Category: Customer Experience

All about Customer Experiences that you ever wanted to know

  • The Goldilocks fallacy

    One way to tell if the audience is happy is to ask a simple question: “Do you want it spicier?” (or the equivalent).

    If half the people want it to go in one direction and the other half want the other, then you know you’re at ‘just right’. You’ve minimized the number of unhappy customers.

    Here’s the problem: This assumes that there’s a normal distribution of preferences. In nature, many things are in fact distributed like this. Height, for example, or sensitivity to loud sounds. Most people are in the middle, fewer people are at either end. The goal when making something for everyone, if everyone is distributed normally, is to seek out the middle.

    But!

    Personal preferences aren’t normally distributed. Most people don’t care at all, some people care a lot.

    And!

    In any market with choices, you’re no longer going to be able to serve everyone, because given a choice, people will make a choice.

    So, seeking the Goldilocks equilibrium is a trap. While it might diminish criticism, it maximizes apathy. While it might increase your appeal to a hypothetical middle-of-the-road consumer, it might be that there aren’t many of these.

    For many products and services, the middle is hollowed out. What you’re left with are the people who want a lot more or want a lot less of whatever it is you’re able to adjust.

  • How to make your loyalty programme personal

    It has long been established that customer loyalty is the driving force behind the most successful brands on the market. The companies that understood the importance of building trusting relationships with customers have grown and expanded over time. They have seen the power of retention over acquisition and acted upon it for best results.  If you’re just…
    The post How to make your loyalty programme personal appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

  • 5 Reasons to Invest in a Virtual Hold Solution

    Customers nowadays fear the dreaded hold mantra of “Thank you for holding, your call is important to us, please continue to hold…”
    Virtual hold technology has resolved this dreaded game of cat and mouse. Also commonly referred to as call-back technology, this tool frees customers from having to wait on hold by allowing them to request a call from a live agent at a later time.
    Are You Losing Customers to Hold Time?
    What is virtual hold?
    Instead of waiting on hold indefinitely, virtual hold technology keeps the caller’s place in queue so they can hang up and go about their day. When their turn arrives, a call-back is initiated connecting the caller with a customer service agent.
    The benefits of virtual hold.
    Smooths high volume spikes.
    Virtual hold technology helps to streamline your call center operations by offering customers a call-back through your traditional IVR or letting the customer schedule a call at their preferred time through Visual IVR.
    The Contact Center Guide to Managing Spikes in Call Volume
    Eliminates hold times, lowering call abandonment rates.
    Customers left waiting on hold are more likely to end the call before getting through to an agent. After requesting a call-back and moving to a virtual queue, the caller is no longer tied to their phone and is free to complete other tasks while they’re still in the queue. This results in lowered abandonment rates – plus, it reduces overwhelm for your agents.
    Better customer experience (CX).
    If you’ve ever stood in line at the DMV, or in the grocery store behind someone with a large order, you know how frustrating waiting can be. When you’re on hold with a call center, it can be more frustrating because you have no idea what size the queue ahead of you is.
    When you eliminate the need for hold time and give customers control of their experience, you can help ensure that they are happier with the quality of the actual service. This customer satisfaction will create the foundation for brand loyalty.
    Meet service levels & KPI goals.
    Your Average Speed to Answer (ASA) is not the only metric that benefits from virtual hold technology. Many other call center metrics are also impacted positively.
    Average Handle Time (AHT) is decreased when your agent is connected with all of the customers account information and reason for their call, letting your agents and customers get right to the issue at hand.
    First Call Resolution (FCR) is also increased when the caller is connected to the right department the first time through intelligent call-back routing systems.
    How to Create a Call Center Performance Report
    Real-time call-back data dashboard.
    No more guessing at the number of customers waiting in queue, or being overwhelmed with a plethora of call data. When setting up virtual hold technology, you’ll have quick and easy access to data such as the number of callers in the queue (both on hold and call-backs requested), live call abandonment rates, and data about each of your call center agents and their availability and call status.

    TIP:
    Fonolo’s Voice Call-Back technology can save your customers hours of hold time, ensuring that your customers are happier when they are connected to a live agent. Learn more about call-backs.
    The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

  • When in doubt, look for the fear

    My friend Amy taught me that “craven” doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. I’ve been using it to mean, “selfish in a particularly short-sighted way.” It actually means fearful and gutless.

    But, exploring the thesaurus, I discovered that it also means “dastardly.” I was sure that Snidely Whiplash was a dastardly villain. A dastardly deed must be something bad.

    Nope, it means “cowardly.”

    But wait!

    It turns out that it also means particularly selfish and evil.

    When someone is fearful enough, craven enough, they sometimes end up acting in unsocial and even hurtful ways.

    While there are definitely some super villains among us, it’s more likely we’re simply dealing with someone who feels like he’s drowning.

    [PS I have a brand new short video course on LinkedIn on decision making. It’s free for the next six hours.]

  • NTT’s latest research: CX technology sets records but still fails to satisfy many customers

    This year’s Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report (GCXBR) comes with quite some interesting results! NTT, a leading global technology services company, conducts this highly influential survey for 24 years in a row with the goal to assess the global status of CX. What do they have for us now? The report reveals both positive and…
    The post NTT’s latest research: CX technology sets records but still fails to satisfy many customers appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

  • Are virtual offices effective for CS teams?

    Hey guys, I’m a CSM at a tech company, and we were looking to improve our communication on the remote. I’ve found this tool which helped our communication to be faster and improve our SLA’s. We’ve tested gather town and kumospace for a while but is not near as fluid and fast as Deskmy and this one is also cheaper. What do you guys think about this virtual office thing, would you use this kind of tool on your CS or CX operations?
    submitted by /u/Liszt_F [link] [comments]

  • Customer Experience Map

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

  • Customer-centric strategy: Increase Sales Through O2O

    In this blog post, we will explore some ways to increase sales through offline to online customer service strategies. Best practices to become a customer-centric: The initial step is to have a reasonable vision of what you need your clients to encounter. You can do this by having some plainly characterized objectives about the client venture. Like, how they will communicate with them and why it is important for their business. This will permit you to see where openings exist that may somehow go unrecognized, just as distinguish any problem areas or barricades enroute so that these can turn out to be essential for an iterative cycle. There are numerous things organizations can do to turn out to be more client driven. You shouldn’t fear putting the time fundamental into making a superior item experience. Regardless of whether this implies burning through cash on plan work as opposed to zeroing in exclusively on value point. It’s significant not just that these progressions occur at all levels yet additionally happen all through various offices inside one association. Everybody has input towards how best practices are executed across useful regions including deals tasks, and showcasing correspondences, and so forth. https://nytimz.com/customer-centric-strategy-o2o-customer-service/
    submitted by /u/protopartners [link] [comments]

  • Can an open market improve the parking experience?

    As we digitalise our society, cash options for parking are becoming obsolete. Across the country, we’re seeing more and more local authorities phasing out pay-and-display machines, and usher in-app solutions as replacements. However, the growing uptake of cashless parking does not come without its own set of challenges. Travelling from A to B, across counties…
    The post Can an open market improve the parking experience? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

  • Defending change (or the status quo)

    The easy argument to make is that the thing we have now is better than the new thing that’s on offer.

    All one has to do is take the thing we have now as a given (ignoring its real costs) and then challenge the defects and question the benefits of the new thing, while also maximizing the potential risk.

    “A hand-written letter is more thoughtful, more likely to be a keepsake, and a more permanent record than a simple email.”

    On the other hand, the technophile defending change simply has to list all the new features and ignore the benefits we’re used to.

    “An email is far faster, cheaper and easier to track than a letter. It is more likely to be saved, and it can be sorted and searched. Not to mention copied and forwarded with no problem.”

    What’s truly difficult is being a fair arbiter. I fall into this trap all the time. We begin to develop a point of view, usually around defending the status quo, but sometimes around overturning it, and then the arguments become more and more concrete. While we might pretend to be evenhanded, it’s very hard to do.

    Sometimes, we end up simply arguing for or against a given status quo, instead of the issue that’s actually at hand.

    And the danger is pretending you’re being fair, when you’re not. In this silly article from the Times, the author (and their editors) are wondering if oat milk and pea milk are a “scam.”

    This is a classic case of defending the status quo. Here’s a simple way to tell if that’s what you’re doing: imagine for a second that milk was a new product, designed to take on existing beverages made from hemp, oats or nuts. Defending oat milk against the incursion of cow milk is pretty easy.

    The author could point out the often horrific conditions used to create cow milk. “Wait, you’re going to do what to that cow?” They could write about the biological difficulty many people have drinking it. Or they could focus on the significant environmental impact, not to mention how easily it spoils, etc.

    Or imagine that solar power was everywhere, and someone invented kerosene, gasoline or whale oil. You get the idea…

    There are endless arguments to be had when new ideas arrive. The challenge is in being clear that we’re about to take a side, and to do it on the effects, not on our emotional connection to the change that’s involved.