Category: Customer Experience

CSAT, NPS, and other methods can provide you insights into your customers’ current status, but they’re not enough to paint a complete picture. To achieve that, you need to harness the data from your Customer Success Managers. Link to post.
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When each car is separate, they’re dumb, and they break one at a time.

When they are part of a networked system, one software glitch can break them all at once.

If we use power off the grid, each house creates its own heat.

If we benefit from an efficient system of distributed power, a rolling blackout can take them all offline at once.

Networks create significant efficiencies at the same time that they produce value that would be impossible without them. And so, relentlessly, we’re hooking everything together.

Along the way, it’s worth reminding ourselves just how valuable resilience is. The only kind of network breakdowns we notice are the cataclysmic ones.

The benefits of a network are immediately forgotten when the whole thing breaks.

Humans differentiated themselves 100,000 years ago by developing the ability to have a detailed memory. Not just “where did I hide the acorns” but rich and diverse memories about people and places.

Only a few thousand years ago, we amplified this by making those memories permanent. Telling a story to someone else dramatically increases our memory capacity.

Then we started making and saving our notes.

And then we developed a common language so we could share those notes with others. The library and the cloud meant that your memory could become my memory too.

And only recently we added search, so the memories and insights of a billion or more people could be easily accessed.

The sixth layer, now appearing, is an intelligence that prompts us and tells us what is out there before we even decide to search for it.

No wonder we’re a bit dizzy. We just multiplied our minds by many orders of magnitude. It’s easy to confuse someone else’s memory (or manipulation) with our hard-earned ability to remember things that actually happened to us.

And we’re now realizing that we have the power (and perhaps the obligation) to use shared knowledge to make better, more thoughtful decisions. And to intentionally edit out the manipulations and falsehoods that are designed to spread, not to improve our lives.

Like most traps, they’re mysterious and then appealing and then it’s too late.

An NFT is digital treasure chest, a status symbol and an apparent item of value.

Like a Pokemon card, or an original Picasso drawing or the actual frame of a Disney animated film from 1955, NFTs are designed to be the one and only, a shred of non-fungible reality in a world gone digital.

You either own this thing or you don’t.

To make it really clear, consider Honus Wagner. A Honus Wagner baseball card is quite rare (Wagner didn’t permit the card to be made because he wanted nothing to do with cigarettes, foreshadowing some of the stuff below) and so there were fewer than 200 all in before production shut down. One of the cards last sold for more than $3,000,000.

Owning a Honus Wagner card doesn’t mean you own Honus Wagner. Or a royalty stream or anything else but the card itself.

For years, this was part of the business model of the collectible card industry. Make billions of cards, most get thrown out, some rookies get famous, some cards go up in value.

Now, consider an oil painting. Perhaps it was stolen a long time ago, or became famous for other reasons. It’s the one and only. If you somehow owned the Mona Lisa, it wouldn’t mean that you own the woman who is portrayed in it, or any part of DaVinci, it would simply mean you own a canvas, one that others also want to own.

People can look at images of the Mona Lisa all day long without compensating you, because you simply own the original trophy, not the idea…

But having it on your wall gives you a feeling, and telling other people you own it gives you another, slightly different feeling.

It’s worth noting two things about the art example:

There’s a three-thousand-year cultural history of owning priceless works of art. Most people understand that an original Rothko is a high-status luxury good.
Almost all paintings are worthless (on a cash basis). They sell at garage sales for dollars, not millions, and original (and beautiful) works of art go unsold every day.

So what’s an NFT? It’s a digital token (the same way a Bitcoin is a digital token) except it’s a one and only, like a Honus Wagner, there’s just one. One of these tokens might refer to something else (a video of a basketball shot, an oil painting, even this blog post) but it isn’t that thing. It’s simply a token authorized by the person who made it to be the one and only one. (The NBA has already sold more than $200 million in video clip highlight NFTs)…

And so the trap:

CREATORS may rush to start minting NFTs as a way to get paid for what they’ve created. Unlike alternative digital currencies which are relatively complicated to invent and sell, it’s recently become super easy to ‘mint’ an NFT. I could, for example, turn each of the 8,500 posts on this blog into a token and sell them on the open market.

The more time and passion that creators devote to chasing the NFT, the more time they’ll spend trying to create the appearance of scarcity and hustling people to believe that the tokens will go up in value. They’ll become promoters of digital tokens more than they are creators. Because that’s the only reason that someone is likely to buy one–like a stock, they hope it will go up in value. Unlike some stocks, it doesn’t pay dividends or come with any other rights. And unlike actual works of art, NFTs aren’t usually aesthetically beautiful on their own, they simply represent something that is.

BUYERS of NFTs may be blind to the fact that there’s no limit on the supply. In the case of baseball cards, there are only so many rookies a year. In the case of art, there’s a limited number of famous paintings and a limited amount of shelf space at Sotheby’s. NFTs are going to be more like Kindle books and YouTube videos. The vast majority are going to have ten views, not a billion. It’s an unregulated, non-transparent hustle with ‘bubble’ written all over it.

THE REST OF US are going to pay for NFTs for a very long time. They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and trade. Together, they are already using more than is consumed by some states in the US. Imagine building a giant new power plant just to make Christie’s or the Basel Art Fair function. And the amount of power wasted will go up commensurate with their popularity and value. And keep going up. The details are here. The short version is that for the foreseeable future, the method that’s used to verify the blockchain and to create new digital coins is deliberately energy-intensive and inefficient. That’s on purpose. And as they get more valuable, the energy used will go up, not down.

It’s an ongoing waste that creates little in ongoing value and gets less efficient and more expensive as time goes on. For most technological innovations the opposite is true.

The trap, then, is that creators can get hooked on creating these. Buyers with a sunk cost get hooked on making the prices go up, unable to walk away. And so creators and buyers are then hooked in a cycle, with all of us up paying the lifetime of costs associated with an unregulated system that consumes vast amounts of precious energy for no other purpose than to create some scarce digital tokens.

[Here are some other views on this].

I wrote a book about digital cash twenty years ago. This is precisely the sort of cool project and economic curiosity that I want to be excited about. But, alas, I can see the trap and I wanted to speak up with clarity. I would usually make this into an episode of my podcast, but Everest’s article deserved a link and more focus, so here you go.

Let’s walk away from this one.

So, it’s March – how are those 2021 CX resolutions going? Last year changed everything, and we all benefited from a new year to start afresh. But while we might want to scratch the last year from our thoughts entirely, there are some important learnings we must glean first. What do we want to take…
The post How to keep your customer experience resolutions this year appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

We see it all the time, and not just in the store, with a catalog or on a website.

You can tell the committed students from the ones who are simply skating by.

You can figure out who’s reading the book because they’ve got something at stake and who’s simply wasting time.

When we adopt the posture of commitment, something extraordinary happens: The lessons get more profound and useful. The questions asked get more specific and urgent. The connections that are made get deeper.

The reason that most online videos and blog posts seem to come and go is because we use a browser to interact with them. “What’s next?” is asked too often. Perhaps it would be more useful to imagine that this is the very last thing we get to engage in before we have to commit to our work…

Hi, Are there any accreditations or standards that companies can strive to register and achieve, to showcase their excellent Customer Experience to potential prospects and existing customers? Like the ISO or BBB standards- in that vein? TIA
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Effective communication is fundamental to all successful businesses. Clear, consistent information is vital in maintaining the engagement of employees in their work and customers in the company brand.  Many businesses – mistakenly – view the challenge of internal communications as a separate entity to their external messaging.  External comms go directly to customers and key…
The post The impact of internal comms on external comms appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Contact center reporting can be stressful for even the most seasoned managers and directors.
Even with modern technology, it’s still impossible to predict call volumes and customer demand with full accuracy. But when your team’s performance is being evaluated based on cold hard metrics, it can be downright nerve-wracking to explain the numbers to upper management.
The good news is, we have some great tactics you can use to boost your KPIs. Have a look!
First Contact Resolution (FCR)
FCR indicates the percentage of customers who had their issue resolved in the first engagement. The higher your FCR, the more efficient your contact center is at helping your customers.

DID YOU KNOW?
The average call center has an FCR of 72%. – SQM Group

This metric is one of the most common industry KPIs, as it also indicates the percentage of customers who need to reach out multiple times to resolve a problem.
Here are a few ways you can boost your FCR:
Provide additional training.
Often, customer issues take more than one interaction to solve because of knowledge gaps. They may end up asking the customer to call back or transferring them to someone else in hopes that they are better equipped to deal with their problem. By providing regular training, you can keep your agents in the know and empower them to better serve your customers.
Review your processes.
Is your IVR optimized to direct your customers to the correct agent for support? Consider reviewing frequent questions your contact center receives and ensure that there are clear and appropriate channels for your customers to navigate.
Prioritize FCR over AHT.
Many contact centers will track Average Handle Time, or AHT, as a performance metric for agents. The problem is, if agents are concerned about spending too much time on a single interaction, they will end up rushing process and increasing the likelihood of the customer reaching out again with the same issue. By creating a culture that focuses on higher quality customer interactions, you can increase FCR and save your team valuable time down the road.
Abandonment Rate
Here’s another popular KPI in contact centers. An abandoned call is one where the caller hangs up before reaching an agent.
Nine times out of ten, abandoned calls are caused by long hold times. This can affect other metrics, such as FCR, since a customer will often need to reach out later to resolve their issue.
Here are a few ways you can lower your abandonment rate:
Smarter staffing.
By forecasting your call volumes, you can hire more staff or schedule agents strategically to ensure you have enough reps to handle customer demand. While this is one of the most straightforward ways to address abandon rates, keep in mind that it’s impossible to anticipate call spikes with 100% accuracy.
Review your IVR messaging.
If your customers can’t avoid the call queue, the next best thing you can do is ease their frustration. Communication is key — review your IVR messaging to inform callers that you are experiencing longer than normal hold times. Providing estimated hold times help with this as well. If they know what to expect, the chances of them staying on the line will increase.
Offer your customers a call-back.
Call-back technology is one of the most popular methods for reducing abandonment rate because it eliminates the customer’s need to wait on hold completely! Simply offer the caller the option to receive a call-back. The software will wait in queue on their behalf as they go about their day and will automatically connect them to an available agent!
5 Pitfalls When Measuring Abandonment Rate
Occupancy Rate
If you want to measure the efficiency of your staff, Occupancy Rate is a great indicator. This percentage indicates the amount of time your agents spend performing call-related tasks versus waiting for calls (idle time).
A high occupancy rate is ideal, but realistically it shouldn’t go higher than 85-90% (your agents need time to breathe between calls!).
Here are a few ways you can increase your occupancy rate:
Avoid overstaffing.
Overstaffing can be just as harmful to your contact center as understaffing. Monitor your call volumes and understand the trends so you can schedule the right number of agents. We don’t want agents sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.
Utilize agents during quiet times.
Having a slow day? Consider having your agents focus on other tasks, such as outbound calls or other secondary responsibilities during quiet periods. This ensures they remain productive even when there are no customers to assist.
Manage agent wellness.
Productivity isn’t always about having work to do. It’s also about making sure your agents are motivated and able to focus on their tasks at hand. After all, if they’re experiencing burnout, no number of protocols will change their efficiency levels.
How to Calculate Occupancy Rate in a Call Center
Customer Satisfaction (CSat) Score
Finally, we reach the heart of the contact center: customer satisfaction. By measuring the level of customer satisfaction, CSat scores can help you understand the quality of service your team provides.
CSat is displayed as a percentage — the higher the score, the better your service is perceived by your customers. This data is typically gathered through surveys and questionnaires post interaction.
Here are a few ways you can improve your CSat score:
Review feedback regularly.
Customer feedback isn’t meant to be stored away. If you aren’t regularly reviewing what your customers have to say about your experience, you’re setting your contact center up for failure. Look for trends within their answers and come up with action plans to address their most common concerns.
Take the customer journey.
Do you know firsthand what your customer experience is like? It’s as easy as dialing into your contact center and navigating your IVR. You can do this with your other channels, including chat, email, and social media. If you run into issues, chances are your customers have as well.
Empower your agents.
If your agents don’t feel encouraged and self-assured about helping customers, it can sour the experience. Therefore, it’s in your best interest to improve agent satisfaction by empowering them to deliver the best experience — trust us, they’ll pass on that love to your customers!

DID YOU KNOW?
Call-back technology can drastically increase CSat scores by eliminating hold time!
The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.