Category: Customer Experience

Books are written almost a year before they come out.
Tweets take about 24 seconds to launch.
Which world would you like to live in, book-world or twitter-world?
If you were designing an ad campaign for your project that would run in three years, what would it say? Can you write the resume or Linkedin profile you’d like to have in seven years? Seven months?
Long lead times force us to focus on the destination itself, not the bumps or the detours.
The deadline for submitting your long lead time announcement is midnight tonight. A chance to hurry up and then stick with it.

It means two very different things.

When a person or a marketer takes your time, they’re stealing. Something irretrievable is gone. If your time is taken for selfish reasons, if it’s wasted, there’s no good way to get it back.

On the other hand, when you have enough confidence to take your own time, to take your time to be present, to do the work, to engage with what’s in front of you right now, it’s a gift.

This is precisely what time is for.

We’re not in a race to check off as many boxes as we possibly can before we are out of time. Instead, we have the chance to use the time to create moments that matter. Because they connect us, because they open doors, because the moments, added up, create a life.

Customer service is one piece of the CX puzzle, and it’s not confined solely to the contact center. Companies today must take a holistic approach, and chances are you’ll need to go beyond conventional contact center offerings. There’s no singular way to do that, which largely explains why there are so many different types of choices now. When thinking about CCaaS, you should rethink your CX from the customer’s perspective. The results you achieve could be much more far-reaching than just your contact center. Full article: https://www.nojitter.com/contact-center-customer-experience/ccaas-rethinking-your-cx-and-customer-service-strategy
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In the last years, social media advertising has been understood as a channel that drives short-term sales. At Nepa, we think this is misleading. In fact, there is clear evidence that social media advertising drives long-term sales as well. Our research is based on over 1600 retail social media campaigns and includes direct access to…
The post How can advertisers maximise social media potential? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

In my earlier post, I opened a discussion about how to avoid missing a deadline.

But what happens if you can’t avoid it?

Projects are always on the frontier, combining elements and ideas and effort to do something that’s not been done before, not quite the way we’re doing it here and now.

And so, bold projects sometimes fail to make their deadline. Even if we build systems and use buffers, sometimes it doesn’t work.

Some thoughts:

Don’t wait until the last minute. Wishful thinking is sometimes confused with optimism, but you probably knew more than four days before the deadline that you weren’t going to meet expectations. If people are building dependencies around your promises, then waiting until you have no choice simply makes the miss worse. Because not only are you late, but you were hiding it.
Don’t minimize the problem. You’re late. Clearly. So say it. Loud and (not quite) proud. By owning the original promise and then being clear that you’re aware of the miss, you help the people who were counting on you feel seen and respected.
Create alternatives. This isn’t always possible, but when it is, it usually leads to better relationships. If an airline can’t have a plane in a certain spot at a certain time, it goes a long way if they do the work of finding all 100 people inconvenienced a new plan, instead of putting that on them, one at a time.
There’s a difference between seeing the damage (and working to ameliorate it) and accepting shame and blame. It’s clear that the future is unclear, and that things happen. If you can clearly outline what you’ve seen and what you’ve learned, it doesn’t make your clients feel better if you also fall on a sword–because if it’s not your fault, the sword is meaningless theater. And if it is your fault, it’s worth telling us that as well.
In short, there’s no good way to make a missed deadline meaningless to the person who was counting on you. Being counted on is a gift. If you want to be counted on next time, best to invest early and often in making that deadline, and then, in the rare cases when it’s not enough, treating your clients with the respect that you’d like to receive in a similar situation.

[Even better, check out out my previous post and create approaches so you don’t miss the deadline in the first place.]

Deadlines are valuable, and deadlines are expensive.

Organized systems and societies need deadlines. It would be impossible to efficiently build a house if the subcontractors could deliver their goods or services whenever it were convenient for them. Movie studios and book publishers schedule their releases months in advance to allow distribution teams to plan their work. Software is dependent on subsystems that have to be in place before the entire program can work.

Along with the value that synchronized deliverables create, there are also real costs. Not simply the organizational cost of a missed deadline, but the significant damage to a reputation or brand that happens when a promise isn’t kept. And there’s a human cost–the stress and strain that comes from working to keep a promise that we might not have personally made, or that might be more difficult because someone else didn’t perform their part of the dance.

In the wide-open race for attention and commitments, the standards of deadlines have been wavering. For forty years, Saturday Night Live has gone on at 11:30. Not, as its creator says, because it’s ready, but because it’s 11:30. That’s the deal.

On Kickstarter, this sort of sacrosanct deadline is rare indeed. “This charger will ship in six weeks!” they say, when actually, it’s been more than a year with no shipment date in sight. Or with venture capitalists and other backers. “We’re going to beat the competition to market by three months.” Sometimes it feels like if the company doesn’t bring wishful thinking to the table, they won’t get funded. Given that choice, it’s no wonder that people get desperate. Wishful thinking might not be called lying, but it is. We should know better.

Earning the reputation as someone (a freelancer, a marketer, a company, a leader) who doesn’t miss a deadline is valuable. And it doesn’t happen simply because you avoid sleeping and work like a dog. That’s the last resort of someone who isn’t good at planning.

Here are some basic principles that might help with the planning part:

If you’re competing in an industry where the only way to ‘win’ is to lie about deadlines, realize that competing in that industry is a choice, and accept that you’re going to miss deadlines and have to deal with the emotional overhead that comes with that.
Knowing that it’s a choice, consider picking a different industry, one where keeping deadlines is expected and where you can gain satisfaction in creating value for others by keeping your promises.
Don’t rely on false deadlines as a form of incentive. It won’t work the same on everyone, which means that some people will take you at your word and actually deliver on time, while others will assume that it was simply a guideline. It’s more efficient to be clear and to help people understand from the outset what you mean by a deadline. The boy cried wolf but the villagers didn’t come.
At the same time, don’t use internal deadlines as a guaranteed component of your external promises. A project with no buffers is certain to be late. Not just likely to be late, but certain. Better buffers make better deadlines.
Embrace the fact that delivering something on a certain date costs more than delivering it whenever it’s ready. As a result, you should charge more, perhaps a great deal more, for the value that your promise of a deadline creates. And then spend that money to make sure the deadline isn’t missed.
Deadlines aren’t kept by people ‘doing their best.’ Keeping a deadline requires a systemic approach to dependencies and buffers and scenario planning. If you’re regularly cutting corners or burning out to meet deadlines, you have a systems problem.
The antidote to feature creep isn’t occasional pruning. That’s emotionally draining and a losing battle. The answer is to actively restructure the spec, removing or adding entire blocks of work. “That will be in the next version,” is a totally acceptable answer, particularly when people are depending on this version to ship on time.
A single deadline is a deadline that will certainly not be met. But if you can break down your big deadline into ten or fifteen intermediate milestones, you will know about your progress long before it’s too late to do something about it.
The Mythical Person-Month is a serious trap. Nine people, working together in perfect harmony, cannot figure out how to have a baby in one month. Throwing more people at a project often does not speed it up. By the time you start to solve a deadline problem this way, it might be too late. The alternative is to staff each component of your project with the right number of people, and to have as many components running in parallel as possible.
Bottlenecks are useful, until they aren’t. If you need just one person to approve every element of your project, it’s unlikely you can run as many things in parallel as you could. The alternative is to have a rigorous spec created in advance, in which many standards are approved before you even begin the work.
Discussions about timing often devolve into issues of trust, shame and effort. That’s not nearly as helpful as separating conversations about system structure and data from the ones about commitment and oomph.
Hidden problems don’t get better. In a hyper-connected world, there’s no technical reason why the project manager can’t know what the team in the field knows about the state of the project.

Like most things that matter, keeping deadlines is a skill, and since it’s a skill, we can learn it.

[More on this in my next post on what to do if you can’t avoid breaking your promise.]

The pandemic has taught us many things and gave some companies a costly lesson of how to look after their employees. As it turns out, the way employers treat their employees has an impact on customers’ loyalty and their general opinion. Flashback to July 2020. The pandemic is doing the rounds, and we’re all grappling…
The post Lessons from lockdown: why customers care about your employer brand appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Employee feedback is critical for businesses who want to understand their employees’ opinions and attitudes towards work, and improve their business policies and processes. Measuring engagement through surveys allows for employees to feel heard.
Engagement is especially important for call centers, since staff turnover is typically high. Research shows that customer complaints, poor morale, and low pay all attribute to high turnover rates in the call center industry. However, you can’t know the specifics around an agent’s satisfaction levels without asking them about it. That’s why agent engagement surveys are so important.
Discover the Six Crucial Contact Center Trends That Will Shape 2021
What is the Purpose of an Agent Engagement Survey?
Agent engagement surveys help you reach the end goals of better profits and agent performance. To get there, however, surveys help you fulfill 3 purposes:

Find out how agents feel about their work and the company.
Show agents that you care about their voices and opinions.
Identify areas for company and agent improvement.

Best Practices for Agent Engagement Surveys
When drafting your agent engagement survey, you might be tempted to list every burning question you have for your agents. However, to keep your survey results measurable, relevant, and actionable, consider these best practices:
How to Create a Great Customer Perception Survey
1. Shorter is better
Shorter surveys have a better chance at completion, and are more reliable. If your survey is long, there’s a higher chance that agents won’t complete them, which can weaken the overall data. Keep surveys short, and relevant to your call center’s business processes and culture.
2. Avoid jargon and technical terms wherever possible
Keep the survey flow simple and easy. Avoid using technical terms and jargon where possible, to avoid frustration and confusion.
3. Keep the questions as easy to answer as possible
If there’s an efficient and easy way to get something done, your agents will be more productive. Similar to how call-back technology makes agents’ work easier, clear and concise survey questions make it easier for agents to complete the survey.

TIP:
You can significantly reduce agent overwhelm and high call volumes with call-back technology.

4. Go easy on the open-ended questions
Too many open-ended questions negatively affects response rate, and ability for analysis. While some open-ended questions help you learn unique information about your agents, you should limit them to ensure you can measure and analyze your survey data.
5. Keep each question about one topic
Avoid confusion and keep things simple by sticking to one topic per question.
6. Reward employees for participation
Make sure to reward employees evenly for participation. This might look like a staff pizza lunch, or letting them go home an hour early during quiet periods. Rewarding your agents in general is a great strategy for engagement.
7. Keep it voluntarily anonymous
Anonymous surveys encourage honesty from agents in completing the survey. Give your agents the opportunity to choose their preference. You might find that some prefer to identify themselves with their feedback, and they’ll appreciate you giving them the option to choose.
Example Questions for a Call Center Agent Engagement Survey
1. How do you feel about work today?
Call centers are stressful work environments, as they frequently need to deal with frustrated customers. This stress can lead to burnout, so it’s important to know how your agents are feeling in their day-to-day work.
2. Would you recommend [organization] to your friends as an employer?
As mentioned, call center jobs are stressful. That’s why it’s so important for employers to take an active role in employee engagement. If your agents aren’t happy at work, they’re far less likely to recommend you as an employer to their friends.
9 Inclusive Practices to Boost Agent Performance
3. Are you proud to work for [organization]?
This question lets you know how your agents feel about your organization. If your agents aren’t proud to work at your call center, this might be an opportunity for you to improve your company policies and culture.
4. Are you satisfied with your current compensation and benefits?
Most call centers offer a base pay with bonuses. If employees are dissatisfied with compensation and benefits, it might be an indication that you need to either better outline performance goals for bonuses, or consider promotions for high-performing agents.
5. Do you receive constructive feedback from your manager?
Call center managers sometimes rely too heavily on data to inform coaching and performance measures. The truth is, agents are all unique and require targeted feedback to excel in their role.
6. Does your manager recognize your efforts when you perform well?
Manager-employee relationships are especially important in call centers. Agents should feel acknowledged, supported, and recognized by their managers, so it’s important to learn if there are any issues as soon as possible.
7. Do you have a friend at work?
Coworker relationships play an integral role in call center agent engagement. This question helps you assess a need for greater group engagement. Perhaps your company can consider social events and employee lunches to improve coworker relationships.
8. Is your team receptive to your suggestions?
Feeling heard by your manager is one thing, but feeling heard by your coworkers can be equally important for a call center agent. This question helps identify a need for more group meetings and sessions where every agent feels like their voices are heard.
9. Do your team members contribute to your success?
Call center agents should have shared goals with their colleagues and learn from each other. This question helps you identify a need to perhaps have more team huddles or group coaching sessions.
10. Do you have sufficient free time for your family and personal life?
As a call center, you won’t be able to satisfy your customers with unhappy employees. Work-life balance is essential to agent satisfaction, so this question will help you better identify any needs for improved flex-time options or introduce more vacation days.
3 Reasons Why Agent Satisfaction is the New Customer Satisfaction
11. Do you have the materials, equipment, and permissions, and technology you need to do your job effectively?
The right technology makes a huge difference in the day-to-day operations of a call center agent. Agents are sometimes hesitant to express technology concerns, so this question helps you assess whether or not you should invest in better technology. Fonolo’s cloud-based call-back technology is a great start.
12. Do you have opportunities to learn and develop your career at work?
Call centers have many opportunities for career growth and learning and development. You might offer your agents opportunities to move laterally to different departments to learn about a different area of work, coaching sessions, or opportunities for advancement. Use this question to make sure your agents are aware of these opportunities, and to learn more about your agents’ learning and development goals.
Final Thoughts
Agent engagement surveys help you understand your employees’ experiences and attitudes towards your call center. They also help you to improve company and agent performance, and heighten employee retention.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

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This is very different from “someday.”
Choose any date you like, as far in the future as you like. But a date, circled on the calendar.
By that date, what will you have implemented? What will be in place? Where will you be, what will you be doing?
Way more powerful than someday.