Category: Customer Experience

It’s a given that the pandemic has been good for the tech giants. The entire GAFAM group, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft have seen profits continue to surge. Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft made $57bn of profits in the last quarter. Alongside this group, other players like Alipay have joined them in leaning on network…
The post It’s time to challenge the monopoly and start a customer-focused revolution in e-commerce appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

For the longest time, just about all jobs were task jobs.

Factory work.

Inbox then outbox.

The assembly line, the ticket taker, the cook…

We learned how to hire for these jobs, measure them, manage the work to be done. Over time, we’ve figured out how to outsource them, mechanize them and pay as little as possible for them.

But in many pockets of our economy, the new jobs and the best jobs aren’t task jobs. They are jobs of initiative. Work that’s taken, not simply assigned. Work that can’t be easily forecast, and work that thrives with a different sort of teamwork.

These jobs often have a lot of task work mixed in, which is really confusing for everyone involved. Because reverting to task work feels safe and hiring for task work is easier. Apparently, people are supposed to learn how to do initiative work on their own and do it in their spare time.

Most organizations do an astonishingly bad job at creating, initiating and dancing with the next thing. And so they struggle and eventually become Yahoo.

First step: announce what the jobs around here are like. Hire for them and measure and reward appropriately.

Sometimes we assume that our competitors are far smarter than we are, better informed and harder working.

And sometimes we assume that they’re clueless, lazy and hapless.

Neither is true.

Did You Know? Companies that have embraced digital transformation are 26% more profitable than their peers. Source: Blake Morgan (Forbes) https://preview.redd.it/e598hx6b21r71.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=d268010b0ed6cdbec8a2736283041a2c93a3cbf2
submitted by /u/vesuvitas [link] [comments]

to never miss a deadline

to be the last to speak up or offer help

to learn something new every day

to be helpless in the face of a technology

to give others the benefit of the doubt

to ask for help when you get stuck

to persist in the face of disappointment

to not bother to look it up

to react instead of respond?

If it’s a habit, then it’s a decision, made consciously or not.

And if we decided, we could decide to make a new decision about how we’ll act going forward.

Research shows that online shopping has increased considerably over the last 18 months. According to Statista, in February 2021, 75% of people were shopping online more than in March 2020 pre-pandemic. Demand has risen and so have consumers’ expectations of their delivery experience. To compete in the online space, we’ve seen many retailers start to…
The post What can customers expect from last-mile delivery over the next five years? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

We’d like the systems we depend on to do what we expect and need them to do.

A useful component of that sort of system is that there’s a bedrock set of expectations, principles and boundaries that exist before and after we encounter it. The drawbridge operates because of the rules of physics, not because an invisible elf decided to open it in this moment.

There are two kinds of situations, then. One in which we’re dealing with a predictable system with expectations about how and why things happen, and the other in which explanations might be suggested after the fact, but they’re justifications, not explanations or principles. In the irrational system, explanations are often made up after the fact and changed as soon as they’re scrutinized.

Both kinds of systems make up our world, but the first kind, the civilized, effective, mature kind, is the type we can build our world around.

We can state the rules and play by them. We can outline a theory and prove it.

Principles truly matter in the moments when it’s really difficult to stick with them.

Efficiency is important to every business, but in a call center, it directly impacts your success. While efficiency can be difficult to quantify, adherence reporting can help you gain insights on the effectiveness of your team’s daily activities.
Adherence is the biggest factor in achieving ROI from a workforce management perspective. Call center managers want to ensure that overall agent performance is meeting service levels, and that agents are working when and where they’re needed.
The ROI of Call-Backs for Your Call Center
What is call center reporting?
Making sure the team is on track with their key metric goals is a big part of call center strategy. The first step to achieving quality call center reporting is having an easily accessible dashboard for your custom reports within your phone system.
What is schedule adherence?
To put it succinctly, schedule adherence is a metric that calculates whether agents are actually available during their scheduled times.
Low adherence can be costly to your bottom line. If agents are not attending to their stations when needed, your callers will have to wait in queue, causing call abandonment and general customer frustration. Monitoring adherence is one way to ensure that your agents are actively working through incoming calls.
Having a 100% goal is admirable, but realistically, it’s not attainable. Here are some common factors that affect adherence:
Agent tardiness.
Arriving late, logging in late, taking excessive breaks, and calling in sick are just four of the most common things that can dip into an agent’s performance and of course their adherence rate. When hiring, it’s important to pay attention to soft skills and emotional intelligence. Finding newbies who are great communicators and well suited to call-center work is much better in the long run than a half-hearted hire with a few years of relevant experience.
Agent burnout.
Adherence is one of the biggest indicators of burnout, and it most often stems from the agent not having enough support in their role. Pay attention to challenges each of your agents are having, and ensure they have the proper training and tools to do their work confidently.
5 Tips to Prevent Call Center Agent Burnout Before it Begins
Non-call tasks.
Your agents may sit next to their headset all day, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re always using it. Outside of conducting calls, call center agents must take notes on the interaction, update accounts, and of course, they’ll need a bit of wind-down time between interactions. To ensure your adherance report is accurate, don’t forget to account for these activities.

TIP:
Automate repetitive tasks so agents can spend more time supporting your customers.

Remote work.
Thanks to COVID-19, remote work has become the new normal. According to Talkdesk, 86% of call center operations had gone remote by June 2020. While not an entirely new concept, more call centers than ever are attempting this transition at once, facing challenges with hardware (i.e. laptops), internet connections, and child care. These challenges should be accounted for in your adherence reporting.
How to Calculate an Adherence Report?
We have established that adherence is important, but how do you calculate it?
Adherence = total time available / time they are scheduled to work
This calculation is displayed as a percentage that represents how productive and efficient your call center agents truly are. While every organization will have different factors to consider, the most common considerations should include scheduled break times and training sessions. In other words, only factor in the times that you expect your agent to be truly available to customers and clients.
When it comes to setting goals, you may want to add some cushion time to this. For example, if your agents are scheduled for 8 hours, factoring in two 15 minute breaks and one half hour break, 100% adherence would have the agent available for 7 hours. If they are available for 6 hours and 45 minutes, they would have an adherence rate of 96%.
If you have a goal for wind-down time after an interaction, say three minutes, then you know that your call center would never hit 100%, and a more realistic goal would be 90%.
Most call center software has adherence reports built right into them. These tools track agent statuses throughout their workday (such as offline, available, available but idle, wind-down, busy, lunch, etc.) Have clearly defined goals and communicate these targets and numbers to your team on a regular basis.
How to Improve Call Center Agent Productivity
Best practices for schedule adherence in the call center.
When it comes to enforcing schedule adherence, there are some tried and true methods that can help you keep them on track:

Train call center agents on schedule adherence, how it works, and how it impacts their goals as a team.
Relieve agent overwhelm with call-back technology. Back-to-back calls are stressful, and your agents will burn out quickly – not to mention, you’ll see a significant dip in adherence.
Automate monotonous tasks such as email follow-ups so your agents can spend more time supporting customers.
Ask your agents how you can support them in hitting their adherence goals.

Finally, ensure your adherence reporting informs your Workforce Management planning for the year ahead with more accurate workforce forecasting.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

This is the default for allocating something that’s scarce.

It’s also rarely the fairest or most efficient alternative. And it’s sort of lazy.

I called a service provider yesterday and was told that they had a two-year waitlist.

They could sort the list by who needs what they do the most.

They could sort it by which sort of client would be the best fit.

They could even sort it by which client would allocate the most resources to be next in line.

Any of these choices would be more useful to them and to their clients than the semi-random solution of handing out numbers at the deli.

It feels more fair because we’re used to it. But it’s actually less fair to just about everyone involved.

When a luxury good is allocated based on time invested by the purchaser, it may seem that rewarding someone who stayed up all night to wait in line makes sense. After all, they traded the one commodity that everyone has the same amount of to signal their desire to be in the line.

But perhaps there’s someone who would put the item to better use. Or consider the utility of allowing people who want something to trade time spent as a tutor or in a food shelter for priority instead.

The internet allows us to transcend time and space. We can collect information and connect people who aren’t necessarily first in line.

Every time we choose not to, we’ve chosen to ignore the value that could be created.

At least one billion people around the world have a disability or impairment that impacts their digital experience. In the UK, this translates to four in ten UK households having at least one person with accessibility needs. With that in mind, this group represents a huge market that is often under-represented, and businesses can no…
The post Building a business case for digital accessibility appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.