Category: Customer Experience

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve decided up your contact center game.
You’ve got the aspiration and the best intentions. But you’ll need more than that. Picking an effective contact center strategy is a process that requires thought, evaluation, and preparation.
Unsure where to start? We’ve got eight essential tips so you can start improving your contact center today.
1. Identify the problems you want to solve
Yes, this is business 101, but we feel it’s worth mentioning. After all, it’s easy to lose sight of your objectives when you’re conducting research.
Establish what your issues are, your goals, and what your ideal solution will look like. By developing this framework in advance, you’ll have a point of reference when it comes time to evaluate your strategies.

TIP:
Ask yourself: is this issue a symptom of a larger problem? For example, if you’re looking to increase productivity and agent performance, you’re likely looking at a larger goal of improving employee engagement.

2. Dive into your data history
You probably have a wealth of information just waiting to be tapped in your contact center channels. Check your past metrics and data reports, and analyze them for any trends that might be useful.
Start with common KPIs such as Average Handle Time (AHT), First Call Resolution (FCR) and abandonment rates. By taking this step, your contact center management team can make strategic data-driven decisions.
3. Gather customer feedback
Customer interactions are at the heart of every contact center, so it makes sense to take their feedback into account. Most contact centers gather customer information through surveys, questionnaires, and call center recordings.
Most of this information will be qualitative data, meaning you’ll need to take some time to assess their feedback and draw trends from their responses. By taking this step, you’ll be able to account for the customer experience — after all, there’s no point in implementing a strategy that makes them unhappy.
4. Interview your agents
Your contact center agents are some of your best resources when developing new strategies. They’re the ones on the front lines, and should be just as involved in new initiatives to improve the contact center.
Gather their feedback and be sure to take them into account when devising your strategy. If it’s not working, they’ll be the first to know!
Handpicked related content: 9 Effective Call Center Strategies to Implement in This Year

5. Consider your budget
It can be tempting to fall back on the classic solutions, such as hiring more agents or outsourcing your call center. While many hands do make light work, these methods aren’t always the most budget-friendly solutions.
If this is a concern, look at the resources you already have and see if there’s a way to re-jig your processes. Can you offer self-service channels on your website? Are you leveraging your social media channels effectively?
6. Explore technology solutions
We’re living in a grand time for call center technology, so embrace your options and don’t be afraid to adopt new tools. Cloud-based technology is especially great for those who are on a tight budget.
For instance, this call-back technology works with any call center system and offers your customers a call-back if they don’t want to wait on hold. Not only does it free up your customers’ time, but it also helps your team manage in times of high call volume!
Handpicked related content: This Year’s Top Contact Center Technology Trends

7. Create a benchmark for success
You’ve completed your research and you’re zeroing in on your ideal contact center strategy. But if you don’t have a way to measure whether it’s working, you’re basically tripping at the finish line.
Decide how you’ll measure success before implementation, and ensure you have the tools and methods to track it. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself back at square one before you know it!
8. Audit your strategy regularly
Of course, no plan is perfect the first time around. Be prepared to do regular evaluations of your strategy to work out the kinks. It’s a good idea to set up a place where your agents and management can track issues as they arise, so that when it’s time to evaluate, you have everything in one place!

Hi everybody, we’re building a library for experience innovation in different industries/fields. Up until today we have covered banking, SaaS, recruiting, education, and many more. Might be worth to have a look if you find your industry of interest – and if not, drop us a line, we’ll do our best to gather all the knowledge we have access to and form a new deep-dive article out of it! 🙂 https://www.smaply.com/journey-mapping-in-industries
submitted by /u/Smaply [link] [comments]

Lawyers are fond of this.

And sometimes, parents are too.

At least you won’t get blamed if something goes wrong.

It turns out that we don’t need an abundance of caution. We need appropriate caution. They’re different things. Abundant caution is wasted.

Things like ripe avocados and morel mushrooms are terrific to have in abundance. By definition, though, abundant caution is not only more than we need, it’s more than is helpful. Because we get hooked on the feeling.

We can always make a risk ever smaller. But the cost is that we will increase other risks.

Please don’t avoid appropriate caution. It matters to you and to the community. But seeking reassurance and peace of mind by trying to drive risk to zero doesn’t get you either one of them.

Connection, possibility and forward motion are tools for resilience and a healthy life.

submitted by /u/ExtremePerspective55 [link] [comments]

Entries are now open for the 2021 UK Customer Experience Awards, which this year is marking twelve years of celebrating the very best CX in Britain. The 2021 UK Customer Experience Awards is going to be a celebration of the extraordinary CX innovations developed in the past year. The event is going to take place LIVE…
The post 2021 UK Customer Experience Awards: Entries now Open! appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Publishers take two risks to bring new ideas to the world.

(And I’m talking about any middleperson–a gallerist, a TV network, a movie studio, a label–they’re all publishers).

One risk is the time and money spent attracting and supporting the creator/artist.

And the other risk is curatorial. They are risking the trust and attention of the audience by choosing THIS instead of THAT. If they develop a reputation for having good taste (in however the audience defines that) they earn more attention and trust and the benefit of the doubt.

The great publishers might not be famous (Motown was, and The New Yorker is) but they change the culture.

TED takes a risk when they put someone on the main stage or feature a video online. And a podcaster takes a risk when they choose a guest.

The artist gets two benefits. They get the benefit of being picked: cash, editing, the emotional solace of being selected and supported.

And they get the benefit of curation. They reach a scarce audience with help from an organization that’s good at that, and is willing to risk their permission asset to support the artist’s work.

The internet has pockets where all of this is intentionally undermined, often by organizations that adopt the mantle of publisher when it’s convenient.

The Long Tail is Chris Anderson’s term for a library with infinite shelf space, one where the rules of scarcity don’t apply in the same way. The internet platform doesn’t care how many different titles they carry, and in fact, benefits from carrying all of them. Spotify and YouTube and Amazon don’t actually care what you listen to or watch, as long as you come back tomorrow.

Because they have nothing much at stake when it comes to content, and because they are focused on scale, they defer to an algorithm. It’s the mysterious program, by now so complex that no one knows exactly how it works, that decides what works get attention. Even the people who work there guess at what the algorithm wants.

And this has consequences.

Look up a recipe online. It’s a very different experience than finding a recipe in your favorite cookbook. The recipes online offer nearly infinite variety, but they’re largely untested, and they’re formatted in a time-wasting upside-down sort of way because someone decoded that this is what Google’s algorithm would like.

Look at most of the junk in the app store, or most of the content in social media. The algorithm sorts through everything, and when anything can make a buck, anything will.

Of course, there are enormous benefits to the long tail. It gives creators who don’t match an existing editorial paradigm a chance to be heard. It gives readers/listeners/watchers a chance to discover things that would have been unpublished in the old model. And it creates room for discussion and access where it might not have existed.

But…

Publishing to an algorithm is not the same as publishing to an audience. If the creator has no publisher and no permission asset, then being heard is dramatically more difficult. As is getting paid.

And living in a culture that’s driven by profit-seeking algorithm owners is different as well. Because without curation, who is responsible? Who is guiding the culture? Who pushes the boundaries or raises the standards?

Wikipedia has 5,000 curators who work overtime to keep the site from becoming yet another example of Godwin’s Law. Sites that only obey the Long Tail and the primacy of the algorithm have fewer standards. They view curation as a last resort, and if mass is the standard, then mass is all that will be rewarded.

It’s tempting to hope that there’s a hybrid out there. But for that to exist, the algorithms have to work for creators and publishers, not the other way around. The publishers have to embrace the cost of curation, focusing on what they want to promote and paying the price to do so, owning the upside and downside of that intervention.

Culture is almost always improved not by what the masses want tomorrow, but by what a small and dedicated group of people are willing to commit to for the long run. “People like us do things like this” is the recipe for culture.

Creators: It’s possible (perhaps required) to not wait to get picked by a traditional publisher. At the same time, we benefit when we realize that the algorithm isn’t rooting for us and quite probably is working against us. The only winning approach is to earn permission and a direct connection with our fans and then act as curators for ideas (and as our own publishers).

Platforms: It helps to acknowledge that you’re not actually a publisher, that ceding decisions to the crowd and the algorithm and walking away from curation might make you a landlord, but you’re not incrementally improving the culture. Yes, it’s possible to find a middle ground, as Netflix has, but it requires awareness, persistence and discipline.

You probably won’t find this post by searching for it on Google, because they moved my blog down in the results a really long time ago. That’s okay, I’m not writing it for them, I’m writing it for you.

“Repeat business or behavior can be bribed. Loyalty has to be earned.” – Janet Robinson https://preview.redd.it/g5aejhkyouh61.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=e1e060d8f9f2dd6e98ebe88dc8fc3f311ca48a2b
submitted by /u/vesuvitas [link] [comments]

I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with this year’s highly deserving Top CX Stars Professional, Simon Johnson. Simon is General Manager for UK & Ireland for Freshworks, a company providing organisations of all sizes with SaaS customer engagement solutions. Simon shares his thoughts on the biggest impact the pandemic has had on the industry…
The post An Interview with 2021’s Top CX Stars Professional, Simon Johnson appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

CXM Editor Debbie Walton had the pleasure of chatting to Simon Johnson from Freshworks, CXM’s winner of this year’s CX Stars Top 100 Professionals, about what he thinks 2021 holds for the CX Industry. For information on Freshdesk’s product offering, please click here. What 2021 holds for the customer experience industry The last 12 months…
The post Gaining and Retaining Customers in 2021. Part Five: What 2021 Holds for the CX Industry appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Is it the same as “doing well on some tests”?
Because that’s what we report–that perhaps 240 times in a college career, you sat down for a test and did well on it.
That’s hardly the same as doing well in school.
Where do we look up insight on your resilience, enthusiasm, cooperation, curiosity, collaboration, honesty, generosity and leadership?
Because it seems like that’s far more important than whether or not you remembered something long enough to repeat it back on a test.