Category: Customer Experience

Multiple UK Customer Experience Awards winner and entech pioneer Octopus Energy today launches in Germany on a mission to disrupt the market and deliver contract freedom and innovative tariffs for customers. The new business Octopus Energy Germany is targeting 1 million customers by 2024. The company is committed to fuel this rapid expansion with an…
The post UKCXA Winner Octopus Energy Launches in Germany appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

We spent the last couple of months asking influencers and industry leaders how they thought the pandemic had impacted customer service.
Their insights were varied and detailed, but we kept hearing one word again and again: empathy. We had to listen to that.

Read the Full Industry Report Here:
Contact Center Trends 2021

The Crisis has Fostered a Sense of Empathy
A crisis drives people together, which fosters empathy. And that’s the driving force behind most of this year’s trends.
“I see the CX industry finding new, faster and more efficient ways to meet their customers’ needs, maybe through the use of new technology, while also balancing a deeply personal, empathetic human connection.”— Shep Hyken, CS & CX Expert and NYT Bestselling Author at hyken.com
This increasing empathy will drive further change in how companies do business. And that includes placing increasing importance on employee satisfaction.
Contact Center Teams Had to be More Empathetic
This year, everybody got treated to a big helping of empathy. COVID-19 wasn’t “somebody else’s” problem. Nobody escaped the endless waiting times.
“Agents are responding with genuine empathy and care because they’re as worried as customers about this pandemic and its impact on our lives.” — Bill Quiseng CX Expert, Speaker & Consultant
The pandemic thrust contact centers on to the frontline. At their own risk, many agents worked long hours to ensure worried customers could reach someone. Many more suddenly found themselves offering emotional support and advice.
“Contact center agents had to up their listening and their empathy beyond what they had ever faced before.
I predict that all the leaders, managers, team leaders, and agents will look back and realize how much they grew from the empathy and compassion they gave and how it helped their customers — their fellow human beings.”— Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™, Author of Leading Morale, Customer Service & Leadership Consultant

Read the Full Industry Report Here:
Contact Center Trends 2021

COVID-19 Made Customers More Empathetic
CallMiner found that nearly 70% of customers said they were more empathetic and understanding of the challenges of agents and customer service departments during the pandemic. That will continue long after the risk subsides.
“Customers are savvier about health, safety, and employee treatment and will continue to be aware. They’ll look for businesses that prove they are putting the health and safety of both customers and employees first.
Customers watch for ways employees are treated and how brands contribute to their communities as a basis for deciding who they do business with.
Younger generations are showing this as a primary driver for their decisions, so this trend will continue well into 2021.”— Jeannie Walters, CX Expert & Speaker, CEO of Experience Investigators
Consumer desires drive profitability. So, when they change, management tends to take notice. The companies that adapt the fastest will reap the benefits of improving their customer and employee experiences.
A More Empathetic Contact Center Should Be Our Goal
Contact centers will need to work hard to nurture this empathy — it won’t ‘just happen.’ It will involve a concerted effort to listen to the customer and design experienced with their needs first – not the company’s needs.
“Empathy will continue to play a larger role in interactions going forward.
While self-service channels and bots can handle basic inquiries and transactions, agents will increasingly deal with more complex issues and questions. In these situations, customers are looking for empathy and a sympathetic ear.
This will require a change in metrics and KPIs, as these calls and interactions will take longer, and metrics like Average Handle Time will give way to KPIs such as customer sat, NPS, FCR, etc.”— Blair Pleasant, Contact Center Industry Analyst & Consultant at BCStrategies
If your business is going to survive this global crisis, you must build customer experiences that engage empathetically. That will require a disciplined approach to designing and delivering customer journeys that foster empathy.
The post COVID is Creating a Surprising Contact Centers Trend first appeared on Fonolo.

The world has changed in 2020. In addition to COVID-19, we have seen seismic changes in the way consumers behave, and the extent to which companies and their ethics are being put under the microscope. The desire to examine, interrogate and reflect is very real. Now combine that with changes in consumer attitudes and needs,…
The post Money Talks or Budget Walks: Delivering a Return on CX Investment appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

It’s entirely possible to believe that your ideas come from the muse, and your job is to simply amplify them. And that successful people are lucky because the muse keeps giving them useful and powerful ideas.
I’m not sure that’s what successful people do. All of us get an endless supply of ideas, notions and inklings. Successful people, often without realizing it, ignore the ones that are less likely to ‘work’, and instead focus on the projects that are more likely to advance the mission.
It’s possible to get better at this pre-filtering. By doing it out loud. By writing out the factors that you’re seeking, by explaining to someone else how your part of the world works.
Instinct is great. It’s even better when you work on it.

You can find more on this in The Practice, my new bestselling book.

I’m blogging about it weekly on Medium. And talking about it on some extraordinary podcasts around the world.

And we just started the eighth season of my podcast, Akimbo.

Ask any contact center leader for data and you’ll likely end up with a hefty pile of metrics and analytics. Most companies can pull up copious documents, spreadsheets, and reports with endless data and analytics. But too often, that data just sits there, gathering digital dust. Companies understand that gathering data is important. But they often neglect to do anything with it. The essence of a good omnichannel strategy is making your data actionable to improve your customer experience. Unless you can connect your data across teams and platforms, much of it is useless. Here are four ways companies benefit by using big data to enable the omnichannel experience.
Actionable data enables you to personalize your omnichannel experience
Customer data reveals how your customers like to communicate
Insights from your contact center help connect KPIs to customer outcomes
Better reporting reveals weak spots in the customer journey (so you can improve!)
Full article: https://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/4-reasons-to-put-your-data-to-work-how-to-use-customer-insights-to-enable-the-omnichannel-experience-in-your-contact-center-today-02364175
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Google is not your friend, it’s a tool.
It’s been 2,702 days since they shut down Google Reader and people still remember.
Or consider that Google can shut you out of all their services with no recourse or appeal possible. All your data, photos, calendars, emails… gone.
But yes, you can back up your data. Do it today…
Visit this page to start the process. It’s free. Hopefully, you’ll never need it. Press a few buttons and back up your data to a cloud service so that it’s in two places–This should happen automatically, but since it doesn’t, it’s worth doing.
The internet was originally designed as a resilience machine, designed to heal itself and work around interruptions. And the essence of it was a distributed, peer-to-peer network that worked precisely because it was open. As data is hoarded, manipulated and monetized, that original intent has been turned upside down.
Resilient systems don’t have to trend toward monopoly. In fact, it’s better when they don’t. And don’t forget to backup your data.
[PS the post from earlier today was skewed by homonyms. Thanks to alert readers for pointing it out… sorry about missing it, but the metaphor is still worth thinking about.]

COVID-19 hasn’t just driven an unprecedented upsurge in web activity; it’s sparked a huge shift towards digital-first living and behaviours that look set to become permanent changes. Alongside record levels of time spent online, the year so far has seen ecommerce sales rise by £4.5 billion and 17.2 billion consumers — equal to 25 percent…
The post Develop Digital Customer Relationships, Not Single Purchases appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

The Ngram tracks words used in books over the last 200 years. Here’s what a million authors and a billion readers think:

Kindness matters.

[Update: I’m realizing that kind has more homonyms than the other two words, and yet the idea still resonates…]

The winners of the 2020 International Customer Experience Awards have celebrated victory following the full day of the Finalists’ presentations live online. The third edition of the awards event saw contenders from across the globe gather online to compete for the most coveted award in CX. Companies from the US, UK, Russia, Germany, UAE, South Africa, Poland…
The post Winners Announced: International Customer Experience Awards 2020 appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Did you know that 56% of companies say “deriving real-time insights” is the top challenge of improving customer experience? https://preview.redd.it/1u9j998l2t061.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=615e95fbc3e5f22a49e9bfa5a6489a5016f7e6e3 Source: Medallia
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