Category: Customer Experience

It’s almost a cliche among woodworkers and others that create with their hands. The difference between the right tool and the wrong one is time, money and safety. The satisfaction of having an appropriate lever for your effort is extraordinary.

Watching people wrestling with their phones or their laptops is sad and frustrating. People continue to use the wrong tools. Perhaps they were the ones they learned a long time ago. Perhaps they came free with the device. More likely, they’re the result of a software company pushing forward an agenda that doesn’t take the user’s needs into account.

There’s probably a better digital tool for the thing you’re trying to do next online. It might be worth a few cycles to ask and discover and learn.

Invest once, benefit for a very long time.

Just about everyone knows how to drive a car. Very few of us know how to build one.

For almost all of history, expertise wasn’t really a factor. If you were raised with the other hunter-gatherers, you were pretty good (good enough) at building a fire, maintaining a hut, hunting and gathering…

But as we built more complex devices, expertise started to arrive. You could tell people that you knew how to sail a boat (or build one), but it was pretty easy to separate those who had hard-won experience and expertise from the others. Either the boat reached the port or it didn’t.

The one thing that everyone is the world’s expert on is their own feelings. In just about every other area that we value, though, there are people with proven expertise, who can show their work, understand the state of the art and produce testable and measurable results.

“Experts” are part of the problem. An expert is someone who has expertise, but sometimes, they forget that past expertise doesn’t mean that they’re always right. When someone with expertise blindly supports a status quo and fails to engage in a relentless search for better, they aren’t showing expertise, they’re simply being a human.

Folk wisdom is priceless. It’s the sum total of shared human experience, usually around our emotions. But folk wisdom is not the same as folk expertise.

I think that most of us, faced with a troubling diagnosis of cancer, would prefer to find the person with the most expertise, not someone who had done a bunch of googling for twenty minutes…

And yet, particularly with the amplification of social media, there’s a devaluing of expertise. Politicians, sure, but regular folks as well. People who assert insight into anthropogenic climate change, public health or the toxicity of medical interventions. People who are sure they can understand the fine print of a 10K or analyze the approach of an athlete. Everyone is entitled to feelings about things, but expertise is earned.

Does your boat make it into port?

Big company CEOs get paid ridiculous amounts of money, but the good ones also do something that most of us avoid.

They make decisions.

In fact, that’s pretty much the core of the job. Whether to shut a plant, open a store, create a division, invest in a new technology…

That’s the part that creates the most value.

When we go to work, most of us simply go to work. We do our jobs, respond to the incoming, hone our craft, make some sales.

The decisions get put off or ignored altogether.

And yet it’s the strategic decisions that can change the arc of our career and our job satisfaction as well.

Here’s a simple list of questions: What are the five big decisions on your desk right now? Would others in your position have a different list? How much of your day is spent learning what you need to know to make those decisions? And can you make them all by Tuesday?

Think about a time you had a bad customer experience. Maybe it was an hour-long wait on hold with your cell service provider. Or maybe you ordered a defective product and didn’t get proper customer support.
Chances are, if you’re unhappy — you’ll vent about it! “I had the worst experience with X” or “Whatever you do, don’t buy Y from X.”
At the LEAST: you certainly won’t recommend the business or product to a friend!
Creating a Customer Service Strategy That Drives Business Growth
But, if you had a great experience with a certain company, you won’t spread negative word of mouth. You might gush about your experience and recommend their services to a friend.
How can companies assess whether their customers are loyal? How can they know if customers would recommend the company to a friend? Turns out, there’s a metric for that: net promoter score!
What is Net Promoter Score?
Net promoter score (NPS) is a metric that measures customer experience and loyalty. Fred Reichheld, an expert in loyalty economics, created the net promoter system to measure how likely a customer is to recommend a company, product, or service to a colleague or friend.
Contact centers measure NPS by giving their customers a survey. NPS surveys entail only one question:
How likely is it that you would recommend [Name of Company, Product, or Service] to a friend or colleague?
Customers answer on a rating scale of 0 and 10.

0 is the lowest: not at all likely

10 is the highest: extremely likely

Contact centers can categorize customer answers into three categories:

9-10: Promoters are loyal customers and recommend the company to friends and colleagues regularly. Promoters also make up the company’s biggest spenders and make up 80% of a company’s referrals.

7-8: Passives are satisfied but not as enthusiastic as promoters. They might recommend a company to a friend. But, they’re just as likely to switch companies after seeing a competitor’s ad!

0-6: Detractors are unhappy customers. They’re likely to spread negative word of mouth about a company to friends and colleagues.

After a contact center has gathered a sufficient number of customer responses, they can start calculating their net promoter score.
How to Calculate NPS.
Calculating your net promoter score is easy. All you have to do is subtract the percentage of customers who are detractors from the percentage of customers who are promoters.
NPS Calculation = % of Promoters – % of Promoters
NPS scores are numbers between -100(lowest) to 100 (highest).
Why is NPS so Important?
Net promoter score is vital to business growth. It helps companies to:

Identify areas in the customer experience that need improvement
Helps create more promoters and boost referral marketing
Improve processes, products, and customer service
Helps target customer strategies for detractors

Net Promoter Score: Dos & Don’ts.
DO provide a field for customer comments. 
Qualitative feedback is gold, especially when it comes to evaluating customer service. While NPS scores are great for quantifying the customer experience, a simple score doesn’t tell the whole story.
Let customers expand on their feedback by offering a text box with the NPS survey. Combining quantitative and qualitative data is the best way to understand your audience and their expectations.

TIP:
Quantitative data refers to numbers and scores, while qualitative data takes the form of anecdotes and written responses.

DO track NPS by department, agent, or product.
NPS can inform changes for customer service, products, departments, and entire companies! Experiment and calculate NPS among different branches of your company.
For example, NPS might be lower for one department than another. You can focus your improvement on the department that needs it to save costs and time.
DO take action with your NPS findings.
If you calculated NPS scores across your call center, that’s great news! Your work isn’t finished, though. Your actions in response to NPS will power improvements to your call center.
One action might be to invest in technology. For example: if customers voice dissatisfaction with long wait times, consider adopting call-back technology. This will shorten wait times and give customers autonomy in opting for a call-back.

DID YOU KNOW?
Voice Call-Backs shorten wait times, while offering your customers the option of a call-back over waiting on hold.

DON’T treat NPS as a one-time project.
Companies evolve over time, and so does customer experience. Tracking NPS only once every couple of years doesn’t tell you anything about your customer experience past the survey time. Calculate NPS frequently to understand how your company is supporting its customers. This could be once a quarter, or bi-annually depending on your business’ needs.
This approach will let you measure performance over time and chart areas of improvement. For example, let’s say you calculated a poor NPS at the beginning of the year, and you took action to try to improve it. Calculating NPS again at the end of the year will help you understand which tactics worked, which didn’t, and inform your customer service strategies moving forward.
DON’T ignore detractors. 
Unhappy customers deserve your attention just as much as happy customers – maybe more. If you learn that a customer is a detractor, don’t ignore their experience. Instead of writing it off as a loss, take time to communicate concern and care to these individuals and show them that you’re willing to improve their experience.
While not all detractors will return to your business, you may be able to regain the trust of a few individuals. Ultimately, if your business is able to demonstrate its willingness to take constructive feedback and act on it, you’ll have a much better chance of earning customer loyalty in the future.
DON’T use the same strategy for every customer.
Your customer base is diverse, filled with different people with different needs. Treating them all the same may seem like a good plan on paper, but in reality this approach can backfire.
Creating customer profiles based on location, history of interactions, and other categories can help you engage your audience more effectively. Use NPS to create tailored strategies for different customers based on their feedback.
 The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

One way to cause forward motion is to help people see that they were right all along.

“The person you were hoping to hire, that’s me.”

“The car you were hoping to buy, it’s here.”

The other way to do it is to try to persuade someone that what they thought they wanted is incorrect. That can cause real change–it’s leadership, not simply fulfilling an established need.

But to do that, we need to find something in the other person’s set of desires and beliefs that doesn’t have to change. “You’ve always wanted to do the right thing, and you thought the right thing was X, but now I’m hoping you’ll see it’s Y. You weren’t wrong, you simply didn’t have all the information…”

If your roof is leaking, the water in the basement will gradually move up until you’ve got a full-blown flood.

And for most humans, for twenty years, each day we get a little taller.

It’s easy to take this physical reality and imagine that it applies to the way humans improve their skills, or organizations mature and grow.

But they’re usually more quantum than that. One day we’re at one state or scale or system, and then we’re leaping to the next level.

It’s not a curve, it’s a flight of stairs. And leaping takes guts.

It is a fact that to achieve agile and continuous integration & continuous delivery, test automation is the key answer. But it is also a fact that it is not acknowledged by software teams in large numbers. We bring you an in-depth look at how to enable continuous integration in Agile software development.
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Although fantastic customer support has always been at the forefront of contact center success, statistics are beginning to expose a new trend. Now, personalizing that support and providing a tailored customer journey is being touted as an effective way to give customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey scores a boost.
According to the 2021 Getting to Know Your Customers report from Khoros, 68% of customers will increase their spend with a company that they feel understands them and meets their individual needs—proof that it may be time for your customer service agents to make it personal.
Contact Center Trends: Predictions for 2022
What is personalized customer service?
Just as its name suggests, personalized customer service is all about providing the people who interact with your contact center an experience that is tailored specifically to their needs and wants. Personalized experiences for your customers start before they get in touch with your contact center, continue throughout their entire interaction with your company, and can even extend after their interaction is over.

Hey #contactcenter agents—don’t be afraid to get a little personal! According to a survey commissioned by @Khoros, 68% of customers say they’ll spend more with a company that understands them and their individual needs. #businesstips…Click To Tweet

How do contact centers benefit from tailoring customer experiences?
Besides encouraging customers to spend more, personalized customer service will also:

Bolster customer loyalty, helping to reduce acquisition costs.
Turn customers into brand ambassadors who promote your business for you.
Encourage the collection of customer data that can lead to future business insights.

How can I implement personalized customer service into my contact center?
The benefits are well worth adding a personal touch to your company’s customer interactions. Though starting to integrate personalization into your customer service strategy may feel a bit daunting, it’s much easier to manage when you break it down. Here are 4 steps you can take to get started:
1. Know your audience.
Determining your main customer profiles can help you to tailor the customer support your contact center provides and the products or services you offer. Gather key analytics like age and location from your CRM software, customer surveys, and even social media channels. Then, use this information to create profiles and determine the best offerings for these specific segments. Making offers personalized in this way allows for large-scale businesses to help customers feel a bit more understood.
2. Keep communications personal.
In 2021, there are so many ways live agents might interact with customers. In every single one of these touchpoints, it’s important to encourage customer service agents to engage with their clients in a way that feels personal.

On the phone? Agents should ask which name their customer prefers to go by and continue to use this name throughout their call.

Through online chat? It’s important that agents ensure they clearly understand the issue the customer is facing as conversations can get lost in translation in chats more easily than via voice calls.

Over email? In every instance possible, agents should either avoid copy and pasting email subject lines and bodies, or at least edit them to include specific customer details. Emails with impersonal subject lines and content are more likely to be regarded as spam. Plus, it’s also always worth it to send a follow up email after a negative interaction—it shows customers that the agent and company care.

How to Train Your Call Center Agents to Exercise Empathy
Take advantage of technology.
The future is now—really. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are widely used by contact centers in the form of online chat bots. Leveraging these technologies provides another support channel to customers, while also alleviating pressure from live customer service agents who will have more time to spend on creating helpful and memorable interactions with customers. It’s a win/win!
Empowering your customers by providing choices is a great way to make them feel as though their service is highly personalized. Conversation scheduling technology allows callers to choose whether they’d like to wait on hold or schedule a call-back in the future—they’ll get a say in their journey and can select an option that works best for them and their personal schedule.

FACT:
Research from Accenture suggests that 91% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a company which provides relevant offers and recommendations.

Connect all your channels.
Nothing is more frustrating for a customer than having to explain their situation over and over. Like we said, providing customers with choice throughout their journey is essential, but with the delivery of all these channels comes the responsibility of keeping them all connected for a seamless customer experience. Agents should have all the background they need to be able to assist a customer quickly and efficiently.
Follow up and ask for feedback.
The best way to know whether your personalized service is on point is to ask. Add questions to your CSAT survey that directly inquire about the level of personalization within the interaction and whether it positively impacted the customer’s experience.
6 Essential Tips to Increase a Low CSAT ScoreThe post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

Tug boats don’t usually tug. They push.

That’s because pushing is more mechanically efficient than pulling. When we pull, there’s tension and slack in the ropes, and the attachment between the puller and the pushed keeps changing.

But the metaphor gets far more interesting when we think about leading instead.

One bird at the head of the flock can lead 100 others if they’re enrolled in the journey. That bird would never be able to pull (or push) even one bird, never mind all of them.

From omnichannel shopping to brand switching, the pandemic has accelerated some key trends in consumer behaviour. It has also profoundly altered customers’ perceptions and beliefs about the companies that serve them. Four key trends in customer behavior As an organization that specializes in Total Experience Management (TMX), at Alida, we wanted to take a closer…
The post Consumers have changed: are brands ready to respond? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.