Category: Customer Experience

Not every organization can invest in every conceivable resource to solve every customer’s need. But they can use basic principles to enhance the perception of the customer’s experience. In a rapidly changing world of how brands and customers interact, consumer behavior should always be top of mind for business leaders. The trick is to discern which behaviors are changing, and which are not. Only then can they deliver competitive customer experiences. Full article: https://www.customercontactweekdigital.com/customer-experience/articles/redefining-customer-experience-through-consumer-behavior
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No matter where someone’s working, there will always be positive points and pain points. Though they vary from person to person, there are a few universal pros and cons to working in a contact center environment that all agents tend to agree on.
The best way for call center managers to combat the cons is to identify what they are and what you can do to help your agents work through them.
How to Foster Agent Engagement in a Hybrid Contact Center
The pros of working in a call center environment.
It’s important to celebrate the great aspects of contact center life before we dig into the not-so-great ones. Knowing what agents can gain from working in a call center can help you to better motivate them and also ensure you hire employees best suited for the job. Just a few of the many pros include:
Honing transferrable skills.
From developing excellent communication skills to practicing problem solving, call center agents leave their job every day having worked on a variety of proficiencies that can help them excel in other areas of life.
Impressive compensation, benefits and overall earning potential.
Call center work often comes with excellent perks including paid holidays, set annual salaries, extensive benefits, paid time off, and desirable working hours. Earning commission is also a possibility for agents who work in sales positions. Plus, there is plenty of potential for promotions and raises throughout an agent’s career.
The option to work from home.
Flexible and remote work options are a big selling point of contact center work. Remote work offers better work-life-balance for employees who would’ve otherwise had to spend hours commuting to an office.

TIP:
Add these pros and any others you can think of into job descriptions when hiring new agents. It’s a great way to catch the eye of potential call center employees who will be more likely to stay long term.

Common cons of working at a call center.
It’s not enough to simply identify the daily struggles agents face. To ensure agents are set up for success, it’s important to have solutions in place that can help boost employee satisfaction and give agents somewhere to turn if they’re stressed.
Here are some common issues that come with working in a call center environment and how to help agents overcome them.
Agent burnout.
Call centers can be great places to work, but they certainly aren’t for the faint of heart. On top of being a fast-paced environment, agents know that their performance activity is monitored throughout the day. Add in a few irate customer interactions, and it quickly becomes clear why burnout is one of the most common challenges for call centers.
SOLUTION: There are a few ways to stop burnout in its tracks. The first is to equip your contact center with technology that takes some pressure off your team. Tools like Voice Call-Backs and Conversation Scheduling help to smooth out call spikes and prevent long lineups in your queues, so agents feel less pressured to rush through calls.
Second, book bi-weekly or monthly one-on-one meetings with your agents and encourage them to discuss any recent high-pressure interactions they’ve handled. Regular check-ins will help them to feel supported and give you the chance to work on conflict resolution together.
5 Tips to Prevent Call Center Agent Burnout Before It Begins
High turnover rates.
Call centers are notorious for high turnover rates, which has a huge negative impact on agent engagement. According to a study conducted by DailyPay, large-sized call centers experience an average turnover of 44%. This is extremely costly, not just for your bottom line, but for your call center service quality.
SOLUTION: Focus on hiring the right call center employees to try to keep turn-over at a minimum. Start by writing down the needs of your call center and the experience and personality types that best suit your situation. Then, ensure your job descriptions are specific and targeted to the types of candidates you’d like to hire.
Promoting from within can lead to improved agent retention, as it demonstrates to agents that there is room to grow within the company. If an agent is excelling, try promoting them, offering a raise, or providing training and knowledge advancement tools to keep them motivated.

TIP:
According to a study conducted by DailyPay, large-sized call centers experience an average turnover of 44%.

Repetitive tasks and demotivation.
Even the perfect call center employee will eventually tire of performing the same monotonous tasks on the daily. It’s unreasonable to expect your staff to remain engaged in their work if they lose their motivation – or worse, begin to hate their job.
SOLUTION: Answering the same types of calls for hours and hours may cause call center employees to check out, which can negatively impact customer satisfaction scores. To keep employees interested and committed to their work, develop an employee engagement strategy:

Recognize employee success by offering bonuses or rewards when milestones or goals are achieved.
Share valuable data and statics with staff so everyone’s on the same page and has something to work toward.
Provide employees with the opportunity to contribute to training, hiring or other call center work that isn’t directly tied to their day to day role.
Create, distribute, and act upon employee satisfaction surveys to show your team that the company is invested in their overall happiness and success.

When cons come into focus, always show your support.
We can’t stress enough how important it is for call center managers to be hands-on when it comes to supporting agents through rough patches. Showing empathy toward an agent’s struggle and offering them support when they most need it is the best way to build employee trust and ensure your call center is functioning in a healthy and productive way.

The best way for #management to combat the cons of working in a #callcenter is to identify what they are and what you can do to help agents work through them. #jobtips #callcenterlife #humanresources #contactcenterClick To Tweet
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That’s the report from the band on the audience’s reaction to the first live performance of Stairway to Heaven.

They bombed. The audience wanted hits, not something new.

Every good idea starts as a new idea.

And new ideas are never familiar.

After exploring the topic of the customer value journey, it’s time to take into account the process of measuring, tracking, and optimising the provided experiences. Customer journey management is an approach to delivering seamless experiences to your customers across all channels and touchpoints. It consists of aligning the entire organisation to your customers’ goals, so…
The post What is customer journey management? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Successful small businesses often stumble when they seek to get to an entirely different scale.

It’s easy to believe that things are dramatically better when there’s more.

More customers, more employees, more market share.

And it’s easy to believe that getting to the next sustainable level is simply the result of efforts similar to the ones that got you here.

But neither is true.

Between this level and the one you seek there may be a slog that’s longer, more difficult and more expensive than it appears.

Staying at a scale that’s working isn’t a cowardly copout. It might be the single best way to do work that matters for people who care.

And if you choose to get through the Dip, consider whether you have the resources, the patience and the team to get to the other side.

Spotify, one of the world’s largest music streaming service providers, continues to be a great reference for professionals talking about CX initiatives. In general, customer experience in the digital space became a burning topic over the past two years, with the technology boost initiated by the pandemic. Spotify was one of the global leaders to shift focus…
The post Spotify sustainability report: why you should give it a read appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Following the initiative to cover CX basics in a series of articles, CXM talked a lot about the topic of the customer journey in the last couple of months. Today, we further explore the subject and give more details on designing a customer value journey. Continue reading and feel free to reach out to CXM…
The post Your guide to the customer value journey appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Insufficient effort creates work that’s wasted. If you do a slapdash job, then the roof leaks, the food is inedible, the car doesn’t start. Insufficient effort is a shortcut that wasn’t worth taking.

Sufficient effort is the goal of the industrial capitalist. Capture the most value with the least work. Build a house that doesn’t fall down, with components that last exactly long enough to avoid a claim. Explain that due to unusually call volume…

And then, perhaps, there’s a third option.

Expending more effort than most people think is sufficient.

This is attention to detail. Care in design. Follow through in customer service. This is an embrace of elegance and wabisabi and the opposite of laziness. This is bringing care (which is rare and precious) to work even if most people would look for a shortcut instead.

More effort creates beauty and magic and remarkability.

Perfectionism is a false hope and a place to hide.

Effort, on the other hand, is our best chance to do work that matters.

Every day around 3 pm, my dog takes a nap.

As far as dogs go, he has a ton of available options. He could hang in the backyard, chase a squirrel, whatever. But in that moment, every day, the choice with the most benefit for him appears to be a nap.

We’re not that different.

Except times a billion.

In any given moment, you could read a blog like this one. Or watch a video. Or check your email. Or send an email. Or…

We choose.

We choose to see what Wolf Blitzer thinks is breaking news. We choose to have an argument or send a compliment. We do it largely out of habit, and our habit is grooved by countless choices in countless moments that came before.

Like the buffet, it probably won’t make you happier to keep loading your plate up simply because you can.

Our best path usually begins by acknowledging that we do, in fact, have a choice.

If you have a million Twitter followers, that means that 99.9% of the people on Twitter are ignoring you, which, with a little rounding, means you have 0%.

If you write a book and it sells a million copies, it will be one of the bestselling books of the year. It will also reach far fewer than 1% of the country’s population, never mind the world.

There are very few things that ever rise to 1% of the market. Not only don’t you need everyone, the act of chasing everyone is probably keeping you from reaching anyone.

Zero (rounded) is enough.