Category: Customer Experience

Historically known for its excesses and wastefulness, the sin city has been reinventing itself over the years to become more environmentally conscious. But how is that possible?  Originally founded in 1905, it had a modest water supply that was enough to supply its then 800 residents. After the casino industry developed the city, it evolved…
The post How is Las Vegas turning itself into a sustainable model city? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Do you notice that you’re dressed dramatically differently than everyone else at the event?

That you’re driving at a different pace than everyone else?

That your question at the end of the talk lasted four times longer than anyone else’s?

That your band’s new single is half the volume of everything else that’s being pitched to this program director?

That your code isn’t commented and everyone else’s is?

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being different from the crowd. In fact, it might be the ideal path forward. The problem begins when you don’t see what’s not matching up.

The best way to transform the path is to see the path first.

History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it usually rhymes.

Managing call spikes during peak periods in your call center can seem like an insurmountable challenge. Whether you’re in retail, healthcare, or the financial industry, understaffed contact centers coupled with increased call volumes create stressful moments for you and your agents.
The ROI of Call-Backs for your Call Center
If this sounds familiar, never fear: call overflow handling is here. These services provide hands-on relief for call centers by helping them better negotiate call volume spikes during peak periods, whether those periods are related to seasonal shopping days (Black Friday, Cyber Monday), seasonal events (tax season, winterizing services, etc.), or widespread crises (pandemic, PR crises, etc.).
The big question is, does your call center need a call overflow handling service? Read on to learn all about what call overflow handling is, the benefits of using an overflow service, and the four main reasons why your business should consider this extremely useful and cost-effective option.
What is call overflow?
Call overflow refers to any inbound voice calls that your contact center agents are simply unable to answer. These excess calls may arise due to understaffing, peak period, product/service issues, or even an emergency or crisis situation.
What is call overflow handling?
Call overflow handling refers to a type of answering service that helps call centers deal with spikes in call volume. These services have trained call center professionals who manage incoming customer calls when primary contact center agents have reached their call handling capacity.
Your Guide to Call Center Outsourcing in 2021
Why do call centers use overflow handling services?
Overflow services ensure no customer call goes unanswered, and no customer is kept waiting. This way, customers will have a more positive experience with your company which can a) encourage repeat business; and b) improve your business’ bottom line.
An overflow service is easy to set up, and can offer your business:

The ability to offer 24/7 customer support to customers,
The capacity to answer every customer call, even during high-volume periods, and

Happier call center agents who can enjoy workload relief.

Most call centers employ a call overflow handling service when they know they will be facing spikes in call volume. This is often the most cost-effective approach, and it eases some of the challenges that come with staffing up during peak seasons where your business may see a high-saturation of inbound calls.
4 important benefits to call overflow handling.
Setting up a call overflow service is ultimately the more time and cost-efficient choice. When utilized strategically, it can also have a positive impact on your CSat scores and overall customer experience offerings.
Read on for the top four reasons your call center should be using a call overflow handling service.
The Executive Guide to Improving 6 Call Center Metrics
1. Call overflow handling is cost-effective: it saves and earns profits for your business.
You may think that outsourcing overflow services is costly, but it has been known to save businesses customer service dollars in the long run. Employing a third party to handle hellish call volumes can save your business serious time and money by:

Lowering the cost of internal training of short or long-term agents.
Reducing the cost of hiring and maintaining new agents.
Saving significant training and HR time (setting up an overflow takes far fewer hours).
Boosting sales, simply by connecting with more customers on the phone line.

2. Using a call overflow handling service ensures you’re always prepared for anything.
While you can predict and prepare for seasonal spikes by hiring more agents, sometimes it makes more sense to use a call overflow service. Why? Many call centers face call spikes due to unforeseen circumstances; they are then unable to meet or exceed their CX quotas during these periods because they simply do not have the right disaster recovery tools in place.
By outsourcing call overflow handling, then, your call center is better prepared to answer all calls during peak periods and maintain a steady customer service level during unforeseen moments of crisis.
3. Never lose another customer when you have a call overflow handling system in place.
One way to gauge the health of a call center is to look at its abandonment rate, or the volume of calls that are dropped before the customer is able to actually engage with an agent.
An overflow service can help you lower this rate and answer more calls, which turn could mean higher sales volumes and mightier customer service ratings. One thing is certain: an overflow service, coupled with a call-back service, ensures no customer will go unanswered.
The Contact Center Guide to Managing Spikes in Call Volume
4. Call overflow handling helps you maintain or improve the customer experience.
When you engage an overflow handling provider, you can rest assured that your customers are still interacting with trained call center agents who can professionally manage an excess number of inbound calls.
These trained professionals help to improve the overall quality of calls during crisis periods, and also help with your CX and CS metrics, including CSat and Average Time to Answer scores. It doesn’t hurt that having more hands on deck to handle calls ultimately lowers your customer frustration levels and lightens your agents’ stress levels — providing that piece of mind both to consumers and call center staff? That’s priceless.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

These are the three problems with creative work.

The first is that when we begin, we’re not that good. This is a fact. The breakthrough for anyone on this journey is adding the word “yet.”

It doesn’t pay to pretend that we’ve figured it out before we have. It’s counterproductive to adopt a brittle attitude in the face of criticism. In fact, during this stage, “you’re not that good,” is precisely what we need to hear, because it might be followed with insight on how to get better.

The second is that once we start to build skills and offer something of value, some people are going to persist in believing that we’re not that good. Fine. They’ve told us something about themselves and what they want and need. This is a clue to offer our leadership and contribution to someone else, someone who gets what we’re doing and wants it. The smallest viable audience isn’t a compromise, it’s a path forward. Find the folks who are enrolled and open and eager. Serve them instead.

The danger is that when you hear rejection during this stage, you might come to believe that you’ve accomplished nothing, as opposed to realizing that you might simply be talking to the wrong people.

And the third comes full circle. Because it’s possible that in fact, we’re not that good yet, and there aren’t enough people who want what we’ve got. We’re simply not good enough for this part of the market. So we embrace that truth and begin at the beginning. We’re not good enough yet. We haven’t practiced enough, found enough empathy, understood the genre well enough and figured out how to contribute. Yet. At least for this audience.

And then we get better.

Sooner or later, these three problems become three milestones on the road to making a difference and doing work we’re proud of.

PS today’s the best day to sign up for the Freelancer’s Workshop offered by Akimbo. I hope you’ll join in…

An Automatic Call Distributor is a software that routes the incoming call to the right department, best-suited agent, IVR with its mechanism. ACD ensures that the customer interacting with the correct agent or department. Explore more benefits of ACD. https://i.redd.it/hwdjxyqisvs61.gif
submitted by /u/CX-Expert [link] [comments]

The post Top Predictive Analytics Providers for Better CX appeared first on UJET.

Investing in a superior, shareworthy customer experience and spirited, humane and timely customer service is hands down the most powerful “marketing” move you can make in 2021. I’d suggest you put your efforts, resources, and money toward some or all of the following: • Customer service standards (best practices) development and deployment. • eLearning customized to your company’s customer service realities and aspirations • Live training • Homegrown efforts such as starting a company or departmental “customer service book club” • Sustainment
submitted by /u/vesuvitas [link] [comments]

Identity feels permanent, powerful, emotional and fragile.

Identity has been used to unite college alumni (“we are!”), political factions and groups of all kinds.

Criticism is not in short supply, especially lately, and criticism aimed at us, at our core self, is particularly hurtful.

“I don’t like you,” is hard to wrestle with.

That’s why ad hominem attacks on appearance and other permanent attributes we all have are so difficult to live with.

But “you” is not the car you drive, the kind of wine you drink or how you feel about a certain issue in our society. Those are choices. Those are tastes. Those can be changed.

When I say I don’t like your idea, I’m not saying that I don’t like you. And if we’ve been persuaded by marketers and politicians that everything we do and say is our identity, then it gets very difficult to learn, to accept useful feedback and to change.

Evolving our choices and our tastes is part of being human. Establishing your identity as someone who is not static, open to change and eager for better makes it far easier to engage in a world where some would prefer us to do precisely the opposite.

Those who haven’t started to thrive in this new post-pandemic economy should take note of the following trends pertaining to the new customer experience. This pandemic has stripped many businesses of budgets and stunted growth initiatives, whilst simultaneously forcing them to overhaul long-standing practices and protocols. They are pressured to keep up with the ever-changing…
The post Adapting to the Post-Pandemic Customer Experience appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Many companies are striving to become more customer centric. They have set up numerous ways of listening to their customers at multiple customer journey touchpoints. However, few have built effective ‘close the loop’ or feedback response mechanisms into their CX strategy. According to PWC, 32% of customers will stop doing business after a single bad…
The post Want to get more from your customer surveys? Close the feedback loop! appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.