Category: Customer Experience

Ski slopes are marked by difficulty. The green circle indicates the easiest slope, the one that will get you to the base of the hill the fastest, with the least amount of risk or drama.
Why would anyone choose to ski down on the difficult black diamond run instead?
Most passionate skiers would ask the question differently: why wouldn’t you?
The point of skiing isn’t to get to the bottom. The point is how it feels on your way there.
I’m wondering why this insight is so hard for us to embrace when it comes to learning or personal engagement or art or the work we do each day?
There are speed bumps along the way, opportunities unevenly distributed, and unforeseen problems. But none of them get better when we decide to always seek the easy way to the end.

CX has seen a major shift away from product-centricity into customer-centricity, as befits the new, consumer-enabled digital world – especially true today. A poorly implemented CX initiative is often worse for both customer and business than having no CX initiative at all. Even worse, it can be argued that it creates apathy within the organisation,…
The post To go from bad CX to good CX, it’s time for organisations to ‘Think different’ appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Crucially, the customer experience needs to be memorable to differentiate it from every other experience out there – and inevitably as humans, we remember how experiences make us feel. Irritating and frustrating is an experience that will stick in customers’ memories. Much, much better is to be memorable for delivering a satisfying and pleasurable experience. It might not guarantee the enduring loyalty of the Everything Customer – for them, loyalty has a shelf-life of zero – but an organization’s brand is the total of all the experiences it delivers, which means that feel-good experiences are experiences that matter. Full article: https://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2020/08/serving-the-everything-customer/
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It’s easy to get complacent in the call center, taking customer queries one after the other.
The Executive Guide to Improving Call Center Metrics
If this sounds familiar, it’s probably time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. By revisiting your business’ goals and values, you can make a much-needed pivot to improve the impact your call center has on your company — and more importantly, your customers!
The good news is, we’ve done the heavy lifting and rounded up the best strategies to implement in your call center.
1. Make data-driven decisions with KPIs
Let’s start with the basics. Most call centers track industry-standard metrics, such as Average Hold Time (AHT), Abandonment Rate, and First Call Resolution (FCR).
But are you leveraging this data to make necessary changes to your operations? If not, this is a great place to start.
The Complete Guide to Call Center Metrics
2. Prioritize agent satisfaction
If your agents have high job satisfaction, they’re more likely to pass those feel-good vibes on to your customers. So, it’s in your business’ best interest to ensure your team is well-trained, equipped, and motivated to make the most of each workday.

It’s not rocket science: If your agents have high job satisfaction, they’re more likely to pass on those feel-good vibes to your customers. It’s in your best interest to ensure your team is well-trained, equipped, and motivated. #cx #cctr…Click To Tweet

Put the focus on employee engagement and find out what would make them happier in their daily work. By maintaining their job satisfaction, you’ll also lower agent attrition, saving you loads on additional hiring.
3. Eliminate hold-time for your customers
Eliminate hold time? Can it be done? While it’s impossible to stop customers from swamping your call center all at once, it is possible to give them a better experience by offering them a call-back.
How to Eliminate Hold Time in Your Call Center
During periods of high call volume, they won’t have to wait in the queue, and they’ll receive updates on their queue status in real-time. Not to mention your agents will rest easy knowing there aren’t a dozen fuming callers waiting on the line.
4. Provide self-service options
Today’s customers are more tech-savvy than ever. Why not use that to your advantage? Complement your call center technology with self-serve databases, AI chatbots, and blogs. This helps connect them with the information they need without tying up your phone lines so your agents can spend their time handling more complex customer interactions.
5. Establish a comprehensive training & coaching program
Learning shouldn’t be a one-time gig, especially when it comes to a service role. To help them do their roles with confidence, train and coach agents regularly. That can be in the form of assigning coaches, a mentorship program, and even regular refreshers. The industry is ever-changing, so make sure your team can keep up!

15 Powerful Call Center Training Methods

6. Empower your agents to make decisions
Suppose your agents are repeatedly asking for the same customer information, transferring calls over and over, or worse yet, needing several calls to resolve a single issue. In that case, there’s a good chance your agents aren’t adequately equipped to deal with their customers properly.
That can stem from several sources — they may require more training or more clarity about when it’s appropriate to escalate a case. But the verdict is clear: agents who have the power to help your customers will do so.
7. Create a supportive (not competitive) culture
In the call center’s earlier days, competitive culture was quite common. Despite their intentions to motivate agents to outperform each other and increase productivity, it often left their team members burnt out and exhausted.

Today, the best call center managers know that providing support and a nurturing environment is the best way to boosting agent performance #cx #cctr Click To Tweet

Today, the best call centers know that providing support and a nurturing environment is much more useful for boosting agent performance. And if your agents feel valued for what they bring to the role as a person, they’re sure to create a better customer experience!
8. Have a crisis plan ready
If there’s one thing the past year has taught us, it’s that disaster can strike anytime, anywhere.
Call centers are still feeling the lingering effects of the pandemic, so it’s wise to have measures in place the next time your agents are faced with an onslaught of customer queries.
How to Make Your Call Center More Resilient

9. Audit your systems regularly
Regularly reviewing your procedures can help you avoid unnecessary headaches down the road. Something as simple as conflicting messaging can create huge challenges for your call center. Take the time to review your IVR messaging, ensure that your channels are set up correctly, and evaluate your tools and technologies to ensure they’re in working order.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

How to get better at graphic design…

There are more amateur and semi-pro graphic designers working today than at any point in human history.

Presentations, instagram posts, websites, the cover of your kindle book or the logo for your podcast–anyone who’s touching a phone or a computer is called upon to do design, and most of us could get better.

Understand the difference between good graphic design and simply putting ideas on paper.
Acknowledge that you want to get better and realize that you can.
Improve the picture in your head.
Learn the skills of making that picture real.

Understand the difference: Simply throwing type or a picture up will definitely put the information in front of people, but it won’t carry with it all of the care, insight and professionalism you want and need.

We don’t tolerate typos in commercial products, and the market has the same feeling about design that’s lazy or out of place.

Graphic design represents an emotional commitment to the work. Long before we read the words or understand the images, we see the layout. Kerning and color and weight and form arrive in our brains before we have decided what the words on the page actually mean. You wouldn’t wear a clown suit to a job interview, and yet people dress up their ideas in clown suits all the time.

Getting better: If you are sure that you’re already good enough and that feedback is simply annoying, you’re probably not reading this. For the rest of us, there’s the chance to say, “I’m going to move to a higher level, and that means leaving this level behind.” Don’t defend your work with the generous critic. The entire point of getting better is to eagerly abandon the approaches you were taking on your way to gaining new skills that are more effective.

The picture in your head: This is a huge step. If what you’re designing looks right to you, then it’s never going to improve. The leap here is to go shopping. Find ten websites that succeed by whatever measure matters to you. Go to a bookstore and find ten book covers that represent the level of authority and professionalism you seek. Go to the Dieline and compare 40 package designs. Check out the difference between the photos you’re taking and the ones that are on the most successful online retail sites. Find some heroes. Understand the genre you’re working in.

Make the picture real: And now–copy them. Step by step, learn what you need to learn to make something as good as your heroes. A direct copy is not what you’re going to publish, but at least you’ll understand how to add the level of care and signalling and understanding of genre that’s needed to get the emotional element of your point across.

Once you know how to do good lighting, color choice and typography, you are welcome to abandon it. But it certainly pays to know how and to make it your choice.

A happy customer is a loyal customer. And loyal customers are important. In fact, the chances of selling to an existing customer are between 60-70%. Which drops to a mere 5-20% for new customers. But what is the key to keeping customers happy? 64% of customers state that experiences are worth more to them than…
The post 7 Ways to Improve Customer Experience with Email Marketing appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

In Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People, he talks about giving compliments as being like leaving beacons of light. The world is a very small place and before you know it, you’ll do a full circle and meet people again, and they will remember you for the small compliments that you…
The post Giving Compliments appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

“What’s different?”
Because we rarely notice what’s the same.
It’s not easy to focus on the chronic. In fact, it’s really difficult. Too often we are in organizations that are highly leveraged, living from quarter to quarter, or we’re depending on clients or bosses from day to day. Too often, we don’t have enough in reserve to focus on anything but what’s changing or what’s getting the spotlight.
It’s the chronic issues that end up causing the most pain. Systems at work that never get better, or problems that fester.
For too long, there have been lousy schools, inequitable opportunity and the pain of grinding poverty. There have always been innocent people in prison and unheard voices in need of our help. There has long been graft and inefficiency and the tragedy of preventable illness and discomfort.
But we’ve too often turned away from those issues, from the things we’re accustomed to, because they appear to be the same as they were. The status quo is there because we’ve accepted it. We might have worked hard on some of the issues, but it seems impossible to be on our toes about all of them, all of the time.
And marketers have pushed us to focus on the new movie, the new crisis, the new tech…
When sudden change hits, it’s easy to get focused on it to the exclusion of everything else. It’s the delta, the change, the acceleration–it attracts our gaze. And we can’t turn away, or it feels like we can’t.
The media is in the delta business. That’s all they do, that’s what they get paid for, and they work to maximize our addiction to it.
Not everyone is lucky enough to be able to spend time away from the delta, but if you can, it’s worth the effort.
The problem with living on the delta is that as we strap into a rollercoaster of external change, we forget to work on the problems we have the opportunity to improve.

Automation technology breaks down into 3 major segments Decision-centric automation, which consists of process mining and insights and event stream processing software used for process-oriented predictive and prescriptive analytics Labor-centric automation, which includes capture software, process-centric application platforms, and robotic process automation software System-centric process automation, which encompasses API integration and management software and the portion of event-driven middleware associated with process automation Full article: https://www.five9.com/blog/supercharge-your-contact-center-with-workflow-automation
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The impacts of COVID-19 won’t be temporary. Customer experience as we know it is coming to an end. But luckily, we can all learn from the changes to come.    Over the next year, we will shift further from a physical product-based economy to one that is increasingly digital and subscription-based. Subscription companies have grown…
The post Accelerating Customer Service: Streamlining Businesses for the Subscription Economy appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.