Category: Customer Experience

Recently CXM had a pleasure of speaking with to Hunain Shahid, Head of Innovation and Partnerships at Elixir Group. After working in roles around Private Equity, Project & Corporate Banking, Hunain Shahid joined Elixir Group as a leveraged finance expert and have progressed to head Strategy & Partnerships. Read below about Hunain’s expectations of the…
The post Interview with Hunain Shahid, Head of Innovation and Partnerships at Elixir Group appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

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Looking for a secret weapon to improve customer perception? Chances are, you already have one in your arsenal.
An unsung hero of the contact center, managers are typically known for overseeing daily operations. However, these individuals hold a lot of value and knowledge by virtue of their position, and often, their resources remain untapped and underutilized.
So how can contact center managers help your business shine in the eyes of your customers? We have some fascinating insights — read on!

FACT:
‘Customer perception’ is a term used to describe a consumer or a group of consumers’ thoughts and feelings about a company. It’s the beliefs and opinions that people hold about your business.

Why can contact center managers influence customer perception??
You may be thinking, “why contact center managers?” After all, they’re not typically the primary decision-makers when it comes to strategy and operations.
However, managers hold a unique position within the contact center. They work closely with agents and keep a close eye on the ground while still maintaining a leadership role. In other words, they act as a bridge, relaying critical information and insights on customer interactions to those in executive positions, all while keeping tabs on any challenges that agents run into on a daily.
This information is essential when managing customer perception. By empowering your manager and providing them with the right training and tools, they can become your number one resource for improving customer experiences and processes.
How to Measure Customer Perception of  Your Brand
The importance of ‘informal authority’
So, if contact center managers are so influential, why is your customer perception rating so low? Unsurprisingly, not all managers have the skills and knowledge to impact customer impressions, especially if they weren’t hired with that function in mind.
Managers who demonstrate ‘informal authority’ are best suited for these types of goals. They are more than just collaborators or team-oriented individuals — they are also adept at providing structure for team members and clients, resulting in higher productivity and healthier relationships.

FACT:
Informal authority refers to “the ability to inspire team members to want to play on your team and win, even if they do not functionally report to you.”  Source: Revenue River

Tips to Help Managers Influence Customer Perceptions
Informal authority can be applied by managers in many ways to boost customer perception in the contact center. Here are just a few techniques for your team to try:
1. Set and adhere to company values
If your business prioritizes customer satisfaction and excellent service, make it known. Then follow through — your company values should resonate through all communications, decisions, and actions. If your agents buy into this culture, your customers will too.

If your business prioritizes customer satisfaction and excellent service, make it known. Then follow through. #custserv #cx Click To Tweet

2. Consistent communication
Messaging mix-ups happen, and they’re not the end of the world. But for a customer, it can come off as inauthentic and shady. Managers should take steps to ensure that their agents are on the same page as leadership and clarify any issues before giving directions.
3. Adopt new tools and tactics
There’s nothing worse than a business that refuses to change with the times. Today’s customers are no longer content with navigating confusing processes or waiting on hold. Managers know the challenges their customers and agents face and can make valuable recommendations for improving the contact center experience!
How Can Employees Affect Customer Perception
4. Agent feedback
The best managers are the ones that validate their team members. By listening to their concerns and feedback and taking appropriate action, they play an essential role in retaining the agents who are committed to providing a top customer experience while encouraging others to follow their lead.
5. Align with marketing efforts
Customer perception is typically seen as a marketing issue, but that doesn’t mean that your contact center has no role to play. In fact, by connecting with your marketing team, you can ensure that messaging is aligned when your agents connect with your customers, creating a more cohesive and consistent experience.

The best call center managers validate their team members by listening to their concerns and taking appropriate action. They play an essential role in keeping agents who are committed to providing a great service. #cx #cctrClick To Tweet

6. Encourage empathy
When aiming for sales targets and other KPIs, it’s common for agents to forget about the job’s customer service portion. Managers who can motivate agents to reach their goals while still prioritizing empathy are extremely valuable, as this will undoubtedly create a positive impact for their customers.
7. Engage with integrity
Honesty and transparency are huge factors when it comes to brand perception. Recognizing and rewarding agents who go out of their way to provide excellent service can help cultivate a culture of integrity, which will pay off in the long run.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

Fashion is everywhere.

It’s not simply the clothes you chose to wear today (and the ones that haven’t seen the outside of your closet for years).

It’s the music that you’re loving right now, songs you wouldn’t have tuned into ten years ago.

It’s the way we understand how the world works, which policies make sense to us and what sort of food we eat. Even the investments we make or the debts we incur.

It’s the rhythm of our days, our priority list and our urgencies as well.

Almost none of our choices in the world are the result of independent direct experience. Instead, we make them in the context of culture, of our surroundings, of ‘people like us do things like this.’ We choose to align with a segment of the culture and take our cues from them.

Sometimes, there’s a coordinator.

Forty years ago, fewer than 100 people determined what songs were going to be the popular ones, the ones that ‘everyone’ would be listening to next week. And a consortium of industry titans decides what colors are going to show up in appliances a few years from now.

We might want to believe that culture simply happens, that it’s organic, distributed and based on millions of independent decisions. And sometimes it is. But more often, there’s an instigator and a benefit for someone along the way.

While many fashion systems are more open and permeable than before (there aren’t three TV networks, there are a million YouTube channels) there are still gatekeepers and narrative setters.

How does the coordinator decide? Are they working in your best interests? Are they erratic, self-deceiving, elusive, selfish, or perhaps a long-term thinker? Do they have a bias toward reality and resilience or is it simply a hustle?

In Latin, the expression is Cui Bono. Who benefits? If it’s you, if it’s us, then fashion is working for us. On the other hand, if it leads to negative outcomes, disappointment and disconnection, it’s worth asking if it’s something we want to keep doing, even (especially) if it feels right in the moment. Because everything we do feels right in the moment.

It’s not a secret conspiracy and it is a choice. Who decides today what’s going to be important tomorrow?

Today’s guest post is from Donald Hicks, a Silicon Valley tech executive, industry thought leader, consumer experience architect, and operations veteran whom I had the pleasure of interviewing recently. Donald was a guest on the live-streaming video version of my podcast (click here to view it on LinkedIn). Be sure to subscribe here to get this episode delivered straight to your inbox in a few weeks when it airs.

Customer experience employees are at the frontlines of every company. They are the often the first, last, or only touchpoint a consumer has with a brand. Being on a CX team demands a high standard of grit, resilience, and trust.
Just in 2020 alone, my team at Twitter had to tackle drills, meetings, and pivots in response to real-time historical moments:

A global pandemic
The #BlackLivesMatter movement
The 2020 U.S. election

Much of what we needed to resolve as a CX team hadn’t been done before. We had no option but to lean on a foundation of trust built when making critical decisions. Without it, we left the door open for misalignment, a poor user experience, and a crumbling internal team.Fostering trust on a CX team is non-negotiable. But trust can’t be built on polite smiles and forced happy hours. Here are the five leadership actions to build trust across teams.
Lead By Example, Even When It’s Unpopular
To lead a team that trusts you, you must first lead by example.
The best piece of advice I can give is to embrace the bold. Be bold when challenging ideas, and be bold with your generosity. When you say something, mean it and plan to back it up. Often, boldness will look heroic, but much more often, boldness will hold people accountable, do the right thing instead of the popular thing, and provide hard truths instead of inflated insights.
Here’s why it matters: boldness shocks the system and challenges the status quo. It recharges teams to think critically in a new way and serve their customers most effectively. Your team doesn’t grow with passiveness; your team thrives with palpable passion.

The best piece of advice I can give is to embrace the bold. Be bold when challenging ideas, and be bold with your generosity. — @DHicks, Former VP Global Ops @Twitter #leadership Click To Tweet

Remember To Serve Your Team and Customers Authentically
A team should be able to trust your intentions as a leader. Leading from a place of conviction means you’ve decided to prioritize honesty and authenticity over optics and office politics. Your actions should assure them that you’re making decisions that are best for the company and team. This confidence will be especially vital for the team when facing critical decisions or external crises.
To serve from a place of intention, you must understand your why and your team members. This will require openness, space for psychological safety, and empowering collaboration over competition.
Encourage your team by actively listening, engaging with their ideas and feedback, and rewarding based on merit. Further, regularly check-in with yourself to see who is driving your leadership decisions and course-correct back to the mission.

Encourage your team by actively listening, engaging with their ideas and feedback, and rewarding based on merit. — @DHicks, Former VP Global Ops @TwitterClick To Tweet

Provide Strength Through Transparency
Like many, I’ve found myself listening to more Brene Brown over the last year. Her relationship with vulnerability and courage is inspiring to countless individuals. A lesson she continues to reaffirm for me is the power of transparency.
Whether providing feedback to a team member or delivering a progress report that won’t “wow” any of the key stakeholders, transparency is vital to building a solid foundation of trust. As a CX leader, you can’t afford to forget that you’re here to serve your team and drive the company’s mission, not your own. Too often, managers will forget to think about long-term sustainability and scalability in the name of staying with the in-crowd and compromise a team’s credibility in the process.
It’s important to hold all players and stakeholders accountable for their actions, for their deliverables, and for the workplace culture, they either add to or take away from. This means coaching your star-player when they do “miss the throw” and investing more of yourself and resources into the introverted rookie that leadership isn’t asking about.

It’s important to hold all players and stakeholders accountable for their actions, for their deliverables, and for the workplace culture, they either add to or take away from. — @DHicks, Former VP Global Ops @TwitterClick To Tweet

Don’t Pretend To Have All The Answers
One of the fastest ways to deteriorate trust with a team is to pretend to know it all.
Each of us possesses a fresh perspective that only we can have; trust is the relational currency that will get ideas out of our heads and onto paper. At my alma mater, Clark-Atlanta, we had a mantra, “Each one, teach one.” Our school encouraged us to teach each other and foster collaboration and denounced the idea of gatekeeping in the name of self-interest.
Foster an open space where team members can share ideas freely, and feedback can be welcomed with interest. Encourage your team to speak-up and strengthen the internal relationships so that opportunities aren’t going unchecked.
After all, you hired or inherited a team deemed contemptible to execute your decisions and strategies. Trust the team to have the brilliant ideas and answers that you hired them for.

Foster an open space where team members can share ideas freely, and feedback can be welcomed with interest. — @DHicks, Former VP Global Ops @TwitterClick To Tweet

Delegate, Empower, Illuminate
If I could leave the business world and every CX leader with one idea, it would be the phrase, “Delegate, empower, illuminate.” Past its concise packaging is a greater message.
Trust is built through successful delegation. When we delegate the projects and tasks to team members, they are empowered to lean into their strengths and given space to develop as a professional and an individual.
The exchange of trust leads to empowerment. Now you have a team member who feels encouraged and supported in their pursuits. Once a bond is built, you both have something to lose: trust. And it is that commitment that will drive their best efforts.
And it’s that effort and commitment that allows them to illuminate and bring their best work to customers. From answering the phone to resolving dire requests, CX builds trust with customers by trusting their team and leaders first.

 
Donald Hicks is a Silicon Valley tech executive, industry thought leader, consumer experience architect, and operations veteran. Creating harmony between unparalleled consumer experiences, and operational strategies is where Donald’s passion lies! Donald most recently served as V.P. Operations at Twitter, overseeing CX, content moderation enforcement, product support engineering, data analytics, and more. He understands the hidden power that lies within dreamers and the responsibility we have to empower all people while fostering a sense of belonging. His relentless pursuit in shaping the way we approach and improve technology platforms has led to his distinct leadership style and unmatched success at tech heavyweights such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and now Airbnb.

Interested in hearing more from Donald Hicks? You can find him on Medium, where he writes content sharing his great insights.

The post 5 Leadership Actions to Build Trust With Those Who Serve Customers appeared first on Customer Bliss.

The post Google Cloud adds UJET to their Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI) Partner Network appeared first on UJET.

With automated digital workers, call center agents can glide seamlessly through tasks. This can increase the probability of a first-call resolution and ensure compliance procedures don’t negatively impact the customer experience. Whether it’s during an interaction with an existing customer or a prospective one, automated workflows can eliminate the friction that turns customers off. And let’s face it — because excellent call center experiences are so hard to come by, streamlined workflows have the power to create a truly delightful, memorable and differentiated customer experience. Full article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/12/03/how-technology-can-make-calling-a-contact-center-be-delightful/?sh=4ded235c6578
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Entries are now open for the 2021 Gulf Sustainability Awards, which will take place in-person in Dubai this September. An annual celebration of green practices and corporate social responsibility, the event is returning to the UAE for its fifth year and will see finalists descend on the Jumeirah Creekside Hotel where they will present their case…
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The insurance industry has an unenviable reputation of providing complicated policies that are obtained through a cumbersome and time-consuming process. For many customers this means a confusing and frustrating experience. And in an increasingly digital world, consumer loyalty is no longer a guarantee. Modern day consumers will move their custom to businesses that offer a…
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The first favor is when you ask a friend or colleague to do something for you.
The second favor is when you ask them to do it precisely the way you would do it.
They’re not related. And the second one costs more.