Category: Customer Experience

After a year of constant global disruption, consumer experience hasn’t completely changed shape — but it is looking distinctly different. As rolling lockdowns have limited real-world connection, technology’s role in brand interaction and purchasing has grown exponentially; sparking record levels of digital activity and fast-tracking ecommerce evolution by five years. These shifts will drive lasting…
The post Consumer Experience Has a New Look, Embracing It is Vital for 2021 Success appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

It’s always difficult to predict trends, especially during uncertain times. However, we’re willing to bet that this contact center trend — resiliency — will be seen across all industries.
COVID-19 reminded us that bad stuff happens quite regularly. Crises do occur. And they will happen more frequently in the coming century, as natural forces and increasing disparity combine to drive systemic ecological and societal change. Contact centers need to be more resilient before the next crisis.
Contact Center Trends 2021
Resiliency Will Be A Major Contact Center Trend Next Year
Most contact centers realized that they could have avoided unnecessary stress if they’d been proactive about upgrading technology and building more resilient systems.

Most contact centers could have avoided unnecessary stress if they’d been proactive about upgrading technology and building more resilient systems.
#cctr #cloudcctr #covidClick To Tweet

“Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”
— Andy Grove, EX-President, Intel Corp.
Businesses and contact centers that create resiliency can anticipate, react, and recover faster and more comprehensively than those that don’t. This chart from hbr.org shows you how that plays out in a crisis event:

The Six Principles of Resilient Systems
Every business is different, but we can use these principles to find the areas of our business that need addressing.
1. Redundancy
Building redundancy into your contact center systems is essential for resiliency. It means creating buffer systems and fail-safes against unexpected failures. Commercial airplanes can fly with as little as 1/4 of their engines running. Your contact center needs to be able to continue to operate in the event of a serious incident such as a fire, natural disaster, or cyber-attack.
2. Diversity
Diversity is essential to resiliency. Animals and plants that don’t have enough genetic variety are at far greater risk of total extinction. Diversity creates resilience in living organisms, populations, and ecosystems like your contact center. In a contact center, this means hiring different people, operating on other channels, and building an environment that fosters creative thinking.

A prudent organization believes in Murphy’s Law: i.e. anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Being careful means developing contingency plans. It also involves regular stress tests. #cctr #resiliencyClick To Tweet

3. Modularity
Modularity is one way to help create redundancies in your systems. It allows individual elements or processes to fail without the whole business collapsing. That comes at a price though, as modularity makes you are less efficient. But breaking up your departments into modules makes them easier to manage and quicker to put back together after a crisis.
Most contact centers realized that they could have avoided unnecessary stress if they’d been proactive about upgrading technology and building more resilient systems.
4. Adaptability
Adaptability requires some level of diversity and modularity. Adaptive organizations create processes based on flexibility and learning rather than consistent, stable processes and outcomes. They make the space for people to innovate rather than focusing on strict adherence to a particular way of doing things.
5. Prudence
A prudent organization believes in Murphy’s Law: i.e. anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Being careful means developing contingency plans. It also involves regular stress tests and ‘fire drills’ for the most significant risks, which you can determine through scenario planning.
6. Embeddedness
Embeddedness is the degree to which an organization is influenced by the social or cultural environment in which it occurs or exists. Your business must be aware of its role in the ecosystems it belongs to, so that it doesn’t accidentally disregard or oppose them.
How to Measure Customer Perception of Your Brand
What Does a ‘Resilient’ Contact Center Look Like?
This is the question that many contact center executives will be asking in the coming months. The truth is, we don’t know yet, but we do have some ideas. One thing that’s certain is that a resilient contact center is not confined to four walls.
Better Integrated Technology
Technology is what has made our society resilient enough to survive this pandemic. Use it to bolster your contact center and build resiliency into your contact center.
“The lasting impact of COVID-19 will be a shift towards embracing technology solutions that remove friction (i.e., waiting in queue, customer authentication, interaction history availability) in a customer’s journey over hiring additional agents.”
— AMIT UNADKAT, MANAGER AT LOGIC 2020
Find systems that ‘play’ nice with others. Use technology that integrates seamlessly with your existing stack instead of finding a workaround or using a more basic version. And reduce the number of windows and screens your agents need to use!
Omnichannel deployment makes sense because your phone lines aren’t always full. Why not have agents respond to email or chat requests? And the better integrated your platforms are, the more efficiently you can resolve tickets.
“Businesses showed amazing resilience in pivoting to a distributed model. They increased their reliance on data to stay situationally aware and effectively manage their CX. In 2021, leaders must continue to find better ways to manage and coach their distributed teams, which will require reliable, real-time analytics.”
— MATT BEATTY, EVP OF SALES & MARKETING, BRIGHTMETRICS™
More Flexible and Efficient Workforce Management
Better integration also means better internal integration. Eliminate silos to make communication between departments easier. A hybrid workplace is more likely to be the norm post-pandemic, and for a good reason. It’s a far more resilient approach than putting all your eggs in one basket.
The State of the Contact Center 2020
“The other big trend that will continue in 2021 is the rise of cloud contact centers to support remote agents. One of the biggest benefits of remote agents is the ability to hire the best agents, not just those who are local and live within commuting distance of a call center.”
— BLAIR PLEASANT, INDUSTRY ANALYST
As society becomes more virtual and dispersed, so must your contact center. There are very few reasons not to have at least half of your workforce remote in the long-term. This will allow you to take advantage of a broader range of agents and provide a more comprehensive service.
Agents with Broader Skillsets and Permission
Multiskilling your employees so they are omnichannel can also improve the customer experience. With the right technology, agents can move across channels to continue to serve (or call-back) a customer as needed. They’re fully empowered to help the customer and take pride in seeing a ticket through to resolution.
“The pandemic will have lots of lasting impacts. If I had to pick one, it would have to be “immediacy” – the need to be available to engage at whatever time and in whichever channel the customer chooses. This applies to CX engineering, management, and measurement, and digital is the key enabler of this for both bot and person-to-person interactions.”
— PETER LAVERS, CX CONSULTANT AT THINKCX
Plan for the Next Crisis Now
Just as many people will see the next crisis coming, as did this one, the hope is that more of us will be prepared to listen.
If the pandemic made anything clear, it’s our responsibility to create contingency plans and test our emergency response strategies for the next one. We are an essential lifeline for our communities and customers, and we need to be better prepared in future times of need.
 
The post How to Make Your Contact Center More Resilient first appeared on Fonolo.

It’s fun to say the perfect thing at the perfect time. Mic drop.
The problem is that then you have to bend over and pick up the microphone.
Conversations take more effort but tend to be worth it.

In last week’s article, we focused on the practical steps brands can take to drive richer insights through understanding customer signals in a climate where the pandemic has altered the ways in which customers interact with brands. Capturing and analysing signals is, however, just one part of the picture. With this rapid pace of change…
The post How to Drive Rich Customer Insight and Rapid Innovation in Turbulent Times, part 2 appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

The deadline to enter the 2021 Gulf Customer Experience Awards is fast approaching, with just days left to put your organisation forward. Potential entrants have until this Thursday, December 17 to submit entries ahead of the Awards finals day on February 15, 2021, where finalists will be presenting their best CX initiatives LIVE online before…
The post Last Chance to Enter the 2021 Gulf Customer Experience Awards appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

One reason that successful and prolific singer-songwriters are prolific is that as soon as they’ve written a song, they can record it and publish it.
And a huge advantage of having a daily blog is that the software is always open, waiting for you to write something.
Your story doesn’t have to be a book, it is simply your chance to make a difference. “Here’s what I see, here’s how you can be part of it.”
When we remove the pre (finding the pen, the paper, the notebook, the software) and the post (finding a way to publish it), it turns out that we write more often, and writing more often leads to writing better.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, it can simply be the next thing you do.
The patterns matter. Streaks work.
All part of your practice.

Here are some books for the end of the year… fifty years of ideas that have helped me understand the world differently:

Gödel, Escher, Bach — Before meta was cool, Douglas Hofstadter won a Pulitzer Prize for this intricately created examination of math, art and music.

Caste — My book of the year. Wilkerson helps us see how persistent and hidden the indoctrination of race and status lie in our culture.

Understanding Comics — Another meta book, and a masterpiece of explanation and insight.

The Red Queen — There are a ton of very cool books on evolutionary theory and this one is particularly good.

Knocking on Heaven’s Door — Lisa Randall’s explanation of physics will change the way you look at the world.

Guns, Germs and Steel — Another classic, it has earned its spot in the canon. An explanation (not without controversy) of how the world ended up as it did. This is what the study of geography is actually about.

The Beginning of Infinity — After you read Randall, this book will take those ideas and expand them. A lot.

Impro — This book transformed the way I saw human interaction, and had a significant impact in the creation of This is Marketing.

What Technology Wants — Kevin Kelly has changed my mind over and over again, and this one is the one I think about the most often.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas — A short story from Ursula LeGuin that you will never forget.

Debt — An astonishing look at 5,000 years of human history by the late David Graeber.

The Jazz of Physics — A great book, even (especially) for people who think they don’t like either.

When Things Fall Apart — Each of Pema’s books is special, and the audio books in particular. This is a fine place to start.

Books are an extraordinary device, transitioning through time and space, moving from person to person and leaving behind insight and connection. I’m grateful every single day for the privilege of being able to read (and to write).

And writing doesn’t always have to take the form of books. Check out this prize-winning video:

Did you know that 66% of customers can’t remember the last time a business exceeded their expectations? Source: Gartner https://preview.redd.it/amjkmzitsr461.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=f9726aac52d39a5f3adde6acc8010f5d6dac3e15
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The typical ten-year-old violinist can’t tell the difference between a cheap instrument and a Guarneri.
A harried traveler simply wolfs down a hamburger, not really worried or aware of its provenance or flavor.
And a bureaucrat buys whatever is cheapest and meets spec, without regard for how well it is designed or the supply chain that created it.
Enthusiasts will work their whole lives to be able to tell the difference in how an orchestra sounds, or how the chocolate is tempered or the simple elegance of thoughtful engineering.
And then, once we do, the incompetent or mediocre stuff isn’t worth much.
In order to appreciate the truly great work, we often end up becoming disappointed with the rest.

Customer and workforce expectations are changing. Contact centre platforms need to change, too. Legacy on-premises software lacks business agility, support for today’s distributed workforce, self-service for customers and agents, and is expensive. Migrating to the cloud delivers better flexibility for the business, efficiency for agents, and support for customers. Moreover, with the right security tools in place, a cloud-based contact centre is the ideal way to keep business and customer information safe. Full Article: https://www.uctoday.com/contact-centre/ccaas/business-is-all-digital-time-to-future-proof-your-contact-centre/
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