Category: Customer Experience

CX Stars is Customer Experience Magazine’s annual list of the UK’s most dedicated CX Professionals and CX Influencers and after last year’s success, it’s back and voting is now OPEN! Our shortlist of these incredible CXers is now published and we want you, our valued readers to vote for them, to catapult them into CX…
The post CX Stars Voting is Open! appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Fostering an inclusive work environment is essential if you want a high-performing contact center team.
If you haven’t been paying attention, agent attrition has continued to rise, according to our State of the Contact Center 2020 report. And high turnover rates won’t just hit you in the wallet — it also impacts morale, which will affect any new hires.
This is why fostering a culture of inclusion, especially today when contact center workers are on the front lines of your business supporting your customers. By creating an environment where your agents feel appreciated, valued, and accepted, you set your team up for success even before they hit the phone lines.
3 Reasons Why Agent Satisfaction is the New Customer Satisfaction
1. Hire agents who demonstrate empathy
Empathy has been a hot topic in the contact center industry this past year. And for good reason — agents who demonstrate this quality are more successful in customer service roles and are great for fostering a positive and inclusive work environment.
When hiring, it’s important to look beyond the job qualifications and look at their soft skills and personality. Ensure they align with your business’ values, especially when it comes to diversity and inclusion. 
2. Train your leaders appropriately
You can’t create an inclusive work environment if you don’t have leaders willing to emulate those ideals. Better training for agents and leaders will be a big contact center trend in 2021 and beyond.
That’s why it’s crucial to provide additional training to those in leadership positions so they can demonstrate and speak to these inclusive practices. That will set the tone for new hires and sway existing team members in the right direction.

TIP:
Be as flexible as possible when providing training, and encourage your agents to share what they need from you to succeed. Not everyone will benefit from the same training tactics!

3. Vary your training styles
Training isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of deal. All individuals learn at different paces and in different ways. Don’t just expect them to read from the training manual and be ready to hit the ground running. 
Offer a variety of sessions and materials that include roleplay, one-on-one coaching, and even quick tips and one-pagers. That will allow your agents to absorb the information more effectively and approach their role with confidence.
4. Provide sensitivity training
Your agents likely come from all walks of life, bringing unique and diverse experiences. However, it’s essential to prepare them for customer engagements they might not have as much experience dealing with.
By providing regular sensitivity training, you can arm your team with the knowledge or tools they need to support your customers of all abilities, genders, cultures, and more with respect and understanding. 

FACT:
Language can be a huge barrier for customers. In the UK, approximately 40% of contact centres have started to support languages other than English. – WhosOn

5. Empower your frontline workers
Day after day, your agents connect with your customers and get real-time information making them valuable knowledge sources. The last thing you should do is dismiss their opinions! 
Create opportunities for agents to voice their suggestions and concerns. One great way to do this is to form committees and groups within your organization. But remember: agent empowerment only works if leadership listens and follows through on their feedback. So be prepared to listen and take action!
6. Offer support proactively
Often, individuals who require additional support and accommodations are expected to submit a request to management. However, by putting the burden on your employees, you convey that their accommodations are just more work for leadership.
Instead, train your leaders to be observant and offer support proactively in a sensitive manner. That may be as simple as saying, “I noticed you’re having some trouble with X; what can I do to help make your work easier?” This question not only shows their willingness to go the extra mile but also alleviates any hesitation they might have had about requesting accommodations. 

TIP:
Encourage your agents to take the initiative and start their own groups to reflect diversity and inclusion in your workplace — for instance, a diversity and inclusion committee or an LGBTQA+ committee.

7. Alleviate key stressors
It’s no secret that working at a call center can be stressful. Suppose your business is committed to providing an exceptional work experience for its agents. In that case, it’s worth it to identify common stressors and find solutions to ease the burden off your agents.
One of the most common issues is high call volume, which can often happen unexpectedly! Consider adopting call-back technology, which defers less urgent queries to a later time so your agents can focus on serving the customers who need them most.
How to Make Your Contact Center More Resilient
8. Create a nurturing work environment
Many contact centers boast competitive cultures, which makes sense, considering they often align success with goals and sales targets. With that said, it is still possible to create a nurturing culture.
Your business can do this by outlining measures of success other than sales, revenue, and KPIs. Start acknowledging agents who deliver exceptional service, solve challenging customer issues with patience, and support their fellow agents.
9. Practice what you preach
Of course, the above tips will do you no good if your business doesn’t follow through. If your agents feel that this is all just a charade from management, not much will change. 
Shifting to an inclusive culture can be challenging, but it’s absolutely worth it if you want to maintain agent satisfaction while providing exceptional support to your customers!The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

The first half of Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography makes some things abundantly clear:

He had no natural ability to play the guitar. In fact, after his first lessons, he quit, unable to play a note.

He had no singing talent. Every group he was part of needed a lead singer, and it wasn’t him.

And just about everyone dismissed him. Audiences walked out, his first agent simply stopped returning his calls and bandmates gave up and moved on.

He didn’t even know how to drive a car. Not only wasn’t he dating in high school, he wasn’t even cruising around town, being a charismatic rock star.

Talent is overrated. Skill is acquirable.

Showing up is something almost every creative leader has in common. In business, in the arts, in society. Consistently shipping the work, despite the world’s reaction, despite the nascent nature of our skill, despite the doubts.

And community is essential. The people you surround yourself with can reinforce your story, raise the bar and egg you on.

After the fact, the community becomes an integral part of your story of success. But first, you have to commit to the journey.

[That’s what happens in the Creative’s Workshop.]

For more on the creative commitment, check out this extraordinary conversation between Brian Koppelman and director Ron Howard.

Burned in is what we look for in an electronic device. It’s working perfectly, in the groove.
Burned out is what happens if we abuse it.
Burn-in comes from a practice, a generous, persistent approach that’s within our control.
Burn out, on the other hand, is often caused by trying to control things that we can’t possibly control. As a result, we waste cycles and create a pattern of stress.
Even though it seems as though the world is trying to steal our focus and our energy, ultimately, in each moment, it’s our choice to make. We can decide to create possibility and contribute. Toward better.

CX Stars, the awards that honour contributions made to the dynamic CX industry by outstanding professionals and influencers, has returned for 2021! We are thrilled to announce the panelists who will be choosing our winners from the Top 100 CX Professionals and Top 50 Influencers who have been nominated his year!   The panelists will be assisting in the validation…
The post And here are the Panelists appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

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The post The Metrics That Are Needed For A Modern Contact Center appeared first on UJET.

Ultra-Modern Contact Center Unifies Enterprise Customer Data with Oracle Cloud CX Service for a Single Source of Truth and more Intelligent Customer Experience
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – January 12, 2021 – UJET Inc.
SAN FRANCISCO –January 12, 2020 – Observe.AI, a leader in Contact Center AI, today announced a partnership with UJET,  the world’s first and only CCaaS 3.0 cloud contact center provider, to deliver more positive, natural brand experiences to the market leveraging the power of data, intelligence and automation. Observe.AI will be the first workforce optimization (WFO) solution in the UJET partner ecosystem.
All areas of business, contact centers included, shifted to remote work in response to the pandemic this year. For many contact centers, 43% of customer experience leaders believe more than half of agents will work from home even after offices reopen, leading to increased challenges in the areas of quality, consistency, and visibility into agent performance. Leveraging Observe.AI and UJET together, joint customers can solve these challenges with end-to-end quality assurance and coaching workflows, regardless of where agents are located.
“UJET’s customers are among the most innovative, forward thinking contact centers on the planet.  They’ve chosen UJET because they’re looking for every edge they can gain and believe in the power of technology to drive meaningful changes to their customer experience, and the bottom line,” said Sharath Keshava Narayana, Co-founder & Chief Revenue Officer at Observe.AI. “Our customers have shared goals, and together we’re focused on introducing a more modern approach to both contact center and quality management.”
Modern brands need to enable a frictionless, blended customer experience. The Observe.AI and UJET partnerships will leverage the power of AI to drive significant operational efficiencies and performance improvements at scale across customer interactions.   Historically, agent performance management has been heavily manual, random, and prone to both inconsistency and human error.  Observe.AI will provide intelligence and automation UJET customers need to improve customer experience quality, analyzing 100% of voice interactions, automatically evaluating call quality. The joint solution will also enable brands to proactively identify opportunities to drive growth and improve coaching based on customer sentiment signals that shed light on customer intent and frustrations, and potential compliance or fraud issues. Joint customers can go live in just 2-4 weeks.
“We’re thrilled to be partnering with Observe.AI to disrupt and improve the status quo for Customer Experience,” stated John Lynch, Chief Revenue Officer at UJET.  “Our industry is at a phenomenal inflection point, as we’re finally seeing new investment in intelligent cloud technologies that go beyond just acquiring customers to truly caring for them after the sale.  The team at Observe.AI shares our passion for better business results through improved customer communications and we’re excited to offer our combined solution to the market.”
Over the past year, Observe.AI has grown its team to 125 people and brought on more than 150 customers, including Pearson, Alcon Laboratories, and Concentrix. During this time, Observe.AI added over 20,000 agent licenses to its platform and grew revenue 600%.
About Observe.AI
Observe.AI, a leader in Contact Center AI, transforms customer experiences and improves agent performance by helping top brands analyze 100% of calls and streamline quality assurance workflows. With Observe.AI, businesses transcribe every call with high accuracy and coach agents while gaining full visibility into their customer service operations. Observe.AI brings the power of agent assistance, automatic speech recognition, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to modern contact centers and their frontline teams.
Observe.AI is trusted by more than 150 customers and partners, including Root Insurance, Alcon Laboratories, Tripadvisor, and Pearson. Backed by Menlo Ventures, Next47, NGP Capital, Scale Ventures, Nexus Ventures, and Y-Combinator, Observe.AI’s headquarters is in San Francisco with an office in Bangalore, India. For more information, visit www.observe.ai.
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.
Media ContactsHolly Barkerholly@ujet.co
Chad TorbinSpeakeasy Strategiesujet@speakeasystrategies.com
The post Observe.AI Partners with UJET to Improve CX Quality for the Remote Work Era appeared first on UJET.

Of course you can.

If you care enough.

It’s not easy, it might not work and it takes effort, but the opportunity is there.

It helps to do it on purpose and it helps to do it in community. I’m excited about the possibilities for 2021… Here are some things you can do that will make your work more effective:

The Creative’s Workshop is back.

It inspired my bestselling book The Practice, but it adds an entire dimension to the commitment of making and shipping work that matters.

In the Creative’s Workshop you’ll be part of a mutually supportive cohort of people who are ready to do the work. Creative work is thrilling and it makes a change happen. This workshop leads to an extraordinary shift in our expectations and productivity.

The thousands of people who have been part of it report that it’s truly a game-changer in their career and the way they approach their work.

And next week is the Early Decision Deadline for the altMBA’s May 2021 session. More than 5,000 alumni in 70 countries have discovered the difference it can make.

And a sneak preview: The Podcasting Workshop is back for its seventh session, with enrollment beginning January 26th.

These workshops work because the people in them are enrolled in a journey, ready to do the work together. They’re all run by my friends at Akimbo, an independent, mission-driven B corp.

Go make a ruckus.

[I’ll try to do these workshop updates once a month here on the blog. Please share with someone who is ready to make a difference.]

Physical retail’s strength when compared to online shopping has always been the multi-sensory experience it delivers. When it comes to hooking shoppers, there’s nothing like seeing, touching, and trying the products. But when touching is a no-go, like it has been for much of the past year, how can retailers deliver the same immersive experience that keeps customers…
The post No-Touch Retail: Creating Rich Experiences for Consumers Using Touch-free Technology appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.