Category: Customer Experience

No matter what brand or industry you represent, denying your employees the right tools to do their job properly is a sure-fire way to lower engagement. With the right mechanisms at their disposal, agents are better equipped to drive sales, solve customer disputes, and otherwise contribute to your bottom line and call center metric health.
But technology has remained a barrier for modern contact centers. Most enterprise software is subpar because they have opted to invest in cheaper outdated technologies. On top of that, call center agents’ opinions usually isn’t included in discussions around tech upgrades and updates.
This needs to change. In a hybrid or remote call center environment, when technical help is hard to find when something goes wrong, it’s more important than ever to give your agents what they need to do their job well. This includes investing in technology that makes life easier for them. Here, we break down the types of technology you should invest in to improve your call center ecosystem, and bolster call center agency engagement and employee retention.
How to Foster Agent Engagement in a Hybrid Contact Center
Invest in technology that takes eases high call volumes.
Support your agents by offering them tools that take the edge off peak call center periods. These are arguably the most stressful moments for call centers. Investing in technologies that take the burden off of your agents shows you care about their needs, and can result in higher employee engagement.
Of course, one way contact center managers can support agents during a flood of inbound calls is to hire more bodies. However, this can become expensive quickly. As an alternative, you may consider outsourcing overflow handling services to ensure all inbound customers calls can be answered and resolved in a timely fashion.
Another cost-effective technology option? Call-backs. These ensure your agents don’t get overloaded during peak periods and your customers aren’t waiting endlessly on hold (which can lead to low CSat scores, and lost sales). Whatever technology you invest in, your agents will thank you with better engagement, and improved performance.
Use AI technology to assist your call center agents.
Like we predicted in our 2021 Contact Center Trends Report, AI is here to stay. It doesn’t replace human beings in the contact center – but it does enhance their ability to do their job effectively. It’s time to leverage advances in knowledge-based AI that can ultimately benefit and support your agents, including the ability to forecast call volume spikes.
Not only is AI an affordable technological option, it also ensures you can easily staff-up or otherwise support your call center agents proactively, without them having to call in for last-minute backup. And your agents will thank you for it with heightened engagement. According to Forbes, AI technology can help you:

Simplify your agents’ jobs
Triage more effectively, and
Improve customer communications

From a consumer standpoint, smart call center AI can work wonders for the customer experience. Instead of using cold and calculated bots, smart AI can promote a more humane and personalized customer journey by leveraging knowledge-based AI to direct the customer to the right person or solution, and fast.
Monitor call center agent engagement (to a point).
In addition to giving agents the tools to finish the job, call center leadership can take the guesswork out of how to boost agent engagement by involving employees in the feedback loop. Asking call center agents, “What can we do to engage you more?” is a reasonable, not to mention efficient, approach to get the wheels in motion.
Technology can also play a role here: provide staff with platforms and/or systems that allow them to weigh in on what’s working, and what’s not, on a frequent basis. This can be as simple as a Google survey or an Asana form. Whatever tool you choose, ensure your agents have a platform upon which to provide feedback often. More importantly, make it your mission to implement that feedback, and tell you agents how their opinions have impacted the overall operations of your department.

TIP:
When it comes to monitoring engagement, don’t overdo it. Forcing engagement can (and likely will) backfire.

Remember: It’s a learning process.
There are endless ways to approach adding technologies to your growing call center. Ultimately, whatever technology you implement needs to align with your business goals and your budget. It is, however, important to keep two things in mind, no matter the scenario:

Make sure your technology is scalable: As your business and headcount grow, it’s important to remember that scrawny technologies that can’t sustain growth will break easily and often (especially if the fix is always to ‘patch the problem’). This will frustrate your customers and agents, decreasing satisfaction and increasing call center turnover in the long run.

Involve your team always: not all technologies are right for all call centers. When testing out new technologies, make sure your agents are a big part of the decision-making process, and have ample opportunity to trial and test the technology. This will make them feel valued, as well as involved.
The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

Advice from people who have gotten lucky is a tricky thing.

Perhaps they did x, y and z, and then got lucky. As story telling creatures, it’s natural to assume that x, y or z had something to do with it. Which can lead to bad advice.

Consider the guy who smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish and lived to be 100. It’s not clear that his habits helped him get lucky.

Luck might not be a strategy, but setting yourself up to be lucky might be.

Luck is a tactic. An unpredictable one, sure, but if it works, it works. A useful strategy might be: I’m going to establish a pattern of resilience and apply information and testing to discover what works. And one of the tactics to support that strategy could be showing up in places where luck can help me out. If I can persist long enough, I’ll get lucky.

But that’s very different than the false correlation of past behavior with lucky outcomes.

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“Data-driven insights” quickly emerged as one of the recent top marketing buzz terms. The question is – do we really know what it means, and how are those insights being used in practice? With the ongoing challenges of data privacy laws, many brand marketers started re-evaluating their measurement strategies to set more appropriate KPIs for…
The post Marketers, get creative! New ways of measuring ad effectiveness appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

That’s a fun question, but nearly as useful as, “what’s effective?”
Pick up a fifteen-year-old copy of Wired, or a business book from 1969 and see what’s still around.
The technology keeps changing, but connection and trust are what still work. Ideas that spread, win. Ideas that stick are worth even more. You can race to be first on a new platform, but it’s far better to be the voice that we would miss if you weren’t there.

Phrenology was discredited a long time ago. People who should have known better were sure that by studying the bumps on someone’s head, a trained expert could divine insights about their personality. It ended up being used to advance racist and class-based agendas, and was completely debunked. It faded away for decades. And it’s back.

New technology creates the appearance (and sometimes the actual fact) of new insights, new resolution, new certainty.

We might not know what an oscillation overthruster is, or why single photon imaging is better, but it sounds well studied and precise. A chart from Excel seems a lot more certain than one that’s hand drawn.

In our search for anecdotes, particularly about health, behavior or the economy, this apparent increase in accuracy opens the door for more hope, even if it’s not based on widespread results.

The charts used to describe the behavior of stocks and tokens keep getting more complex and refined, but they’re still unable to accurately predict what will happen next week.

The fancy readouts of horoscopes or biorhythms glow with many insignificant digits, but they still tell us nothing about someone’s future, any more than palm reading does.

And an x-ray can tell us with great certainty if your appendix has burst, but a SPECT scan is useless in determining someone’s personality without the aid of an in-person consultation, which is all we’ve ever needed. In fact, that’s precisely how phrenology used to work: meet with someone first, then find validation in the mysterious reading of their bumps.

The standard worth checking for is easy: From the chart or the bumps or the scan alone, without meeting the patient, tell me what you see and what’s going to happen next.

They put Einstein’s brain in a jar, but learned nothing from it.

The folks who ate green coffee beans or swallowed colloidal silver have plenty of anecdotes to support their placebos. And when they move on from pyramids to magnets, the anecdotes will follow them. But anecdotes aren’t science. Like coincidences, they’re by-products of our story-seeking minds, connections we make as we search for solace in a confusing world. And sometimes marketers use the anecdotes to make a sale and hurt the customer.

Very few interventions that involve humans are simple. We need more than a double-blind study, because humans aren’t double-blind. We know what’s on offer, and the story we tell ourselves changes how we behave.

Science is often not the right answer to every question–it often fails to deliver what we need. But hustles pretending to be science are almost always a bad idea.

In fact, stories are too important and worthwhile to need a babble of pseudoscience that some would like put on them.

Placebos are powerful, and if they’re cheap and benign, I’m all for them. My day is filled with placebos of all kinds, because they work. The problems happen when they stop being benign, when they keep us from appropriate treatment and when they’re used against us…

Somehow, we’ve persuaded ourselves that we need to pretend that our anecdotal interventions are actual scientific breakthroughs instead of embracing the fact that we’re humans, and that stories work on us. By wearing the mantle of science, hypesters are not only able to charge more, but they also degrade the reputation of the very methods they purport to use–when we see firsthand that pretend science doesn’t work, we’re tempted to imagine that the same is true for interventions that are actually studied and tested.

We wouldn’t fly on a plane or cross a bridge that was built with the same doublespeak that many folk medicines and soothsayers use. They have their place, they make us who we are, but anecdotes aren’t science.

They rhyme, but they have opposite meanings. It’s very difficult to feel both emotions at the same time, and one is far more productive than the other.

Are you feeling overwhelmed? Don’t have the internal resources to give your customer journey the attention it deserves? Talkdesk offers advanced administrative services to help customers optimize their contact center. Talkdesk continue to work closely with their customers to improve Customer Experience (CX) and achieve greater revenue. By partnering with leading customer experience consultancies to outsource administrative efforts, we aim to reinforce our commitment towards providing customers with a better agent and customer experience, and increased customer advocacy. Talkdesk Managed Services allows businesses to supplement their teams with an advanced administrator. Managing software and associated tasks needed to put the contact center running smoothly and efficiently becomes easier, relieving the administrative obligation and letting businesses focus on operational and strategic tasks. While Talkdesk Technical Account Managers and Premium Support Engineers devote themselves to optimize the platform and provide technical leadership, a dedicated administrator measures, reports, analyzes, and optimizes contact center operations, and monitors and resolves issues before they disrupt agents, customers, or the business. Full article: https://www.talkdesk.com/blog/relieve-admin-duties-focus-on-cx/
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The risk of data security threats and cybercrime has increased significantly during COVID-19 as cybercriminals exploit weaknesses in remote work set-ups. While working from home gives our employees safety, convenience, and flexibility, it also increases chances for online treats. The vulnerability of home-based networks is providing cybercriminals with new opportunities for data theft and digital…
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In this article, read how small businesses can compete with big brands and thrive in this overloaded market. The David vs. Goliath fight between small and large businesses has been raging for decades. On the most basic level, large corporations have resources unimaginable for small businesses with under 500 employees. It is incredibly difficult for…
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