps your customer — it also publicly demonstrates your strong brand values! #ContactCenterLife #CustomerServiceStrategyClick To Tweet
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