Category: Customer Experience

Reputation Experience Management (RXM) is especially important now in our “”new normal.”” Since March — and for the foreseeable future — fewer opportunities exist for face-to-face interaction, and our new reality will look very different all the way down to the customer level. There has never been a more important time to pay closer attention to a business’s reputation on digital channels. With all this in mind, businesses can implement some best practices now so that their outside-in approach remains strong into the future. • Gather and listen to customer feedback wherever it exists. • Respond to all feedback — and do it quickly. • Future-proof your business model by making customer experience, customer success and customer loyalty a company priority. • Honestly evaluate your business, recognize that there’s work to be done and then do it. The customer experience evolution isn’t a coincidence, but the world’s current state of affairs has made it more important now than ever before. Because we sit at the threshold of a new reality that makes the customer experience so important, understanding and incorporating RXM best practices into company culture can go a long way in separating a good company from a great company into the future. Full article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/01/14/why-customer-experience-matters-now-more-than-ever/?sh=59efab44fd29
submitted by /u/vesuvitas [link] [comments]

Over the past year, keeping up and responding to customers has become a feat for businesses. In today’s digital world, contact centres are juggling more conversations than ever before and on an increasing number of channels. Without a doubt, digital customer service is no longer a luxury but a customer expectation. As the terrain of…
The post Customer Interaction Analytics: The Secret to Modern CX appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Meteorologists on TV spend most of their time talking about how the weather is right now, right outside. And progress for TV weather often looks like more accurate reporting of the current precipitation, temperature and windspeed, along with nicer graphics.
That’s not the same as actually predicting what the weather will be tomorrow. We can probably agree that more granularity in how the weather is right now isn’t particularly interesting.
It’s an easy trap to fall into, because spending time on what’s provably true is way less risky than deciding what’s important and using it to predict the future.
Our best work involves sorting the important from the rest, along with bringing a point of view and experience to complicated problems. Problems that are interesting because there isn’t a proven, correct answer.
The wind chill factor is best left to an automated device.
We don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but figuring out how it’s going to blow tomorrow is a great skill.

Despite recent progress in MarTech innovation, brands can still expect to face significant obstacles when it comes to implementing customer experience (CX) strategies. We wanted to find out more about the exact nature of these barriers and commissioned a study by Forrester Consulting. The main goal of our research was to delve deeper into the…
The post Overcoming CX challenges with advanced customer insights appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

submitted by /u/isonxperiences [link] [comments]

Consumer expectation and channel preference have always dictated the direction of customer service and experience. The highly-coveted Millennial and Gen Z consumers expect and demand a certain quality of customer service across all channels. Many call center overseers are now realizing that they are technologically behind their more channel-savvy competitors.
The result? Budget-conscious center managers are struggling to up their CX game while managing the cost of upgrading their operations. If this sounds familiar, don’t worry — it is possible to upgrade your call center infrastructure and reduce future contact center costs at the same time.
Read on to learn how to offset call center costs, and ensure that your customer service operations meet the needs of the 21st-Century customer.
The ROI of Call-Backs for Your Call Center
1. Upgrade your call center software and infrastructure.
Many optimized contact centers are able to save on time, money, customer grief, and agent training thanks to their investment in better integrated call center technology, where each customer channel speaks to one another with ease in a truly omnichannel experience.
To reduce the cost of outdated tech, consider adopting high-quality call center softwares that include call-routing, cloud-based calling, and sophisticated reporting tools. This way, you can better serve customers and make actionable data-informed choices about how to further improve your call center.
2. Double-down on agent training and empowerment.
The equation is proven: effective call center agents equal lower call center costs and improved customer service quality. Investing in training and re-training your agents and expanding the knowledge base of existing contact center staff will result in fewer costly mistakes, an increase in the number of calls an individual agent can handle in a shift, faster resolutions, and an overall positive impact on your call center metrics.
3. Save dollars by nurturing happier, more engaged call center agents.
After hundreds or thousands of interactions on the phone line, customer service agents can experience emotional drainage or high levels of stress, which can lead to high turnover rates.
Constant hiring and training can drain your call center spend, so it’s important to find ways to engage call center agents (think gamification or other work culture boosts). Providing psychological support for your team is not only healthy for them and your attrition rates, it’s healthier for your budget.
3 Reasons Why Agent Satisfaction is the New Customer Satisfaction
4. Optimize your Average Speed to Answer (ASA) and reduce telco costs with call-backs.
One of the easiest ways to save money, reduce agent stress, and improve your customer experience is to invest in a solid call-back solution. Call-backs provide callers with an alternative to waiting on hold by saving their place in the phone queue. They can then confidently hang up, go about their day without having to listen to hold music, and receive a call-back when the next available agent is free.
If you calculate cost-per-call, you’ll immediately see the cost-savings of call-backs. Not only do they save on hiring excess agents, they smooth out spikes in call volumes, reduce abandon rates, lower your telco costs, and generally contribute to a healthier and happier call center atmosphere.
5. Improve your self-service options.
Forbes recently declared self-service technology a top priority for contact centers, which isn’t surprising considering the increased demand of all customer service channels during the pandemic. Invest in self-service features like chat, SMS, MMS, email, and website chatbots. This ensures that you’re never leaving a customer, or a potential sale, behind.
6. Go remote (or go home).
The COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged businesses of all shapes, sizes, and industries to go big by going home. Call centers going fully or partially remote are seeing major savings on rental brick-and-mortar office buildings.
Even if you maintain agents onsite, hiring remote agents onto your team can help reduce labor costs, lower overhead, and provide a work-from-home environment that may contribute to a more positive agent attitude and reduced agent attrition.
7. Get a solid return on investment with a call overflow handling service.
Overflow handling services are a popular cost-cutting tactic for the modern customer service center. Having a plug-and-play overflow service ready to handle excess calls during call volume spikes means your call center agents are always prepared for peak periods, and that customers you would have otherwise lost on dropped calls are properly served. In addition to ensuring that all your potential inbound sales aren’t lost on dropped calls, this kind of service can positively impact your CSat scores and overall CX metrics.
15 Top Call Center Overflow Handling Services
8. Leverage advances in AI to improve conversations and call resolutions.
An alternative to call center overflow handling services is call-center-centric AI. Artificial intelligence has quickly become a call center’s best friend, ensuring that call overflow periods are easier to predict, and call volume patterns are simpler to forecast. It doesn’t hurt that AI becomes more affordable year after year.
Another way to lower cost-per-call with AI? You can automate the voice channel with conversational natural language IVR (or Interactive Voice Response), an AI-powered feature that is becoming so effective that it is seeing success rates of about 85%.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

It pays to know what something is for. It helps us figure out how to do it better, how to allocate resources and how to know when we’re done.
Much of what we build or invest in is complicated. It serves multiple purposes, has to please many constituents and has competing priorities.
So the question: “How will we know if it’s working?” is a powerful one.
It opens the door to a useful conversation about what it’s for.

No one wants to be hustled. To be pitched and pushed and most of all, pressured into buying something. Hustle culture has been around for a long time, but the internet–and new forms of it in particular–seems to amplify the feeling.

Three elements of hustle stand out for me:

The reality of what’s on offer can’t match the hype, and so it feels false.
The pitch can’t succeed on merit, so social pressure is used instead.
The pitch is made in the wrong place at the wrong time, without earning permission. We wouldn’t miss it if it weren’t there.
The folks at Akimbo (an independent B corp) have been quietly building a series of interactive workshops that help people build value and show up in the marketplace without hustle. By doing good work that you can be proud of.

Here’s what they’ve got coming up:

The flagship altMBA has already helped more than 5,000 people transform their careers and their lives. The Regular Decision Deadline is tomorrow, May 4th for altMBA’s July 2021 session.

Ramon Ray’s The Small Business Workshop starts tomorrow, May 4th, and you can enroll now. It’s back for its third session.

Real Skills, a one-day non-conference is happening on May 14th (tickets available now). No speakers, no Powerpoints, simply small-group interaction designed to change the way you and your team create possibility. This is the fifth session, and many people have done it more than once.

The Creative’s Workshop, session four, starts in a few weeks and enrollment is open now. In this workshop (which led to my book The Practice), you’ll learn to find your voice and ship work you care about. Now in its fourth session, participants have been amazed at how deep and wide this work can go, and how powerful the connections created within cohorts can be.

And bestselling author Bernadette Jiwa is back with the seventh session of the Story Skills Workshop. This is an essential foundation for anyone seeking to be heard, to make a difference and to engage with people to make change happen. Bernadette’s breakthrough approach is proven to be effective. You can check it out today.

When you’re ready to level up, it’s possible to learn to make a bigger impact.

Possibility has a flipside.

We need possibility to do our best work. To believe that it might work. To understand that if we do our best work and bring our full selves to the project, we have a shot at achieving our goal. Hope is fuel.

Perhaps we’ll make the sale, be admitted, create a hit, change someone’s mind, invent a breakthrough, play the notes beautifully, open doors and create magic…

But we might not.

And if we don’t, what then?

The first opportunity is to learn from what happened. That possibility was there, but we guessed wrong, or missed a cue or need a new skill. Perhaps we have to find a way to get the benefit of the doubt or simply need more practice and experience.

But, with apologies to Gödel, maybe there is no solution. Maybe the thing we thought was a problem wasn’t a problem to be solved (because problems have solutions) maybe it was simply a situation or even a dead end. Given who you are, what you know and what you’re dealing with, there actually wasn’t the possibility for success, even if it seemed there was.

Or perhaps there was luck involved, and this time, the luck wasn’t on our side (perhaps 20% of the applicants who are qualified get in to famous colleges, which means that kids who do their best still have just a 1 in 5 chance of admission).

If there was no acceptable solution, or there was more bad luck than we hoped, then there’s no room for shame or blame or recriminations. All we can do is honor the situation and work to find the next thing, another opportunity to contribute or grow. Spending cycles on blame (of ourselves or others) is time we can ill afford to waste.

Organized sports, particularly for school-age kids, present a real challenge. The results are easily measured and are on just one axis. Points scored. Winning vs. losing.

If we teach a child to identify with the outcomes in this way, we might create arrogance. If you win, after all, you must be better than the others.

This is where the big man on campus comes from, the push for dominance and the brittle self-worth that can lead to bullying.

And of course, it’s not just sports, and it’s not just high school.

But in any scarcity-driven competition, sooner or later, you’re not going to win. You’re not going be state champ, national champ, world champ… Sooner or later, if you’re honest, you’ll need to acknowledge that winning isn’t going to happen.

And then what happens?

Economic utility almost always occurs when we’re good at things that aren’t easy to measure. And when the things we’re good at are additive, infinite and generous it can be something we embrace for the long haul. Because in those areas, it’s possible to be useful and skilled and make a contribution, every single time.

If you have a chance to play a game that’s based on scarcity and winner-take-all, perhaps it pays to play a different game instead.