Category: Customer Experience

We might be settling scores or we might be opening doors. It’s up to us.

Grievance and possibility have confusing roots.

Grievance isn’t about grieving. In fact, it’s the opposite. Grievance is the narrative of getting even.

Possibility doesn’t itemize everything that’s possible. Instead, it focuses on the side effects that come from acting as though things are possible.

Grievance looks back and possibility looks forward.

Organizations and relationships that are focused on grievance care a lot about their share. About the competition. About maintaining ‘enough’.

Organizations that are focused on possibility care a lot about how big the pie is. About innovation. And about what’s next.

You can build a relationship or a career on grievance or on possibility.

And you can run a justice/penal system that way as well.

Possibility begets more possibility. Opportunities multiply.

And, alas, grievance leads to more grievance. Because it’s the fuel that keeps the narrative going.

Organizations/partnerships/systems that are usefully focused on possibility don’t deny that there are reasons for grievance, that there have been actions and omissions that must be addressed. In fact, they adopt a posture of forward motion as the best way to address the problems that came before.

One challenge is embracing the effective and generative approach of possibility when we’re sure that we’re entitled to grievance.

Toward better.

When you first start a business, everything is on you – from accounting to customer service to sales. However, as you grow your business, you can’t focus on everything internally.
This is especially the case with customer service and customer care. Outsourcing customer service can potentially save your business money while allowing you to focus on other areas of the business.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the reasons why businesses outsource their customer service strategies to call center companies. We’ll also explore some of the pros and cons that come with call center outsourcing and customer service companies.
Reasons to Outsource Customer Service
Outsourcing your customer service allows you to focus on other areas of your business, and it can also be cheaper in the long run. This is a very common practice – in fact, many companies choose to align with customer service organizations or call centers — whether inbound or outbound — to handle the area of the business in which they’re weakest. Rather than hiring employees to perform an uninformed strategy, they simply communicate their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to outsourced services who can take over these operations.
Here are some great reasons to consider outsourcing your customer service operations:
Cost Savings
There is a reason why major telecommunications and technology companies outsource their customer service operations — it’s cheaper. Major markets in India and the Philippines can hire workers at a much lower hourly rate, which can save you money in the long run.
Time Efficiency
Outsourcing can allow you to redirect your main focus to other areas, such as growth and innovation. Creating strategies for your business takes a lot of time and planning. Outsourcing your customer service operations to call centers will free up your employees to focus on the tasks for which you ought to be paying them, and save you time on extensive interviewing and hiring.
In addition, hiring a customer service organization or a call center service may enable you to provide 24/7 customer service. If you hire a call center located abroad, depending on the time zone difference, you can provide round the clock service for your customers. This is a factor that sets many businesses apart; customer care and support is expected and if it can’t be delivered, it could deter customers from engaging with your brand in future.
Budget
Just because you’re leading your business doesn’t necessarily mean you’re the best person to interact with your customers. Engagement, time of response, and handling complaints are all key aspects of a businesses’ customer service goals — however, it costs time and money to execute them properly.
A good call center service will understand how to deliver results at a lower cost. You can establish a set of goals or deliverables over a certain period, and for a set price, you’ll get a set of results and access to data that will help you stay in line with your budgetary targets. Keeping on top of your budget is important for any successful business, and outsourcing customer service can help you maximize your efforts.
When to Outsource a Call Center
Depending on the type of business you have, you might not need to outsource a call center. But if you’re growing at a rapid rate, it might be time to change things. These outsourcing deals don’t have to be a permanent part of your business. If you work a seasonal business where calls are likely to overflow during a certain period, outsourcing can help you manage that demand.
This is especially true for holidays, summer trade work, and repair work during natural disasters and other crisis-related emergencies. Having a response team in place to deal with customers at a time of freneticism will get you through the grind so you can keep focused on your overall objectives.
Things to Consider When Center Outsourcing
If you’re currently looking for a good company to outsource to, it’s important to consider the product and services they’ll be supporting your customers with. You’ll want to find a cost-effective solution, but it’s also important to consider the quality of customer support. In addition, you’ll want to glean from outsourcing companies or market research, while being able to rely on their organization for lead generation and technical support.
Here are some key factors to consider:
Language Barrier
While there are many excellent businesses abroad that can handle your outsourcing needs, you need to be realistic regarding their ability to communicate with your customers. Agents who have strong accents and different levels of language fluency will be something to consider. Keep an open mind while putting yourself in your customer’s shoes to ensure that the team you hire will be able to effectively engage with your customers and provide the level of service you require.
Training and Ramp Up
Regardless of whether you hire an in-house or external team, there will be a learning curve involved. You’ll want to think about this before you choose a company. Having a more experienced call center service or customer service organization in your corner might be beneficial to avoid a product learning curve. Outsourced call centers rarely specialize in any one industry and will serve a range of companies. Customers will get a faster, more comprehensive response with a well-trained agent, and ultimately be happier with your service.
Opportunities for Feedback
Your customers will be calling for support with their product or services, but their feedback can get lost in the shuffle. That information is valuable for growing a business, so make sure you have a way to learn from your mistakes. Create channels, whether on social media or through an email service, where customers can deliver direct feedback without having to call in.
How Much Does Outsourcing a Call Cost?
Outsourcing your call center operations is not a decision to be made lightly. But if do it correctly you can save a ton of money. An in-house operation in North America could run you more than six figures, but you’ll be able to spend a lot less money by hiring a business in places like Latin America, Asia and India.
Your product and service will dictate the right path to take – remember to take that into consideration along with the above pros and cons, and it will become clear whether outsourcing is right for your business.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

Even before COVID-19 hit, the CX world was changing fast. Companies were already investing heavily in digital transformation to become more efficient and flexible. At the same time, customers were increasingly demanding a convenient, seamless and emotionally engaging experience across multiple online and offline channels.  The social and economic disruption of the pandemic has accelerated…
The post What’s the best way to improve Customer Experience in the new normal? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Make no mistake, 2021 is the year to focus on how to ready your contact center to handle larger call volumes on multiple channels. But it’s an opportunity to up your game in the employee experience department by giving agents the tools and help they need so that they can advance, most importantly it gives you an opportunity to continue pushing your organization to deliver meaningful and enjoyable customer engagements that build lasting relationships. Below are the three important lessons about digital customer experience: Lesson 1: The BIG Lesson – Customers want to solve the issues themselves when it makes sense Lesson 2: The Need for Speed – Used correctly, chatbots can greatly accelerate routine engagements Lesson 3: The lesson that is hidden from customers Full article: https://www.niceincontact.com/blog/a-bottle-of-shampoo-and-digital-customer-experience
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Weight is a useful measure. 10 pounds is twice as much as 5 pounds.

Measuring things and then ranking them effectively enables us to make better choices and to scale up our operations.

Sometimes, though, in our rush to standardize and process a complicated world, we begin to measure things that can’t be easily measured, and then, since we’ve measured them, to aggressively rank them.

Smart isn’t easily measurable. Neither is beautiful, good or successful. And especially happy.

A high SAT score is a measure of whether or not you scored well on the SAT. That’s it. A bank balance is a measure of how much money you have in the bank. That’s all.

In the face of the difficulty the system has in measuring things that don’t measure, we create proxies. Things like popularity as a proxy for whether a work of human creativity has worth or not.

It’s a method built to process commodities instead of people, and it’s running amok.

A precision ranking is nothing but a number, an inaccurate and ultimately useless stand-in. These proxies are created and spread and relied upon by a system that craves certainty and order.

Realizing the fraud of the proxies might help us get back to what matters instead.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – February 23, 2021 08:00 AM Eastern Standard Time
UJET Inc., the world’s first and only CCaaS 3.0 cloud contact center, announced its partnership with Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI (CCAI) and integration of its AI-Powered Conversational CX, UJET Virtual Agent with Google Cloud Dialogflow CX. UJET’s solution will be available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, making it easier for Google Cloud customers to procure and deploy UJET’s solution.
“UJET’s expanding partnership with Google Cloud is yet another way we are fulfilling our commitment to modernizing the contact center,” said Vasili Triant, Chief Operating Officer at UJET. “The integration of Google’s newest CCAI capabilities into UJET’s unique CCaaS 3.0 platform enables our customers to continually optimize their customer journeys through more predictive, graceful conversational intelligence.”
As a native component of the UJET CCaaS Platform, Virtual Agent was designed to help scale the contact center and reduce operational costs, all while delivering more natural, personalized self-service options to customers.
Using real-time and historical customer journey data, the UJET routing engine can predict when it’s the right time to proactively engage, whether routing to a virtual or live agent will yield the best outcome, and when sentiment dictates that a warm handoff to a live agent is appropriate.
Optimized for large contact centers that deal with complex conversations across voice and messaging channels, Google Cloud Dialogflow CX extends UJET’s capabilities to a broader set of use cases and interactions, enabling even greater operational efficiency across the enterprise.
Businesses of all sizes are increasingly deploying chatbots and voice-enabled virtual agents in an attempt to drive efficiency by deflecting calls, reducing hold times, and mitigating spikes in contact center demand. Though unless these technologies are meticulously deployed as part of a comprehensive, integrated digital transformation strategy, the negative impacts to customer experience and the bottom line can be significant.
“Conversational AI is opening up a new world of possibilities in areas like customer experience and user engagement,” said Anand Janefalkar, Founder and CEO of UJET, “The key to realizing these possibilities is taking a holistic, unified approach to the customer journey rather than just trying to layer in AI and new digital channels. Through our partnership with Google Cloud, our customers are continuing to revolutionize the customer experience by providing more efficient, intelligent experiences, that deliver even higher levels of customer satisfaction.”
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.co
The post UJET Announces Partnership with Google Cloud Contact Center AwI and Integration of Google Cloud Dialogflo CX appeared first on UJET.

The world’s first global online membership community for Women in CX is launching on International Women’s Day – March 8th 2021. And this start-up is pretty special. CX Magazine has partnered with Women in CX and this week, caught up with Founder and CEO Clare Muscutt to find out why. The rise of online communities…
The post Online Female CX Communities: Why They Matter and How You Can Get Involved appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

According to Forbes, spendings on e-commerce has increased to 77%. And to make your store stand out in the competition, you need to think about the regular maintenance of your e-commerce store. ​ Here are some tips on maintaining your e-commerce website! >> https://krishaweb.medium.com/ecommerce-website-maintenance-complete-guide-for-ecommerce-startups-e3b9ac9272ca ​ #ecommercewebsite #userexperience #websitemaintainance #ecommercestartup #guideforecommercestartup
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This blog is for contact center industry newbies. It’s a quick rundown of call centers and how contact center technology has developed over the last 70 years.
What does call center technology mean?
Call center technology refers to a vast range of software and hardware used to run the modern call center. That includes the front-end software that call center agents use to respond to serve customers and find answers. But it also consists of a vast array of underlying TELCO and networking infrastructure that we barely ever get to see or hear about.
Top Contact Center Trends 2021
And that type of call center technology has a fascinating history, which starts in an air traffic control tower…but we’ll try and keep it short.
A Short History of Call Center Technology
Pre-1950, nobody had ever been left on hold for more than the time it took for an operator to say, ‘Hold please’ and connect them physically to the person they wished to speak to.
The First ACD Came from Air Traffic Control
But in the mid-1950s, all that changed. Some brilliant blokes — likely based in Birmingham, England — hacked the Air Traffic Control systems of the time to create the first Automatic Call Distributor (ACD). At the time, less than half of households didn’t own a phone, so nobody cared.
Call Centers Start to Appear
Much later, the Birmingham Press and Mail launched the first call center in the world to handle incoming customer enquiries. Still, only about 60% of people even had a phone, so many businesses were skeptical of this new-fangled way of talking to customers and shunned it in droves.
The Full List of Contact Center Technology
The technology that allowed this transition was called ‘Private Automated Business Exchanges (PABX), which were essentially smarter, more complicated ACDs.
The Dawn of the Toll-Free Telephone Number
Shortly after the first call centers started to pop up, AT&T created 1-800 ‘toll-free’ numbers (1967).
That opened the door to various marketing opportunities and legitimized the practice of providing customer support over the phone.
Call Centers Become All Too Commonplace
In the early 1970s, Lloyd’s Bank — the largest retail bank in the UK — opened a call center to handle balance inquiries and other simple complaints. They also found that it was a fabulous (very profitable) way to reach potential customers. The age of the pesky sales caller was born. Later in that decade, IVR (Interactive Voice Response) technology was first rolled out into call centers.
First Voice-Over-Internet-Protocols Established
The 80s were — for everyone involved — a blur of innovation and expansion for the contact center world. That also meant that hold-time became a popular way to defer annoyed customers, and outbound call center reps earned a bad reputation. Call center technology progressed incrementally but slowly.
The Complete Guide to Contact Center Technology
In the early 90s, a strange new form of communication began to grow in popularity: the internet. With it, a new era of voice communication tech began, with the inception of voice over internet protocols — enabling the digitalization of voice.
One of the critical technologies that lead the charge was BT’s Digital Access Signalling System 2 (DASS II), which laid the groundwork for many of today’s PTSN and SIP technology.
First Virtual Queuing Technology
Later in the 90s, just before the tech bubble popped, the first virtual queuing solutions began to appear. Considering the ubiquitous and frustrating nature of long hold times, virtual queuing hit the scene with surprisingly little fanfare or adoption by the larger players. The message from many corporate players was simple: it’s cheaper to leave them on hold.
Most Call Center Technology Runs on Amazon
As we ripped into the new Millenium, it became clear that the internet and digital technology would quickly become the standard in call centers.
And one very familiar name entered the space (through the back door). Not content with supplying you with cheap electronics, books, workout equipment, and organic quinoa, Amazon also supports most cloud-based contact center software today.

Fonolo Births the Cloud-Based Call-Back

At this point — around 2009 — call center technology was slowly moving to the cloud.
The year before Twilio had launched, it became clear (to innovators) that the AWS Twilio stack was the call center’s future. Those pioneers included our founders: Shai Berger, Jason Bigue, and Mike Pultz.
After a short iteration as a consumer-based service, Foncloud (as we were known at the time) pivoted to providing a novel cloud-based call-back solution for contact centers.
Today, most contact centers run on a combination of Twilio and AWS. And even the old in-house legacy systems are slowly moving to the cloud and turning to AWS for help. This changeover was anticipated to be slow but inevitable. Up until March 17th, 2020.
The Great Contact Center Diaspora
We knew that cloud-contact centers were inevitable, but we didn’t anticipate the switch to happen quite so fast. But the coronavirus pandemic of 2020-21 forced contact centers to upgrade their technology stacks to make them more flexible and resilient. The days of the single physical location are probably gone for all but the smallest call centers.
Top Contact Center Technology Trends in 2021
The Future of Contact Center Technology
The conditions brought on by the pandemic have fostered rapid change in call center security. Burgeoning AI tech is developing at an astounding pace. Data security and information privacy concerns will bring about many new protocols for backend call center tech, as well as many new features to help customers and agents get the answers they want as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The future of call center technology is most definitely ahead!The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.