Category: Customer Experience

The upcoming Unlock Your #CX Potential conference is set to bring global Customer Experience though leaders and practitioners together in a single day. This unique event will feature a range of experts including Ian Golding, Greg Melia and Deborah Cane. Taking place on March 25, the conference is a full-day event and returns for the second year,…
The post CX Mids presents: Unlock Your CX Potential in 2021 appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

The world is going to change, and resilience is our best response.
It’s not about building things that always turn out the way we expect. Bulletproof is too expensive, too rigid and requires perfect knowledge of the future.
Resilience is a commitment to a design, an attitude and a system that works even when things don’t turn out the way we planned. Especially then.
Instead of designing for the best case scenario, we make the effort consider how our work thrives when the best case doesn’t arrive. Because that’s far more likely.
Sailors know that fixing on a point on the horizon is a good way to survive a storm.
Flexibility, community, and a sense of possibility can go a long way. That doesn’t make it easier, but it’s our best path forward.

It’s been ten months since the first LIVE online event and the inaugural South East Europe CX Awards hosted by Awards International. The event brought together more than 50 contenders from across the region for a chance to win recognition with their best initiatives in customer experience. Almost a year later, CXM sat down and…
The post Looking back at SEECXA 20: An Interview with Nets appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

You’ve probably heard the terms ASA and service level. But what do they really mean?
KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are metrics used by contact centers to measure success and performance. There are many important KPIs, but these are arguably two of the most important.
So how do they work? We’ll explore the relationship between these two KPIs and find out how you can use them to improve your contact center!
What is Service Level?
Service level is a standard way contact centers measure performance and efficiency. It’s displayed as two numbers — the first indicating the percentage of calls answered, and the second indicating the target time period in seconds.
For example, a contact center with an 80/20 service level answers 80% of calls within 20 seconds.
The Only Call Center Agent Performance Metrics You’ll Ever Need
What is ASA?
ASA, or Average Speed of Answer, is a KPI that refers to the average wait time callers spend on hold. This metric is usually displayed in seconds.
It’s no secret that long hold times result in frustrated customers, which lowers their overall experience. For this reason, ASA is a critical metric for call centers to manage.
How are they connected?
The above metrics offer a glimpse into the service efficiency of a call center, but neither show the full story on their own.
Service level is great for indicating how quickly your agents are addressing customer concerns. But an 80/20 service level doesn’t tell you much about the 20% of callers who are left on hold for extended periods. When combined with ASA, you can get a holistic view of your contact center operations.
For example, an 80/20 service level is a strong service level. But if your ASA is high — say, 15 seconds — it means there’s a big discrepancy in service quality for your remaining 20% of callers.
ASA and service level can also impact one another. A low service level will naturally reduce your ASA, so it’s important to understand how these metrics work together to achieve the best results.
Why an 80/20 Service Level is Wrong for Your Call Center
Tips for boosting your service level and ASA.
Call volume forecasting.
Dive into your data history and analyze call volume trends. Are there certain times of the day, week, or month when you consistently see spikes in demand? Consider the time of year as well — depending on your industry, there will likely be seasonal periods when you’re busier than normal (summer and winter holidays, tax season, flu season, etc.).
Strategic staffing.
Once you have the data to forecast demand for your call center, align your staffing efforts. There’s nothing worse than being short-staffed and blindsided by a sudden wave of calls, so be sure you have enough agents available during busy times.
Call-back technology.
Of course, it’s impossible to forecast customer demand and staff your team with 100% accuracy. Anything from a website issue to a public crisis can cause a flood of calls without so much as a warning. Call-back technology makes an excellent safety net by offering callers the option of a call-back so they don’t have to wait on hold. This helps mitigate customer frustration while protecting your KPIs, including ASA and service level.
Finding the Right Service Level for Your Call Center The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

When distribution is scarce, the hits are powerful indeed.

AM Top 40 radio meant that if you made that list of 40 hits, you were going to sell a huge number, and if you didn’t, you were gone.

Giant movie screens meant a few movies could play for months and own the market.

Limited independent bookstores kept a hit on the bestseller list for up to a year.

And then, when the long tail arrives, there’s a riot of variety, with most of the available offerings selling few indeed (most videos on YouTube have fewer than 25 views) but the ones on the shoulders do far better than they ever would before. This happened to movies in the 1990s when the number of screens multiplied, and to cable TV when the premium networks were okay with 3 million viewers for Mad Men.

Excited creators start to imagine infinity. There will be room for an unlimited number of Kindle books or YouTube videos or Netflix shows…

And that’s when the pendulum starts to oscillate a bit.

Because the media business remains a business, and it’s largely built on attention, and attention is scarce and it’s hard to scale.

So instead of an infinite number of successful titles, the market begins to segment. Instead of one blockbuster movie like Jaws that owns the summer for an entire nation, there are multiple markets, multiple audiences. But within those segments, there are still hits. Short heads built on multiple long tails.

Yes, having the most popular podcast in the world is quite valuable. But having the most popular podcast for a particular audience is valuable as well.

And we continue to segment for as long as the attention can be lumped together in valuable ways.

But, at the same time, we live in community, and we have a thirst for the big hit, the one that ‘everyone’ is talking about.

The disconnect occurs when producers and creators try to average things out and dumb things down, hoping for the big hit that won’t come. Or overspend to get there. The opportunity lies in finding a viable audience and matching the project’s focus and budget to the people who truly want it.

And the dance continues.

Your customer knows what good service looks like. Like it, or loathe it, Amazon sells to more than 80% of the UK population every year.  This means your customer is also an Amazon shopper, and probably an Apple shopper too. They compare your business against these titans, as well as their energy company, their bank, and the…
The post Net Promoter Score will only take you so far in the race to catch the CX heavyweights appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

If you’re used to a messy desk, cleaning it will probably be a temporary measure.
Credit card companies have discovered that if a person carries $2,000 in debt with a $3,000 credit limit, they’ll probably have $4,000 in debt if the credit limit gets raised to $5,000.
People who live with drama at work will almost certainly invent new drama (of any scale) if the existing drama fades away.
The world is real, and opportunities and pain are unfairly and unevenly distributed. At the same time, our narrative and our habits are real as well, and they work to prove themselves right.
We organize our lives to maintain the pressures and boundaries we’re used to. We’d like to pretend we’re just going to bear with it until we get through this urgency, but we’re usually lying to ourselves.
A new habit takes at least thirty uncomfortable days to form, and a new habit is unrelated to the external forces (positive and negative) that we’re so good at finding and embracing.

UJET is recognized across five Best Of Lists, Including Highest Satisfaction Products & Best Customer Service Products
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – March 16, 2021 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Akin to The People’s Choice Awards for tech companies, G2’s Best Software Awards rank the world’s best software companies and products based on authentic, timely reviews from real users.
Tech companies on the list have proven their commitment and value based on hundreds, if not thousands of verified reviews. UJET is honored to be recognized on the Top 100 Best Software Products list, an achievement that can only be earned through the endorsement of its users. G2’s audience of software users has also recognized UJET on four additional G2 Best Of Lists.
The company’s G2 recognition also includes:

Top 50 Products for Customer Service
Top 50 Enterprise Products
Top 100 Highest Satisfaction Products
Top 100 Fastest Growing Products

The lists G2 created are based on data from over 1M authentic, verified customer reviews. These reviews were written and published between January 1, 2020 – December 31, 2020.
This is UJET’s second time on one of G2’s Best Software lists.
“It’s great to see UJET again on G2’s Best Software List! UJET’s cloud contact center raises the bar and lets us support our customers as they expect to be supported — quickly, consistently, and whenever they need us. We’re proud to be a UJET customer, and excited to see so many G2 users raving about the UJET product as well,” Julie Weingardt, Vice President, Operations, Turo.
“This isn’t a subjective list based on a few peoples’ opinions,” explains G2 CEO, Godard Abel. “With the highest traffic and engagement, largest selection of product and services, and highest quality data, G2 analyzes more than 4 million data points to determine which products and companies make the list.”
Read the complete G2 Best Of Lists at https://www.g2.com/best-software-companies. For more information, or to schedule a demo please visit https://ujet.co/request-a-demo/
Criteria: Winners were determined based on reviews left at G2.com between Jan. 1, 2020 and Dec. 31, 2020. All scores are calculated using G2’s algorithms, including for Satisfaction and Market Presence, explained in detail here. Further information on methodology is available upon request.
About UJET
UJET is the world’s first and only cloud contact center platform for smartphone era CX. By modernizing digital and in-app experiences, UJET unifies the enterprise brand experience across sales, marketing, and support, eliminating the frustration of channel switching between voice, digital, and self-service for consumers. Offering unsurpassed resiliency and the flexibility to deploy across leading public cloud infrastructures, UJET powers the world’s largest elastic CCaaS tenant at up to 22,000 agents globally, and is trusted by innovative, customer-centric enterprises like Instacart, Turo, Wag!, and Atom Tickets to intelligently orchestrate predictive, contextual, conversational customer experiences.
Learn more at www.ujet.cx.
Follow UJET: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook

Media Contacts
Holly Barker
UJETpr@ujet.cx
The post G2 Reveals UJET as one of the Best Software Companies for 2021 appeared first on UJET.

After 2020, the rules have changed for many brands. Along with the expected advances in consumer interests, brands have to consider rapidly changing consumer behaviour, navigate a fluctuating economy, and also be mindful of the difficult times that their audience have been through. That’s right. Being a useful brand in 2021 is difficult. But it…
The post How to be a useful brand in 2021 appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Still getting to grips with call center metrics and which ones are the most important?
This blog will teach you what FCR is, the difference between First Call Resolution and First Contact Resolution, and everything about FCR that you need to know to succeed in a contact center.
Contact Center Trends 2021
What is First Call Resolution (FCR) in Call Center Metrics?
First Call Resolution is a measure of how frequently you can resolve a customer’s query the first time they reach out.
Historically, less attention was paid to FCR, but it’s quickly become one of the most important metrics in the call center. It’s now also referred to as First Contact Resolution in modern omnichannel contact centers.
What’s the difference between First Call and First Contact Resolution?
There is no difference between first call and first contact resolution in terms of intent. The purpose of FCR is to measure how effective your team is at solving issues for your customers.

There is no difference between first call and first contact resolution in terms of intent. The purpose of FCR is to measure how effective your team is at solving issues for your customers.
#cctr #fcr Click To Tweet

In the past, when the telephone was the only way of making contact, it was easy to define. The difference emerged as customer support became available through other channels: social media, email, live chat etc.
When defining this metric in your call center, the most crucial difference is establishing what counts as a ‘first contact.’ With ‘calls,’ this is moot; a call is a call.
With email or social media, you can reasonably stretch that definition to mean the same ‘conversation,’ ‘thread,’ or even the ‘first day.’ That will have to be determined by channel and audience and will take some adjustment to perfect.
The Formula for First Call Resolution
The formula is easy to work out, but the issue is defining what ‘first’ and ‘resolved’ mean.
Here are the two most common formulas for First Contact Resolution, courtesy of callcenterhelper.com:

There will always be some errors and mislabelling when it comes to FCR. But it still makes a far better measure for Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) than Average Handle Time (AHT).
The trick with FCR is defining what a ‘first contact’ means for your call center.
Defining First Contact Resolution in Your Contact Center
What we’re really measuring here is the efficiency of your internal processes, so your definitions of FCR should match your goals.
30 Call Center Tips and Tricks You Can’t Live Without
If you have a three-tier escalation system, it doesn’t make sense to count the FCR as a resolution without escalation.
That said, if you are trying to determine if that first tier could be better empowered and solve more enquiries, it might be a good idea to measure FCR at that tier, as opposed to FCR over the entire call.
Here are some more things to think about when defining First Call or First Contact Resolution for your team:

Does escalation mean the call wasn’t resolved the first time?
What does ‘sufficiently resolved’ mean? Does the customer decide this?
Does a call-back count as part of the ‘first contact’?
What happens if a caller gets directed to the wrong department?
For non-real-time conversations (email etc.), what is the ‘window of opportunity’ that can be counted as FCR?
What happens if the customer abandons their call before being connected and calls back again later?
What happens if the issue is escalated across channels (e.g. from social to voice)?

The most important thing is that everyone understands what and why you are measuring FCR, so take time to define it clearly.

The most important thing with first call resolution is to ensure everyone understands what and why you are measuring it – so take your time to define it clearly. #cctr #fcr Click To Tweet

First Contact Resolution is Essential to Customer Satisfaction
In the dark days of customer service, the game was about trying to prevent customers from reaching you at all.
1. First Contact Resolution improves customer perception
Contrary to what some call center executives must believe, people don’t want to call you.
Most people have better things to do than spend an hour getting you to do whatever it is they already paid you to do. So, failing to resolve the issue at the first attempt means you are putting further stress on your customer — the person who is giving you money.
The more effort and time you ask from them, the less money they’re going to give you.
2. First Call Resolution improves customer retention
Unsurprisingly, when you respect your customers’ time and do your best to resolve their problems at the first time of asking, they’re more likely to stay with you.
The Complete Guide to Cusotmer Perception
But more importantly, when you solve a customer’s issue the first time, they’re almost 10x less likely to leave your brand than if you cannot solve it.
Take the extra time and effort off the customer, and they’re far more likely to give you another try.
3. Improving First Contact Resolution reduces operating costs
Call centers run on a tight budget, so every little efficiency goes a long way.
SQM Group found that for every 1% improvement in FCR, there’s a 1% reduction in operating costs.
The voice channel accounts for about a quarter of the average contact center’s budget. Reducing the number of times a customer has to call you can result in huge savings over a year.
4. Better FCR makes your agents happy
Another exciting study found that for every 1% improvement in first contact resolution, there was as much as a 5% increase in agent satisfaction.
This makes sense on a human level: by the time a customer calls back a second or third time, they’re much more frustrated than the first time.
A high FCR also indicates that your support agents are fully empowered to help your customers. This fosters a sense of pride and achievement in employees, contributing to higher job satisfaction.
What is a good First Call Resolution Rate?
If you notice your FCR rate slipping or it is lower than you would like, you know that you’ll need to dig deeper to find out what hurdles your support team is encountering. While the FCR rate will vary by industry, a good benchmark to shoot is 70-75%.
 The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.