Category: Customer Experience

Every year, Forrester publishes prediction reports and shares the biggest trends for the year ahead. To do that, we analyze customer expectations, market dynamics, new technologies and innovations. For 2022, we expect that European brands will look to their customer experience (CX) teams to help them navigate through the lingering effects of the continuing pandemic.  According to our research, companies will adjust by managing customer expectations and emotions around topics such as digital acceleration and saturation,…
The post Forrester predictions for 2022: prioritizing privacy and sustainability in CX appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

If you’re considering putting an unmarked key into a drawer filled with keys, you’re better off simply throwing it out instead.

Not only won’t you be able to find that unmarked key when you need it, but you’ve just made it more difficult to sort the other keys as well.

We hesitate to embrace or announce failure right now, preferring to put it off to some indeterminate date in the future. But postponing the announcement isn’t the same as not failing. It simply makes things worse later. And being clear about the failure we’re about to cause someday makes it more likely we’ll do the work to avoid it.

If you don’t have time to do it right, you’re unlikely to have time to do it over.

No sense wasting tomorrow as well.

This is an absolutely terrible acronym for a really important idea.

Use Your Best Judgment.

Don’t wait for someone else to take responsibility. Don’t wait for perfect. Don’t wait to find this exact situation in the manual or in history.

Use your best judgment.

My preferred abbreviation is: Go go go.

Not with a guarantee.

Not with someone to blame.

Simply because we need you to lead us.

It’s not the same as being rich.

Rich is always relative. Compared to your great-grandparents, we’re impossibly, supernaturally rich. We have access to information and technology that was unimagined a century ago. At the same time, compared to someone ten miles away or ten years in the future, we’re way behind.

Two people with precisely the same resources and options might answer the question of ‘rich’ completely differently. Because money is a story.

The neighborhood or industry or peer group you choose has a lot to do with whether you’re relatively rich or not.

After a stock market adjustment, billionaires give less to charity. They still have more money than they can count, but they’re not as rich as they used to be, and not-as-rich is easy to interpret as not rich.

Which means that for many people, feeling rich is a choice.

If that choice encourages us to be imperious, selfish and a bully, it’s probably best to avoid it.

On the other hand, if choosing to see our choices, chances and privileges as a path toward generosity, long-term thinking and connection, we can do it right now.

According to research released this week by NAVEX Global®, only 25% of consumers believe businesses are primarily motivated to undertake environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives to make a positive difference to the world. Moreover, 55% of businesses agree it’s more about the bottom line than their impact on the world.  They further found that less than a half of consumers…
The post Are ESG efforts more about the bottom line than about businesses impact on the world? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

From the UX professional perspective, we, as practitioners, have a significant role in supporting our organization in adopting accessibility products and services. Unfortunately, many of us struggle to influence our companies to make accessibility a priority.  “Accessibility” has become a popular buzzword in UX articles, debates, and conferences which has empowered us to ‘fix’ the…
The post Why aren’t brands prioritizing usability: four accessibility misconceptions appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

From retail to tourism to food service, almost every sector is currently experiencing major labor shortages, and contact centers are no exception. Though contact center technology has revolutionized the way agents are able to work remotely, managers and directors are still catching up when it comes to finding and implementing strategies to balance staffing needs.
One of the sectors that has taken a big hit throughout the labor shortage is childcare. A reduction in available childcare workers has left many contact center agents without adequate care for the kids, forcing them to leave their positions. The labor shortage really is cyclical and one that successful contact centers can’t afford to ignore.
As labor markets become more constrained, wages are skyrocketing in an effort to acquire and retain more employees. Approximately 80% of a call center’s budget is directed towards staffing, which means any kind of increase in wages will have drastic impacts on all contact centers navigating the labor shortage. All these changes are especially difficult to cope with considering the many challenges the pandemic brought about in 2020 and 2021.
Ensure Your Contact Center Thrives Throughout the Labor Shortage
So, what’s the solution? It’s multi-faceted and a little complex, but we’re excited to walk you through it during our webinar. Shai Berger, CEO of Fonolo, will be discussing how to handle all the curveballs that come with this labor shortage, and ways you can protect your contact center in the short-term and over time.
Here’s what we’ll be discussing:

Coping strategies for staffing shortages in the contact center.
How to safeguard your contact center from high turnover.
Contact center technology to help manage call volume.
Plus, so much more.

Who should attend:

VPs & Directors of Contact Centers
VPs & Directors of Customer Experience
VPs & Directors of Customer Service

Join Fonolo on Thursday, December 9th, at 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT for the live webinar and Q&A.
Speakers:
Shai Berger, Founder and CEO, Fonolo
Shai is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fonolo, a leading provider of cloud-based call-back solutions. As an innovator in the space, Shai is on a clear mission to educate the call center industry on how to improve the customer experience.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

Employee NPS often gets unnoticed by leaders focused exclusively on driving CX related impacts. However, neglecting employee perspectives on their overall experience might cost businesses in the long run. One of the reasons companies should implement employee NPS as their standard practice is the increasing importance of employer brand, and employee value proposition. Put differently,…
The post Employee NPS: recognizing the power of promoters within your company appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Most large organizations would disagree.

They hire cheap labor to answer the phone. They install recordings to mollify people who are on hold for hours. They measure the cost of the call center and put loopholes in the warranty.

When you see customer service as a cost center, all of these steps make sense. Any money spent lowering costs seems to raise profits.

But customer service is actually a profit center, for four reasons:

First, because the customer who calls you or shows up at the adjustments window is fully enrolled. Unlike just about every other moment you’ve had with them, in this moment, they are paying attention, leaning into the situation and on high alert. Everything you do here, unlike just about every other marketing interaction you have, will go on your permanent record.

Second, because your competitors have foolishly decided to treat this interaction as a cost, the chances that you can dramatically overdeliver are pretty good. You can’t make a car that’s ten times better, but you can easily produce customer service for your car customers that’s ten times better than what most manufacturers deliver.

And third, because in our industrialized economy, people love to tell stories about service. And so the word spreads (or doesn’t) based on what you’re about to do.

Finally, it’s been demonstrated again and again that the most valuable customers are the loyal ones. While your promotional team is out there making noise to get you new customers, you’d be much better off turning your existing customers into repeat customers and ambassadors.

And so, the money you spend on customer service isn’t simply free. It actually repays you many times over.

Companies are discovering that hiring people to mollify critics and disappointed customers is cheaper (in the short run) than changing things, learning from the feedback or even wasting the time of people who do the ‘real work.’

The CAO doesn’t participate in tactical or strategic discussions, and probably can’t explain the dynamics that led to a given policy, or why it’s difficult to change. That’s not their job.

Their job is to make the customer or critic feel heard enough that they’ll accept the status quo without further fuss.

This is the tech support person who’s not allowed to acknowledge that the software has a bug, or the gate agent who is unable to report to the home office that the scheduling system is causing real problems for loyal customers.

In addition to eating away at the mollifier’s well-being, the work of the Chief Apology Officer is also ultimately doomed. By insulating the industrial system from the feedback loop that would improve it, these organizations doom themselves to a slow fade.

“Do you have any influence on how the organization is going to respond to this?” is a fair question. And the CAO can only honestly answer, “no.”

It’s a tough gig.