Category: Customer Experience

With the boom of the online era, customers in many sectors have become spoilt for choice when it comes to both products and services. With more options than ever and the ability to quickly compare offerings between companies, decisions can often come down to one key factor: Customer Service. This hasn’t gone unnoticed – and…
The post Excellent Customer Service: The Unexpected Benefit of Lockdown appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

The CX Stars list of the UK’s top Customer Experience Professionals and Influencers is returning to CXM for 2021. CX Stars is Customer Experience Magazine’s annual list of the country’s most dedicated CX Professionals who strive to transform businesses and place the customer firmly at the centre of their organisations, and the inspirational thought leaders…
The post CXM’s Top CX Stars: 2021 Edition appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

“You’re welcome,” is not the same as, “it’s my pleasure.”

and

“No problem,” is not the same as, “I’m happy to help.”

These sentences are the closing parentheses of a simple conversation that opens with “thank you.”

We have to say something. The “thank you” demands acknowledgement.

It could be, “okay, now we’re even.”

Or we could express satisfaction at having the ability to make a contribution. We can continue the infinite game instead of simply walking away.

That might be more satisfying all around. A wave is more powerful than a grimace.

Partnership Helps to Meet Massive Demand for Contact Center Modernization at Scale
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – December 08, 2020 09:00 AM Eastern Standard Time – UJET Inc.
the world’s first and only CCaaS 3.0 cloud contact center provider, today announced a strategic partnership with Telarus, the largest privately-held technology services distributor in the United States. Under the terms of the partnership, Telarus will now be able to leverage UJET’s cloud contact center solutions to further assist innovative global enterprises in unifying their brand experiences and transforming customer journeys to meet the needs of the modern consumer.
The combination of UJET’s ultra-modern cloud contact center solution with the trusted experience and extensive partner network of Telarus helps tech-forward businesses and industries adopt scalable, reliable, and secure customer service tools to eliminate operational silos and create more intelligent and natural customer interactions.
“The digital transformation of customer service has suddenly re-emerged as a mission-critical enterprise initiative, yet virtually every contact center on the planet is working with disparate, outdated technologies that render it impossible to provide a truly modern experience for their customers,” said Vasili Triant, chief operating officer, UJET. “UJET and Telarus combine to address these challenges through frictionless, flexible, and transformative solutions tailored to modern, smartphone-era consumers. We’re thrilled to partner with a leader like Telarus to bring these capabilities to market rapidly and at scale.”
The partnership allows Telarus partners full access to UJET’s contact center products and features, including their unique approach to embeddable experience, enabling businesses to fully integrate support into their existing mobile experience. With UJET’s in-app support, businesses can eliminate fragmented, repetitive customer interactions while unifying their customer data for a more intelligent and contextual customer journey. Partners can also access the new UJET Virtual Agent, which provides proactive, conversational AI to empower both customers and contact center agents.
“Helping our partners navigate through the current business climate and identify solutions to improve their customer experience and achieve operational efficiencies is paramount,” said Brandon Knight, vice president of business development, Contact Center, Telarus. “We have a number of cloud contact center providers, but UJET offers paramount scalability, best-in-class CRM integrations, and a truly unique customer experience that hasn’t before been brought to the market. This is a one-of-a-kind solution for the next-generation of CCaaS.”
UJET’s channel partner program supports strategic business partnerships, master agents, and integrators looking to diversify their portfolio, grow their business, and partner with a leader in contact center digital transformation. More information about joining UJET’s channel partner program can be found at https://ujet.co/partners/.
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.
Learn more at www.ujet.cx.
About Telarus
Built for You, Telarus is the largest privately held technology services distributor (master agent) in the United States. Our dynamic agent-partner community sources data, voice, cloud, and managed services through our robust portfolio of over 200 leading service providers. We are best known for our home-grown software pricing tools and mobile apps unique in the industry. To help our partners grow their businesses, we’ve assembled the best support organization in the industry, including cybersecurity, SD-WAN, Cloud, mobility, contact center, and ILEC specialty practices whose primary goal is to help our partners identify and design the right technology solutions for their customers. To learn more about the Telarus opportunity, please visit www.telarus.com, or follow us on Twitter @Telarus.
Learn more at www.getujet.com.
Media ContactsHolly Barkerholly@ujet.co
Chad TorbinSpeakeasy Strategiesujet@speakeasystrategies.com
The post UJET Announces Strategic Global Partnership With Telarus appeared first on UJET.

The digital transformation of companies accelerated significantly in 2020. In particular, they had to quickly adopt remote work and further increase their use of digital channels. A McKinsey study shows this situation could have saved five years on the adoption of digital tools. In this context, what will be the impact of these changes in…
The post The 6 Top Customer Experience Trends in 2021 appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Last month, we asked what was missing in the journey ecosystem, according to our customers. One of the most heard answers? ’A way to work with insights across journeys, without the hassle of diving deep into the details.’ Manage opportunities in one place, across journeys Now the question is, are our users right? Are we right? I’d love to hear from other experts like you. At TheyDo we’ve turned the double diamond into a digital hub for customer-centric collaboration. The newest engine to manage opportunities across the business is design to scale Opportunities and insights outside the workshop. Are we on to something? https://www.theydo.io/guides/manage-opportunities-across-journeys/
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AI has been making a relentless assault on the contact center for several years. But it wasn’t until 2020 that its true role became clear. And — it’s not quite what you’d expect.

Read All the Contact Center Trends Here:
Contact Center Trends 2021

Contact Center Execs Had Been ‘Back-Burnering’ Upgrades
Artificial intelligence has been around for a while now, but many contact centers have yet to integrate it. On top of that, many were also pushing back on hardware and core stack upgrades.
“I was surprised by how many call centers were unprepared for the move to work from home. I don’t want to make light of a difficult situation, but all the managers and executives who had for years pushed back on moving to the cloud found themselves in a really tough place.”
— Thomas Laird, CEO, Expivia
The expense — in both time and resources — meant that upgrades were kicked to the curb or filed under, ‘fix when broken.’ Lockdown broke everything. 2020 was ‘the curb.’ And it had many contact center managers wishing they’d invested sooner.
Lockdown Precipitated Rapid Development
The rapid move to remote work how unprepared contact centers were for the future — even though they should have been.
Suddenly, experimenting with new technology wasn’t an obstacle; it was a life-saver. Rapid technological updates were forced upon execs like never before.
 
The long lines and endless hold times showed contact center managers that they needed to find better, more efficient ways to deliver customer support — fully opened executives’ eyes to finding a solution. And let’s be clear: the solution isn’t fobbing customers off with clunky bots.
“Contact centers must understand that the omnichannel experience is important and AI is a part of the equation. But businesses that believe they are fooling customers with AI are kidding themselves. It is the quality of the entire service experience, not just the technology, that will define a customer’s perception of an organization.”
— Tony Johnson, CX Leader, Author, Speaker Founder at Ignite Your Service
COVID Demonstrated the Importance of Human Connection
People want a human connection, and when they’re looking for help with something quickly, they’re just going to reach out to a human straight away, especially when they’re already anxious.

Read All the Contact Center Trends Here:
Contact Center Trends 2021

The endless waiting times demonstrated how unprepared most contact centers were to service their customers when they really needed help. And that’s when the real role of AI in the contact center became clear.
“AI is bridging the gap in efficiency, keep everyone connected remotely, and providing real-time support for customer service agents and the managers who monitor and evaluate call quality data.” — Rana Gujral, CEO of Behavioural Signals
The True Role is to Bridge the Gap
RPA & AI undeniably has a role in the contact center. But it should be clear by now that AI technology can’t replace human interaction. But it can facilitate and enhance it.
We can — and should — be using AI for certain things:

Understanding our data so we can be more proactive in solving customer issues
Optimizing our back-end operations to remove friction and improve accessibility
Providing customers with smarter self-service
Facilitating better service by providing agents with better data during conversations

“AI-powered applications help contact center staff work more efficiently by auto-transcribing and analyzing conversations to serve up contextual answers to help agents resolve a customer’s request faster will be a growing trend. The lasting impact is going to be a new bar of customer service that surpasses pre-COVID benchmarks, which is great news for customers!”— Amit Unadkat, Manager – Digital Transformation, Logic 2020
The Future of AI in the Contact Center
We must use AI technology to help customers solve simple queries themselves and contact the right person when they need to – not create a barrier to contact.
Businesses at the top of their game will use AI to anticipate a customer’s needs before they do. And then perhaps offer to have an agent reach out to them. Later, AI will be there behind the scenes, equipping the support agent with the information they need to help that customer as much as possible during the interaction.
The post The True Role of AI in the Contact Center first appeared on Fonolo.

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Humans do it all the time. Sometimes with great success. Not just easy-to-measure and profitable endeavors like sports betting or the stock market, but essential human interactions like, “what’s the best way to welcome a kindergarten student on the first day of school,” or “If we arrange the intersection this way, traffic will flow better.” In matters of public health and engineering, the ability to have a good idea about the repercussions of our work is urgent.

When dealing with a prognosticator, it’s worth asking three questions:

“What’s your track record?” It’s unlikely we’ll be right every single time, but once we adjust for luck and statistical anomalies, do you regularly outperform the others, or are you simply loud about it?

“Can you show your work?” It’s hard to trust someone who has a secret method. While this might be a competitive requirement, it’s more likely that the person has simply had a lucky streak (streaks are statistically likely).

“Have you taught your method to others?” This is a variation of the previous question. If people are using the method to successfully predict the future in other areas, then we’re seeing a resilient and robust approach to understanding how the world works.

Rules of thumb (the topic of my very first book, co-authored 34 years ago) are a stand in for the sort of rigor that is far more common today. With our predictions etched into the memory of the internet and more data available than ever before, we ought to be better at predicting what’s going to happen next and determining who’s good at that and who isn’t. But belief is a strong force, widely held, and sometimes it takes us a while to realize that confidence and volume are not a replacement for seeing things as they are and understanding how they work.

Operating a business in 2020 is challenging in ways that few of us could ever have predicted. Rarely have we seen change occur with such magnitude or velocity. Customer-demand fluctuations, fractures in supply chains, workforce disruption, and rapidly evolving government policies have stressed organisations all at once. Meanwhile, customer anxiety levels have soared and their…
The post The Journey to Effortless Customer Care: Digital Workflow Solutions Need to be Simple, Fast, and Affordable appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.