Category: Customer Experience

“The computer wants you to click this button.”

“It thinks you asked for something else.”

“He’s mad at you.”

Thousands of generations ago, we evolved our way into a magnificent hack. It turns out that we can more safely navigate the world by imagining that other people have a little voice in their heads just as we have one in ours.

By projecting the narrative voice to others, we avoided fights that could be fatal. It’s a powerful shorthand that allows us to use limited brain processing power to interact in complicated cultural situations.

It worked so well, we began applying it to dogs, to lizards and even to the weather. It’s a great place to find the origins of bad decisions and superstitions.

The truth, of course, is that your cat doesn’t have a voice in her head. But we still act like she does. And that cloud doesn’t really have an angry face in it, a bug we see so often that we even gave it a name. Pareidolia is proof that the mistake is almost universal.

And now, AI chat is putting the common sense of this to the test. We know exactly what the code base is, and yet within minutes, most normal humans are happily chatting away, bringing the very emotions to the computer that we’d bring to another person. We rarely do this with elevators or door handles, but once a device gets much more complicated than that, we start to imagine the ghost inside the machine.

If it’s working, keep at it.

The problems arise when the hack stops working. When we start making up stories about the narrative intent of complex systems. Sooner or later, we end up with conspiracies, misunderstandings about public health and opportunities missed in the financial markets.

Emergent behaviors (like the economy and computers and the natural world) aren’t conscious.

It’s hard to say, “I know I’m making up a human-centric story to explain systemic phenomena, but it’s a shortcut I use… do you think the shortcut is helpful here?”

Years and years ago, I helped the Weekly World News make a book.

While their periodical was weekly, it certainly wasn’t news. They were just four people in a small office in Florida. They gleefully made stuff up every week. They had a few filing cabinets of stock photos, and they invented stories featuring UFOs, aliens, “scientists” (in quotation marks) and various other diversions for folks trapped in the checkout supermarket line.

And now, of course, we are all trapped in that line. And now, the algorithms are pushing spineless profit-seekers to bombard us with junk, junk that shows up on the home page of search engines, in our social media feeds and in our email.

Adblockers are one of the most popular innovations of the last few years. What I want is a junkblocker. A big button on my browser that says “shields up.” And just imagine if it was set to on by default.

No celebrity gossip. No conspiracy theories. No weight loss breakthroughs. It would automatically block fist fights, trolling, urgent but unimportant breaking news, insights about the royal family, discussions of whatever happened to a star from thirty years ago, aliens, UFOs, MLMs, the latest pump-and-dump schemes, things that are true but irrelevant, things that are relevant but didn’t actually happen and stories designed to demean, degrade or intentionally inflict distress with little recourse available.

When you put it that way, who doesn’t want a button like that?

Somehow, we survived as a culture for centuries without exposing ourselves to thousands of profit-driven manipulations dumped on our living room carpet all day, every day.

No wonder we’re exhausted after a day online.

It keeps getting shorter and shorter.

This video couldn’t have been made, at any price, 18 months ago. 18 weeks ago, it would have required a thousand hours of work.

Now, here it is. This impossible is going to happen faster and faster and faster.

After 25 years, I stopped using a certain credit card for business. It was easily millions of dollars worth of transactions over that period. Did anyone at the company notice? Did anyone care?

I still remember losing a client in 1987. Small organizations pay attention and care very much about each and every customer. Verizon and AT&T, on the other hand, don’t even know that you and I exist.

Small family farms have significantly higher yields than neighboring farms that are much bigger. That’s because the individual farmer cares about every single stalk and frond, and the person with a lot of land is more focused on what they think of as the big picture.

But it’s pretty clear that if you add up enough small things, you get to the big one.

Caring at scale can’t be done by the CEO or a VP. But what these folks can do is create a culture that cares. They can hire people who are predisposed to care. They can pay attention to the people who care and measure things that matter instead of chasing the short term.

Large organizations have significant structural advantages. But the real impacts happen when they act like small ones.

Happy Friday! ‘This week in CX’ brings you the latest roundup of industry news. This week, we’re looking at thoughts on the spring budget for retail and hospitality, as well as new questions into whether employee benefits include all the financial help they need. There’s also new research into ineffective AI for customer service, and the…
The post This week in CX: are the current employee benefits and financial aids enough? plus Talkdesk & Twilio appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

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

Your contact center may run like clockwork, with engaged agents answering calls quickly, solving problems, and creating satisfied customers in record time. But without the contact center KPIs and metrics that managers use to measure the effectiveness of their operations, you’d never know for sure.
KPIs matter. And they’re changing quickly. We asked contact center industry influencers to share their insights into the changing role of KPIs and shine a light on new metrics to watch.

Dennis Wakabayashi, CX Expert, Team Wakabayashi:
“I see new kinds of data that we’ve never seen before plugging into customer care; digital footprint metrics like number of chats, or number of clicks to the website, or other additional steps in the customer journey. I think the more companies focus on customer care analytics over marketing analytics, the better. I think that’s where the insight and the wins can be.”

Do Traditional Contact Center KPIs Still Matter?
KPIs monitor just about everything that happens in a contact center: workflow, scheduling, attendance, agent performance, and customer satisfaction. Managers review these metrics, looking for trends and patterns to confirm things are going well. Or signals that pinpoint places to improve the customer experience, reduce friction and optimize for efficiency.

FACT:
KPIs change, but one thing stays the same: customers hate hold time. Offering customers a call-back respects their time and keeps them off hold. Your CSAT scores will light up, too!

Popular Contact Center KPIs
There are dozens of call center metrics, but these are some of the most popular ones that businesses rely on.
Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
Just as it sounds, a customer satisfaction score shows how satisfied your customers are with your products or services.
Average handle time (AHT)
Average handle time computes the average duration of an entire customer transaction. AHT includes hold time, call transfers, and after call work, too.
Net promotor score (NPS)
This metric expresses the customer’s perception of your brand and how likely they are to recommend your product or service.
First call resolution (FCR)
First call resolution shows the percentage of customer problems that are resolved on the first call or contact with an agent.
Average speed of answer (ASA)
This metric shows the average amount of time it takes for an agent to pick up an inbound call, including any time the customer spends waiting on hold.
Measuring Customer Satisfaction
The arrival of AI-supported tools is expected to flip the script on some of those traditional metrics and introduce some new ones, too.
For example, AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants make metrics like AHT less important. Why? With bots answering basic questions, the calls that get routed to humans will be more complex, and resolving them may take longer. Your AHT may go up, but if the goal is to have happy customers, then CSAT is a better metric to watch.

Shep Hyken, CS & CX Expert, NYT Bestselling Author:
“If we’re looking at average handle time as a key ingredient to determining whether our agents are successful, well, guess what our agents are interested in doing? Getting off the phone as quickly as possible! We have clients that say average handle time is important. More important is that when we get finished, they give us a high NPS rating — on a scale of 0 to 10, the likelihood of being recommended — or a high CSAT rating. That’s the number one goal. We want the customer to be happy.”

AI-Assisted Tools Bring New Insights
On top of changing the relevance of some traditional KPIs, AI brings new ways of measuring success. Industry experts are excited about sentiment analysis, which is a score that reflects a customer’s feelings about the customer service they’ve received.

Tom Laird, CEO, Expivia Interaction Marketing Group:
In 2023, we are looking at real-time agent assist and real-time sentiment scoring. This means looking at a dashboard and not just seeing just bubbles of cool keywords but seeing if a call is going south, in real-time, based on sentiment scores.

How does it work? Computer programs with natural language processing abilities monitor customer service calls — some in real-time — and offer sentiment scores, usually expressed as line chart, bar graph or heat map. By listening to what customers say and how they say it, the software can reveal whether the customer is happy with the service, or if they feel neutral, or dissatisfied.
By combining sentiment analysis scores with other KPIs such as CSAT or NPS, managers can have a more comprehensive view of their customer service – and a better shot at success.The post CX4Now: Contact Center KPIs that Matter first appeared on Fonolo.

Large sections of Los Angeles are studded with billboards for minor TV shows. These billboards exist nowhere else, even though there are televisions globally.

Obviously, there’s ego at work here, but it’s sort of productive.

First, there’s the ego of the producers/networks. They like showing their peers what they’re up to, and it probably makes it easier to recruit the talent that lives nearby. If you’re in the famous business, being more famous, even locally, is a boost.

And then there’s the ego of the stars. After all, if they see the billboard, it’s as if everyone sees it.

Social media is simply a smaller scale digital example of this very tendency.

And getting your billboard right–and doing work that makes it easier to get your billboard right–might be one of the single best side effects of useful social media.

But, like billboards in LA, it’s best to not take them too seriously.

Hi guys, I’m new in this scenario and I’m building a presentation with succes cases of retail e-commerce based on CX, like how they are designed and the steps of journey’s customer where they are focused.. But my boss asked about the investment those companys made and the results they presented… So, I’m asking you guys if there’s some book, website or whatever, where we can find some cases with this information. I found some but they are paid, like Forrester and at this point (just starting the arguments to implement the area) I can’t afford yet… Roi and cltv data is welcome too… (sorry my english) submitted by /u/Thiago-Acko [link] [comments]

Warm up the machines that take a long time first.

Stress test the go/no go parts of the project as early as possible.

If the cost is low, replace dependent processes with parallel ones.

Do the difficult parts when energy is high and the budget hasn’t been depleted.

Ship before you run out of time or money.

Invest in slack buffers for any critical dependent components.

Budgets are a tool, not a weapon.

Thrash early, then lock down decisions and don’t change them.

Assign each task to the least expensive/least busy people able to get the job done. (This is probably not the project manager).

Prioritize feedback from people with taste, skill and influence, not proximity or volume.

Identify go/no go points based on irreversible actions or unrecoverable costs.

Anticipate the difficult and high-risk moments in advance and reserve resources for the ones you can’t anticipate.

Heroism is more fun but less reliable than good planning.