Category: Customer Experience

Are we doing enough to adjust websites for all customers out there, including ones with disabilities? The past year has forced all of us to become more tech-savvy, but brands still need to focus on providing accessible online services. Simplicity is the core value to include in all digital strategies, despite how accustomed we became…
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Millions of people all over the world found themselves forced to change their purchasing behaviours overnight, which had a strong impact on global trade. The pandemic was a turning point for customers’ relationships with companies and their service teams. People’s loyalty towards brands was strongly challenged by the quality of services during uncertainty. Although the…
The post Overcoming mental health challenges with the right CX approach appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

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“Ignore sunk costs” is the critical lesson of useful decision making.

The thing you earned, that you depend on, that was hard to do–it’s a gift from your former self. Just because you have a law degree, a travel agency or the ability to do calligraphy in Cyrillic doesn’t mean that your future self is obligated to accept that gift.

We hold on to the old competencies and our hard-earned status roles far longer than we should. The only way to be creative is to do something new, and the path to something new requires leaving something else behind.

New decisions based on new information are at the heart of leadership. But you can’t make those decisions if you’re also busy calculating how much the old decisions cost you.

Creativity is the generous act of solving an interesting problem on behalf of someone else. It’s a chance to take emotional and intellectual risks with generosity.

Do that often enough and you can create a practice around it. It’s not about being gifted or touched by the muse. Instead, our creative practice (whether you’re a painter, a coach or a fundraiser) is a commitment to the problems in front of us and the people who will benefit from a useful solution to them.

I built a workshop on creativity that’s run by the folks at Akimbo. The fourth session starts this week. If you’re ready to get serious about your art, whatever form it takes, I hope you’ll check it out.

In May this year, Alida, a creator of the world’s first CXM & Insights Platform, has been awarded the Great Place to Work® certification. This was a wonderful invitation for our team to meet up with Alida’s CEO Ross Wainwright and find out more about his approach to people-centred leadership, trust, and accountability at the…
The post Leading with empathy: An interview with Ross Wainwright, CEO of Alida appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Many customer experience (CX) professionals appreciate the multi-dimensional value of artificial intelligence (AI) and its effectiveness at lowering resolution costs while increasing customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. AI with machine-learning (ML) drives smarter, faster, and better contact centers, so it’s important to know how to operationalize it for long-term success. AI models power a system that learns from high-quality data. These are initially curated data sets, which include important business details like product names, terminologies, customer intent, and speech patterns. The accuracy of AI models depends on the completeness of training data, which is not static and must consider the variability of the business environment. #customerexperience #cx #custexp #customerservice #AI #artificialintelligence #CSAT #ML #smartcx #communications #Talkdesk #VesuvITas Full article: https://www.talkdesk.com/blog/accurate-adaptable-artificial-intelligence/
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Call center managers are always on the lookout for ways to increase the productivity of their agents and the overall efficiency of their departments. However, these plans are usually put on hold due to high call volume periods and unexpected crises.
These peak periods in call volume can bring the voice channel to near breaking point. With customers clogging up the phone lines, your agents will be overwhelmed with increased customer frustration. So, when it comes to tackling these never-ending inbound calls on the voice channel, what’s a call center manager to do?
The Contact Center Guide to Managing Spikes in Call Volume
Two words: call deflection. This powerful strategy takes the pressure off the phone lines by strategically diverting customer inquiries to other digital or messaging channels. It ultimately lightens the load for your agents and your larger call center infrastructure.
Caution: if done incorrectly, call deflection can damage KPIs, agent engagement, and your customer satisfaction (CSat) scores.
When done correctly, a call deflection strategy can change your business, and the lives of your customer support staff, for the better.
Read on to learn more about what call deflection is, how it can benefit a customer support program, and proven call deflection strategies that improve the overall health of a contact center.
What is Call Deflection in a Contact Center?
A simple definition of call deflection? It’s the strategy of directing customers to a) not call you, but rather; b) use another channel to contact you instead (think virtual assistants, text messaging, or chatbots).
Moving customers to a different channel can happen at any stage of the customer support journey: pre-call, post-call, in-call. While it may seem like you’re shunning customers, you’re not: when done correctly, a customer who encounters call deflection should leave their customer support journey feeling taken care of, with their issue resolved quickly and painlessly.
5 Best Practices for Great Self-Service Customer Support
How does Call Deflection Benefit a Call Center?
When choreographed properly, a call deflection strategy can be hugely beneficial to your overall contact center operation. It can:
Free up your call center agents.
This way, they can answer more calls (and perhaps make more sales or solve more pressing issues as a result)
Speed up the resolution process for customers.
If they are deflected to another channel where information is readily available for them (say, an FAQ page), they may be able to get an answer faster, and not have to wait endlessly on hold for the next available agent.
Improve your metrics of success.
This includes your SLAs, your ASAs, and your CSat scores. It can also help you manage spikes in call volume in the long run.
Top Call Deflection Strategies
One of the golden rules of customer service: make the customer feel valued (and not an inconvenience) at all times.
When setting up your call deflection strategy, keep this rule top of mind and make sure you don’t come across as shunning customers or make them feel bad for trying to phone you.
Frame any moment in your call deflection strategy as an alternative method that puts the customer and their needs first. And that shouldn’t be hard to do, as 72% of US consumers prefer to use a website to get answers to their questions.
From an operational standpoint, there are several ways you can begin implementing call deflection into your contact center:
Set up self-service.
Especially for e-commerce or online-enabled businesses, having a smart user-friendly self-service function on your website can take the pressure off your phone lines. If you have regularly updated FAQ pages, chatbots with a good natural language function, pop-ups, and other methods of directing customers to a resolution, you’re doing self-service right.
Recognize the value in Visual IVR systems.
Direct your customers to choose self-service options by letting them opt-in to communications from you via text or call-back. These Visual IVR systems fit snugly on your website, and make your high-tech call deflection strategy more visible to your customer-base.
What’s a Visual IVR and How Does it Improve CX?
Offer call-backs.
One sure-fire, cost-effective way to lower demand on your phone lines is to offer callers a call-back. Rather than waiting on hold, they leave their phone number and hang up to receive a call at a later time. This tidies up the voice channel, and improves your many call center metrics.
Enable online voice messaging.
To free up your phone lines, you might try implementing online voice messaging services like telbee. This kind of call deflection software gives consumers and agents the option to send voice messages to one another, rather than clogging up the customer service hotline. This can help save you time and telco costs.
Looking to Computer Vision AI.
This technology analyzes images and videos to quickly identify a customer’s issue and take the necessary steps to resolve it. A new kid on the customer service tech block, Computer Vision AI is already proving to reduce call volumes, expedite customer issue identification, and encourage more and more customers to use self-service options.
The True Role of AI in the Contact Center
Conclusion
It’s 2021, a time when communications technology is purposely diverse enough to meet any customer on any of their preferred channels. We don’t need to put constant pressure on our call center agents when better alternatives are available.
So, why not take the pressure of the phone line with a smart and divert to all of the other effective channels, then? A smart call deflection strategy will be an absolute necessity for the contact center going forward. Now is the time to lay foundations and think deeply about how to improve CSat, lower call volumes, and create a fruitful customer experience.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

Look at that banana, just look at it.

Bananas are a modern miracle. They’re cheap, nutritious, and readily available.

And just about every banana you’ve ever eaten (if you live in the Northern Hemisphere) came from the same tree.

Not just a similar tree, the way oak trees are all similar to one another. The same exact tree, which was planted in a hothouse in England about a hundred and fifty years ago. The Cavendish banana tree (named after the family that’s now called the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire) is sterile. It has no seeds. The only way to grow one is to take a cutting from an existing tree and basically grow a clone.

Because the tree was optimized for yield and taste, we end up with plentiful, delicious, cheap bananas.

Until a blight arrives. And the virus that’s just around the corner is almost here, and it will wipe out every single Cavendish tree on Earth in just a few more years.

There have been real environmental side effects all along, but at scale, they become impossible to ignore.

Or consider the legal system in my country. It grew from a fairly informal and resilient (if not always fair) way to keep the peace and settle disputes into a behemoth, which combines the prison-industrial complex with a very expensive civil suit system that’s beneficial to many of the key players but ultimately insensitive to those that can’t use it to their advantage.

Check out Rohan Pavuluri’s new TED talk about bankruptcy, or Bryan Stevenson’s urgent talk on criminal justice.

People aren’t bananas, and the injustices that the legal system has created have always been shameful. But at scale, immense scale, they’re even worse.

Industrial scale seems to pay off. Until it doesn’t. And then it’s on us to change it, while there’s still time.

Strong customer engagement strategies can have a direct impact on business goals tied to activation, monetisation, and retention, but only if brands define and measure the appropriate metrics. Without the right metrics, marketers will struggle to quantify the effectiveness of their engagement against company goals. The recently published 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review at Braze…
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