Category: Customer Experience

What’s better, a fish or a bicycle?
That’s a ridiculous question, because they’re not opposites nor are they exclusive.
It’s tempting to come to the conclusion that discipline is on one end of a spectrum and fairness is on the other.
We see it in sports, business and politics all the time. A boss or coach is seen as a voice of discipline, right and wrong, certainty and power, while the ‘other side’ is all tied up in knots over what’s more fair.
But they actually don’t oppose each other. Fairness can be executed with rigor. Fairness can lead to productivity and efficiency. Fairness is actually what forward motion is capable of.
The opposite of discipline is actually laziness, and that’s often associated with fear. Fear of responsibility and fear of the truth. Responsibility and truth are required if we’re going to get on the right track.

We’re either going or we’re not going. We get to make that decision every day. Perhaps you’ve decided:
We’re going.
That detour we hit, the pothole we narrowly avoided, the interruption that was unexpected–we experienced them, and we decided that we’re still going.
Speed bumps are real. They’re a warning, or they’re unavoidable, and they hurt. Speed bumps cannot be denied.
A speed bump that stops us from going is an obstacle.
Often, the only difference between a speed bump and an obstacle is our decision about which one it is.
Onward.

50 years ago, Oldham and Hackman proposed the job characteristics model. It so resonates with people that it feels like common sense: Job satisfaction is driven by five factors:

Task significance: Does the work you do create meaning or impact?Task identity: Do you feel ownership (emotionally) in the work you’re doing?Autonomy: Do you have the freedom to make choices?Skill variety: Is the task monotonous?Feedback: Are you in a place where you can safely and easily get feedback and use it to improve?

If you think about your moments of flow, or the pastimes and hobbies we choose, they have all or most of these elements.

And if you think about the most boring day you’ve ever had, or the worst job you had to do, it’s likely that most of these were missing.

And yet, even though it’s easy to show that these five factors are critical in attracting and keeping skilled and talented workers, many organizations work overtime to eliminate them. “I’m just doing my job” is the antithesis of what works for workers.

So why?

Because industrial systems hate variability. They work to mechanize as many steps as they can, and if forced to use a human, work hard to keep that human within very specific boundaries.

Better to have a three-hour Zoom call where everyone listens to the rules than risk having someone make a mistake, even one with no negative impact. Better to parcel out jobs to the cheapest available cog than depend on a linchpin to make a difference. And better to know in advance exactly what to expect.

The industrial system would rather settle for mediocre than suffer between moments of brilliance and occasional defects.

The solution is not surrendering to the system. It’s to realize that in a competitive marketplace, automating human performance is a shortcut to becoming a commodity. If you can automate it, so can your competitors.

Instead, we have the opportunity to do work that is unexpected, generous and original. It won’t be perfect, it won’t be the cheapest, but it will matter.

Jack Benny died when I was 14. He was an early radio and TV star, a comedian primarily remembered for just one line.
The other day, a peer said, “well, if you’re giving me a Jack Benny choice…”
It occurred to me that few people younger than us were ever going to use that reference. It ends with this generation.
YouTube and the net have extended the half-life, dramatically. Instead of TV shows or memes disappearing forever, they simply move to the back row of search. But they’re still there.
Will Pi Day or Rickrolls be a thing in 44 years?
There’s been an explosion in pop culture. I created a book a long time ago: The Encyclopedia of Fictional People. Today, there would be far too many to ever fit in a book. It doesn’t make sense to create books on trivia or music or cultural ephemera because there’s just too much to fit inside. But our brains can’t keep track of all of it, so we go shallow and we forget the old stuff. Was Paul McCartney in a band before his solo career?
I’m not sure the perfect preservation of culture is possible or even beneficial. It marches on, regardless.

It’s not rare for companies to lie to customers. At some point, we have all been in situations where free products were not quite free, or services came with hidden terms and conditions. Such an approach to customer communication decreases loyalty and chances for long-term success, and many CX professionals have talked about it. But…
The post Why do customers lie and how to deal with the issue appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

High call center agent productivity is every call center manager’s dream. Not only does it lead to higher profits and lowered costs, it also results in better employee engagement and improved customer experiences.
So many factors damper agent productivity, like high call volumes and staff turnover, both of which are only too common in the call center industry. As managers, you need to be aware of your agents’ performance to ensure a good customer experience. And, agent performance is linked to agent productivity.
How to Foster Agent Engagement in a Hybrid Contact Center
Important metrics and KPIs for measuring agent productivity.
As a call center, you have many metrics and KPIs available to measure agent productivity. Here are a few:
Call abandonment rate.
Call abandonment occurs when a customer hangs up before an agent answers the phone. For example, if 20 calls to a contact center out of 200 are hang-ups, the abandonment rate is 10%. Call abandonment often occurs because customers become frustrated with long wait times. If we’re honest, most customers don’t like waiting, period.
While Voice Call-Backs help lower abandonment rates, they can’t address issues within specific agents. If you notice your call abandonment rate is higher than usual, talk to your agents. Find out what’s stopping them from reaching customers promptly.
Average Handle Time (AHT).
Average handle time is the average amount of time it takes an agent to wrap up a phone call or live chat. Lower average handle times usually mean higher productivity. But, AHT isn’t enough on it’s own. When evaluating average handle time, it’s important to compare it with customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
Cost per call.
Cost per call is a great agent productivity metric that shows the direct cost associated with each call your center receives. To calculate cost per call or contact, use this calculation:
Cost per contact = monthly operating costs/ (# of contacts or interactions per month- abandoned calls)
The Executive Guide to Improving 6 Call Center Metrics
Tips and best practices for improving agent productivity.
Metrics are important in identifying performance and operational issues. After looking at the data, act on it. Here are some tips to improve agent productivity:
Offer autonomy.
Your agents play a critical role in ensuring customer loyalty and satisfaction. As the first face or voice of your company, your agents are a customer’s first impression of your company. Your agents’ performance dictates a customer’s likelihood of promoting your brand to others.
Don’t micromanage your agents, especially if their performance is generally strong. Empower agents by offering them autonomy through self-assessment and analysis, self-service tools, and by sharing historical data with them. This information helps agents take more pride in their work and feel more in control of their results.
The Only Call Center Agent Performance Metrics You’ll Ever Need
Give positive and constructive feedback.
Create a culture in your call center where both managers and agents feel empowered to offer feedback. Give positive feedback to your agents in public, and offer constructive critiques in private. Offering valuable feedback improves call center agent productivity.
Invest in your agents.
Make use of centralized knowledge bases and provide easily accessible resources for agents to study on their own. Online content is becoming increasingly popular and effective for knowledge transfer within call centers. Invest in ongoing training for call center agents and make time for one-on-one coaching. Create learning opportunities for your agents to improve.
Offer career growth opportunities.
Call center agents don’t have dead-end jobs, no matter how badly the media portrays our industry. We know that call center agents have opportunities for lateral switches to different departments, as well as promotion potential. But, it’s management’s job to make sure their agents are aware of those opportunities. Promote new roles like supervisors and managers for your agents. Opportunities for career growth improves call center agent engagement and agent productivity.
Offer flexible scheduling.
A post-COVID-19 work era will likely involve hybrid models of remote work. This is especially true for call centers, where 60-80% of agents switched to a work-from-home model. Working from home might appear flexible enough, but it isn’t always. Talk to your agents to know their specific scheduling needs. Additionally, engaging a remote team is vital in improving call center agent productivity.
How to Improve Contact Center Agent Performance
Conclusion.
Call center agents have difficult jobs. With high call volumes, impatient customers, and learning curves with new technology, it’s easy for agent productivity to fall sometimes. Use metrics to assess your agents’ performance and productivity and proactively address that data as soon as possible.
Fonolo’s call monitoring helps you assess call quality, and Voice Call-Backs lower abandonment rate and call handle time. Technology is a great tool to improve agent productivity, but a human touch is always necessary. Engage your agents, invest in their careers, offer them autonomy in their day-to-day work for optimal results.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

There are countless ways to make a point. You can clearly demonstrate that you are angry, smart, concerned, stronger, faster or more prepared than the person you’re engaging with.

But making a point isn’t the same thing as making a difference.

To make a difference, we need the practical empathy to realize that the other person doesn’t know what you know, doesn’t believe what you believe and might not want what you want. We have to move from where we are and momentarily understand where they are.

When we make a point, we reject all of this. When we make a point, we establish our power in one way or another, but we probably don’t change very much.

Change comes about when the story the other person tells themselves begins to change. If all you do is make a point, you’ve handed them a story about yourself. When you make a change, you’ve helped them embrace a new story about themselves.

And even though it’s more fun (and feels safe, in some way) to make a point, if we really care, we’ll do the hard work to make a difference instead.

In the first ten months of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic cost the tourism industry $935 billion in revenue worldwide. Despite having no control over the global crisis, travel operators are forced to think creatively about the field they can impact and improve – the travellers’ experience.   If we dig deeper into available research, we’ll find that…
The post How technology helps us reimagine the travel booking experience appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

That used to involve putting film or paper into a chemical bath. You could have a small influence over what happened, but almost all the work involved setting up the shot in the first place. The goal of the bath was to uncover what was already on the film.
Developing today has a totally different meaning. We’re not simply uncovering, we’re building. Software, careers, our culture–we develop them daily, adding a little bit at a time, toward the future we seek to create.

There’s no question that companies need to be able to quickly answer customer support requests. One study from HubSpot showed that 90% of customers rated an immediate response (where “immediate” is defined as less than ten minutes) as important or very important. Live chat is a strong tool for meeting these high expectations as it…
The post Live chat security and privacy: How to ensure both for supreme CX appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.