Category: Customer Experience

It always seemed like a silly question–school is for doing what you’re told, summer vacation was for discovering all the things that were worth caring about.

As adults though, regardless of our hemisphere, we’re always on vacation from school. No tests or diplomas, simply a huge array of choices.

And in a world that keeps changing, regardless of how much we might want it to slow down, learning is the attribute that is often overlooked.

The folks at Linkedin asked me to create a short video series on how organizations can become more creative. You can check it out here.

And Akimbo, proudly an independent B corp, has a bunch of effective workshops coming up, all of which you can find out more about today:

The Regular Decision Deadline is July 27 for altMBA’s October 2021 session

The ninth (!) session of the Podcasting Workshop with Alex DiPalma is now open for pre-enrollment (starts July 20th).

The sixth session of the Freelancer’s Workshop starts in about a month. Nothing will transform your work as a soloist as much as this workshop.

Bestselling author Bernadette Jiwa’s powerful Storytelling Workshop starts in August as well. You can sign up today.

And we’re around the corner from their breakthrough Real Skills Conference. Check out the details so you don’t miss out.

8 reasons why you need effective business communication in your company
Improves employee engagement
Good for team building
Boosts customer relationships
Helps with business goals
Creates a communicative culture
Encourages collaboration
Increases productivity
Improves creativity
Full article: https://www.ringcentral.com/us/en/blog/effective-business-communication/
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Over the past year or so, the concepts of leadership awareness, emotional intelligence, and employee mental health became a central topic for EX and HR professionals worldwide. We saw first-hand how COVID-19 and other social events around diversity and inclusion reshape and develop the EX-field. As a team determined to deepen our understanding of what…
The post The future of work: An interview with Jacob Morgan appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

The play before time ran out. The last speech of the campaign. The typo on your resume or the spot on your tie. The final decision before the company declared bankruptcy.

We focus on the thing that happened just before the end. And that’s almost always an unimportant moment.

Things went wrong (or things went right) because of a long series of decisions and implementations. A misguided strategy, a bad hire, a brilliant insight about network effects–these are the acts with leverage, not the obvious thing that all the pundits would like to talk about.

When you get to the thing before the last thing, don’t sweat it. It’s almost certainly too late to make the outcome change. On the other hand, when you’re quietly discussing the thing before that before that before that before that, it might pay to bring more attention to it than the circumstances seem to demand. Because that’s the key moment.

Over the past year, the number of so-called remote work experts and hybrid work advocates grew dramatically. However, implementing work from home takes careful planning and often requires external help from an expert. If not implemented intentionally, remote work can cause employee burnout, disengagement, and Zoom fatigue. Can it be that we are not doing…
The post The future of hybrid work model: glimpses from Ei Evolution Summit appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

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Contact centers help customers get the information they need from a business while gathering valuable consumer insights through outbound and inbound communication. However, a contact center can’t function properly without effective, customizable call routing.
What is call routing?
Call routing ensures customers can access the information they need. The routing process directs incoming calls to specific people or departments within a contact center. Call routing isn’t new – the first manual switchboard of the late 1870s used the same concept to direct telephone traffic. This first instance of call routing in New Haven, Connecticut, allowed 21 customers to be directed with the help of a manual switchboard operator.
Call centers and call routing evolved more in the mid 1900s, with the first Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) appearing after the hacking of an Air Traffic Control System in England. The history of call centers and call routing included AT&T’s establishment of toll-free numbers in the mid-1960s, and the rollout of IVR (Interactive Voice Response) technology in call centers in the late-1970s.
Most call routing these days is more sophisticated, and is often integrated with Computer Telephone Integrated systems (CTI) or Voice Over Internet Protocols (VOIP), both of which are types of contact center technology that keeps things running smoothly. Call routing is essential for managing high call volumes and ensuring customer satisfaction.
Types of contact center call routing.
Different types of call routing are classified by who the call will be directed to and how each call is queued.
Time-based and location-based.
This is one of the most common methods of call routing. Using the caller’s time zone and global location, you can connect them with an appropriate support agent in their region. With this approach, businesses can support their customers worldwide while contact centers maintain their set business hours.

DID YOU KNOW?
Fonolo’s Smart Routing allows contact centers to limit calls from certain countries, states or provinces.

Skills-based.
Skill-based – or department-based – call routing directs customer calls to agents based on their skills and knowledge. For example, an IVR system might direct a caller to a department that deals with complaints or product returns. It could also direct a caller to a technology support specialist. A caller might need to be routed to a representative at the managerial level. By quickly getting a caller to the correct representative with the right skills, you can reduce hold time and decrease abandonment rates by up to 60%.
Caller ID.
Caller ID call routing directs customers based on their call history. For example, if the customer has called before about a particular product, the system might direct them to a representative they have spoken to before. This can be very reassuring for the customer, as it prevents them from having to share their details from scratch.
Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Machine learning via AI can use biometrics to get customers what they need. Voice biometrics, for example, can authenticate a customer’s identity without requiring them to undergo a long identification process (forms, questionnaires, etc.).
Interactive Voice Response (IVR).
IVRs are one of the most common fixtures in a contact center. This tool can double as a form of self-service so customers can find information without needing to speak to an agent. IVRs can also direct a customer call based on how the customer voices their needs.
8 Tips for Creating a Great Visual IVR
Methods of routing calls in the contact center.
There are a few methods, or policies, of call routing that your contact center might use:

Simultaneous: Great for speed, this call routing method gives all team members the option to take a call, since all of their phones will ring at the same time.

Weighted: An ideal method for call centers that have team members of varying skills, the weighted method allows a ratio of calls to be routed to each agent. For example, the most experienced or high-performing agent could receive 80% of calls, while less experienced agents might receive the remaining 20%.

Uniform: This routing method directs each incoming call to the agent who has been available the longest. For example, an agent that hasn’t had a call for 1 hour will receive the next call before an agent that hasn’t had a call for half an hour.

Regular: This method directs calls to agents in chronological order. Agent 1 will get the first call, Agent 2 will get the second, and Agent 3 will get the next call if Agent 1 or 2 aren’t available.

Round-Robin: This method ensures all calls are distributed equally among your team members, one at a time.

Benefits of call routing.
Call routing offers countless benefits to both contact centers and customers.
With smart call routing, a contact center can:

Optimize resources and use their call agents as efficiently as possible.
Improve customer satisfaction through skill-based routing, by getting them relevant and timely support.
Increase First Call Resolution (FCR), reduce average handling time and decrease customer wait times.
Increase agent availability by routing calls to different time zones.
The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

If you were to discover that your business was ignoring the needs of a potential customer base worth £274 billion per year how would you react? Would you continue doing business without addressing the problem or even showing a slight interest in making the necessary changes? The group in question is people with disabilities and…
The post Disability awareness is a key element of improved CX appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Organizations grow when they develop a base of customers.

Companies find profits, non-profits serve their cause, political ideas become movements for just one reason: they develop a group of people who are changed by what they do. For ease, let’s call them ‘customers.’

Once you see that, it becomes pretty clear that this is the most difficult and important thing that the organization does, and in fact is the only one you can’t outsource or work your way around.

It’s possible but unlikely that the first product or service you develop will be exactly what potential customers were already hoping for. That’s why failure is the fuel that moves new projects forward. Failure is a way of discovering one more thing that customers didn’t want, and perhaps, learning a bit about what they might want. By iterating without tears or fears, organizations are able to discover things about their future customers.

Sometimes (actually, almost every time) the innovation an organization brings to the market isn’t instantly and universally adopted. While there are people who get satisfaction and status and results by going first (early adopters), most customers would prefer to wait. These customers see little upside in investing the time to be a pioneer or in taking the risk to go first.

[And to be clear, that’s true for non-profit donors, voters and any other sort of ‘customer’].

And so you see the paradox: on one hand, organizations need to be agile and eager to pivot as they engage with a market that’s invisible or skeptical, but on the other hand, ideas don’t spread through a marketplace instantly.

That’s one reason why it’s so important to identify your smallest viable audience. The smallest group of customers that will enable you to thrive. By seeing them, obsessing about them and serving them, you can refine your product at the very same time that you establish the conditions for growth.

At this stage, growth can come from one of two places:

It could be that your core audience begins to tell the others. That you’ve built the network effect into your offering, so that it works even better when people tell their friends and colleagues. This is Tom’s shoes or Starbucks coffee. This is Twitter and the ice bucket challenge as well. When you create a purple cow, the remarkable nature of your product or service is in fact part of the reason people buy it, and the reason they talk about it. Not because it helps you, but because it helps them.

Or, just as powerful, it could be that your success at serving this small but viable audience gives you the team, the cash flow and most of all, the social proof to begin to find a different set of customers. Customers that might want a different set of benefits, a different story, a different way to change.

Often, this shift to a different customer set is difficult, because now you might feel stretched, you might even have to leave behind the people who originally embraced you and your offering. Patagonia doesn’t spend a lot of time selling removable pitons to hard-core rock climbers anymore. As they shifted to become the organization they are now, they probably got a lot of push back from people who said, “no one buys from them anymore, it’s too popular.”

Both approaches share two underlying principles:

You’re telling a story.

You’re making a change.

Being clear about ‘who’s it for?’ and ‘what’s it for?’ is the actual hard work of developing customers. And if you’re not gaining traction, deciding to hype harder is not the right choice. Traction doesn’t come from more social posting or working your network and asking for favors. Traction comes from accompanying the customers you’ve chosen on a journey that they’re eager to go on.

And the hard work of customer development is finding a reason for your customers to bring in new customers, or discovering a path where you can help non-customers discover what you offer and eagerly engage with it.

Further Reading: Blank & Dorf, Purple Cow, Crossing the Chasm, Story Driven, This is Marketing

Sjain Ventures focuses more on customer demands. We believe that the only way to handle user’s app fatigue is to keep innovating things to enhance their experience with the app. The users are inclined more towards apps that provide them with settings and access over data limit control and privacy control. Contact us to know more at Sjain Ventures
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