Category: Customer Experience

You’re probably familiar with IVR, or Interactive Voice Response, is a menu system that connects customers to the information they need in your call center.
Callers will use either a dial pad or tap-button options (Visual IVR) to connect with an appropriate agent or department to address their needs. An optimized IVR system is essential to call center software, as it reduces costs, improves customer satisfaction, increases first-call resolution (FCR), and increases overall call center efficiency.
Despite the efficiency that IVRs offer, most customers don’t like using them. That’s right – about 61% of customers associate IVRs with a poor customer experience. That’s why it’s so important to evaluate this essential tool and make any required upgrades, especially when you notice signs of customer complaints, low agent morale, or technology limitations.
Discover the Six Crucial Contact Center Trends That Will Shape 2021
Luckily, there are many ways to optimize your call center IVR so you can offer both your agents and customers a better experience. Here are some tips to optimize your IVR:
1. Test your IVR menu.
Evaluate your customer journey by testing your IVR menu options regularly. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes – are the menu options self-explanatory and intuitive? Is the platform easy to use? Is the voice pleasant and personable? Is the wait time too long? Glitches and inconsistencies can make or break a customer experience, so it’s worth your time to manage its upkeep.
2. Omni-channel or opti-channel.
An opti-channel strategy can help you determine the ideal communication channel for a specific customer. Alternatively, omni-channel (also known as multi-channel) integrates multiple channels (IVR, mobile, and web), and tracks user activity across all channels.
Omni-channel offers a more fulsome approach to customer communication, but it requires a lot of planning and coordination to operate efficiently. Opti-channel, on the other hand, provides a more simplified experience. Optimize your IVR by carefully considering which approach is more suitable for your company.
3. Use automatic routing.
Call routing is a standard feature of most IVRs, as it routes customer calls to their desired department or appropriate call center agent. Fonolo smart routing takes this one step further by directing call traffic efficiently with automatic routing, while using speech recognition to better analyze customer data and history and improve call efficiency.
4. Upgrade to a Visual IVR.
Customers are becoming more and more irritated with traditional IVR. Consider upgrading to a Visual IVR system, which performs a similar function through your business’ webpage or app and allows customers to tap or click their preferred options and even enter important information that your agents can use to support them. Plus, it’s more convenient for customers to tap or click menu options on a device than to listen to all of the menu options over the phone.
8 Tips for Creating a Great Visual IVR
5. Adopt call-back technology.
Does your contact center experience dreaded call spikes at certain times? The last thing your customers want to hear on your IVR is “please hold…”. Luckily, call-back technology solves this problem by offering customers a call-back from an available agent at a later time.
Not only are spikes troublesome for customers, they’re also bad news for your agents. They’ll hear the brunt of customer complaints if the center experiences a high call volume and customers are left on hold. Luckily, call center software has evolved over the past few years to solve this issue. Call-back technology decreases abandon rates, improves customer experience, and smooths out call spikes.
6. Always offer a live-agent option.
A good IVR system will guide customers to their virtual destination without them “zeroing out” in the first few seconds. After all, 69% of customers would rather solve a problem on their own, without interacting with an agent.
It may be tempting to only offer self-serve options. That said, it’s always good to offer your customers the option to communicate with a live call center agent. If a customer is dealing with a more complex issue, they might prefer to speak to someone right away. Giving them that option will improve their satisfaction.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

There are ten people.

If those ten people were aware of what you do, trusted you and were enrolled in the journey of change you seek to make…

They might each encourage ten people to join in.

And that group of 100 people might be able and willing to help you improve your work, or to introduce you to resources you need, or to become clients.

Which might lead to more opportunities, conversations and improvements.

Step by step. Like building a house.

It’s not direct marketing, which is focused on action and measurement and a funnel. It’s directed marketing, because you’re generous and specific about precisely who the work is for. And you’re willing to ignore most everyone else.

There’s a reason we hire a physical trainer, get a job and show up for work on time.

We see the value in someone else directing our actions.

On one hand, giving someone else authority over our effort is challenging, because they might not be aware of how much we have in reserve or what else we’ve got going on.

But the alternative is emotionally taxing: Taking initiative.

Instead of calling it “taking initiative” perhaps it would be more accurate to say “giving initiative.” Because it’s in short supply and we need more.

Deciding to do something that no one expected or ordered you to do.

Reading something or developing a skill on your own account.

Raising your hand, speaking up, launching a new project…

We’ve been trained to avoid all of these things. And the proof is that four-year-olds don’t have trouble with any of them. We know how, but we’ve been taught not to.

They say that seeing is believing.
But it might be more true that believing leads to seeing.
It’s often easier to discover the truth if we believe it’s there in the first place.

The emergency wins every time.

The newspaper, social media, dinner time conversation, the principal’s office, sportscasters, the weather, the boardroom–the conversation is almost always about the emergency of the moment. The thing that’s happening all at once.

We have a volunteer fire department in town, but we don’t often have a volunteer corps dedicated to long-term culture change. Even typing that out seems odd.

But the chronic problems define our future, and the persistent changes over time brought us to where we are. Evolution of species is a chronic process. And most of us die from chronic illnesses.

What would it take for us to spend even a fraction of our time and energy and attention on the chronic instead of the urgent? Drip by drip.

Infallibility is a difficult model for forward motion.

It’s likely that you’re going to make an error. That you will make choices based on things you don’t know, perhaps should have known. Things will go wrong.

And then what?

When a kid takes driver’s ed, shouldn’t they teach what to do if they get a ticket or have a fender bender?

If you’re a district attorney, your staff might go after an innocent person. If you’re a doctor, a patient might die. If you’re a blogger, you might post something that isn’t correct. That’s not the moment to start coming up with a plan.

Are you ready and eager to say, “now that I know what I know, I’m going to change my course?”

Are you open and willing to say, “I didn’t know that key fact then, but I should have, and I’m building systems to make sure I will know it next time?”

Doubling down on wrong always makes things worse.

As society begins to reopen, retailers and brands must be cautious not to lose sight of the legacies of lockdown. One of the most notable is the new ‘conscious consumer’. After the pandemic, we became more aware of the impact shopping habits have on the environment. A recent report from PFS and LiveArea, ‘Selling Sustainability:…
The post What does the conscious consumer want in 2021? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

There are many different call center metrics used to measure activity and efficiency. Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, can be tracked through integrated phone systems and call center cloud-based technology.
These include metrics like customer satisfaction (CSat) score, average handle time (AHT), net promoter score (NPS), occupancy rate, average speed of answer (ASA), first call resolution (FCR), and more.
Different call centers might have different goals, and thus have different metrics to prioritize. But, there’s one metric that every call center needs to prioritize: cost per contact.
The Executive Guide to Improving 6 Call Center Metrics
Why is cost per contact important?
Cost per contact determines how much a call center pays for a contact or call. Think of each individual customer interaction as a single unit of work. The lower the cost per contact, the more efficient your call center is.
Call center metrics are important for understanding where your call center can improve. Using KPIs help improve customer experience and satisfaction and agent efficiency while ensuring your operations are more cost-effective.
High cost per contact limits operational efficiency in your call center. That’s why it’s important to constantly measure efficiency through metrics to maximize efficiency.
The Only Call Center Agent Performance Metrics You’ll Ever Need
How do you calculate cost per contact?
To calculate cost per contact, add up all operating expenses of a call center and divide it by the annual inbound contact volume of the contact center.
Examples of operating expenses for a call center include:

Employee salaries.
Overtime pay.
Bonuses.
Commissions and other incentive compensation.
Facilities costs.
Hardware and computers.
Office supplies and furniture.
Software licensing.
Travel.
Education and training.

It’s important to note that most call center expenses are in labor and personnel costs. Some call centers only factor the costs of employees in their calculations for cost per contact. Call centers that add up all expenses use fully loaded costs.
Inbound call volume is the total number of calls to the call center minus abandoned calls. But, contact volume for a contact center includes all contacts from:

Voice calls.
Emails.
Website messages.
Social media chat messages.
Faxes.
Walk-ins.

So, put simply:
Cost per contact = monthly operating costs/ (# of contacts or interactions per month- abandoned calls)
What is the ideal cost per contact for your contact center?
For contact centers that calculate only employee costs in their formulas, average costs per call range from $1.11 to $3.29 per 3-4 customer call. For contact centers using fully loaded costs, the cost per contact increases to about $2.70 to $5.60 per call.
You should aim for a cost per contact that’s close to or above the averages listed above.
Tools and tactics for reducing cost per contact.
Here are some strategies to reduce your cost per call or contact:
Call monitoring and recording: Real-time call monitoring and recording helps call centers identify areas for improvement in their agents’ call tactics. This reduces abandon rate and in turn, reduces cost per call or contact. Call monitoring also helps contact centers measure average call handle time, call duration, abandoned calls, and more.
Shift scheduling: Maintaining a strategic agent schedule can help reduce cost per contact. During peak times, make sure your most skilled agents are on the floor, or optimize part-time workers for peaks and valleys in call volume.
Quality education and training: Investing in employees from the first day can assure better performance. Call center agent training costs money, but it’s worth it because skilled agents reduce call time, improve customer service, and reduce cost per contact.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

As the dynamo of digital and technological development drives the wheels of change faster than ever before, organisations across all sectors are having to adapt. Changes in consumer attitudes and behaviours, the effects of technology on customer experience (CX) and the progressive innovations that are transforming markets are all having an impact. Here, Ross Kittlety,…
The post Customer Experience (CX): Adapting to changing times appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

“Let’s make more!”

99.99% of what’s produced and sold is a copy or variation of something that was already made and sold. That’s the power of industry to shape our world–it’s very good at producing more of what’s finding a market.

And so we paved more roads, built more cars and pumped more oil. And we made more telemarketing calls, sent more spam and bought more ads. And we built more houses, produced more bandages and developed ever more convenient ways to shop.

It doesn’t matter if it’s hard work. The system finds a way.

It’s beyond dispute that industry is an efficient way to produce more. The question is: More of what?