Category: Customer Experience

Enabling an increasingly agile workforce will be critical to success for many businesses post-pandemic. Especially for teams operating in customer-focused environments, being able to maintain an exceptional level of customer experience is paramount during this time of uncertainty, even when staff has transitioned to a Work From Anywhere approach. But how can you set your staff and your business up for success and maintain high levels of customer experience when your employees are working from anywhere? Here are some ways: – A combination of cloud and evergreen technology stack – Action-driven insights and engagement with artificial intelligence, analytics, and machine learning – A combination or total automation of low-value tasks – Omnichannel capabilities demonstrated across all domains Full Article: https://www.niceincontact.com/blog/enabling-an-agile-workforce-for-organisational-success
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A few weeks ago, I had the honour and pleasure of judging the 2020 UK Customer Experience Awards. This was my third year as a judge at this event and I was invited to chair the judging panel for the category ‘Customers at the heart of everything – Utilities and Housing Provider’. The first thing…
The post “I wouldn’t start from here, if I were you….” appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Increased demand on a typical day is challenging enough, but it can be downright overwhelming during the holidays. Earlier this year, we saw the COVID-19 pandemic nearly bring call centers across the world to a halt due to a sudden increase in customer inquiries.
The difference this time is that businesses have time to prepare. Here are some essential steps to take to ensure your call center is ready for anything the holiday shopping season has in store!

With change and uncertainty looming thanks to the #COVID19 pandemic, you can count on one thing for sure — that your customers will be leaning heavily on your customer support team. #CustomerService #CX #Holiday2020Click To Tweet

1. Know this year’s upcoming trends
The landscape has changed over the past year, and with it, your customer expectations and behaviors. Before you touch a thing in preparation for the shopping season, you need to know what to expect and how to address any looming concerns.
Do some research on industry trends so you can adapt your processes appropriately. We’ve put together a full article on this year’s retail holiday trends here!
2. Forecast customer demand
This step goes hand-in-hand with the industry trends research you’ll need to do. Dive into your call center’s historical data, metrics, survey data, and agent feedback to get a sense of trends in call volume during past holiday periods.
How to Improve Customer Perception of Your Brand
By combining the insights from upcoming trends with your customer base’s past activities, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions when prepping your call center for the shopping season.
3. Review your customer journey
It’s easy to get caught up in numbers and statistics, but it’s important to remember the customer experience! After all, there’s little use in having a smooth operation if your customers are left unsatisfied.
Take some time to go through your IVR, website, and other customer-focused communications. Think from the perspective of the customer — is the navigation menu easy to understand? Are common questions easy to search up online? Remember, the goal is to make the process as quick, easy, and stress-free as possible.
4. Review processes for your agents
The holiday period will be a very different experience for your agents, especially those who are working remotely for the first time this year. They’ll be on the front lines during this busy period, so it’s crucial to provide them with the proper tools and support required to perform well.
Ask your agents about any challenges they’ve faced since shifting to a remote role. Are there any concerns they have for the upcoming holiday season? Doing your due diligence now can help you set them up for success during the busy period!
How to Prepare Your Call Center for Shopping Season 2020
5. Fill the gaps in your processes
Once you’ve got the lay of the land, ask yourself where the gaps in your current processes are. Fixing these will likely require a combination of training, resource development, and new tools, so it pays to start this as soon as possible!
Here are some of the most common complaints from customers during the holidays:

Confusing IVR menu. As mentioned previously, it’s essential to have a clear and concise menu for your customers to navigate. Go through the messaging step by step and compare the options you offer to your list of anticipated customer queries. You can also consider adopting a Visual IVR!

Long hold times. Unsurprisingly, this is one of the top complaints from customers. Consider adopting call-back technology — this allows customers to leave a phone number and have an agent call them back when available. It’s a win-win!

Uninformed agents. Customers see your business as a single entity and often become frustrated having to repeat their issue at multiple touchpoints. By investing in an omnichannel platform, your agents will be able to address customer issues from any channel and continue the conversation seamlessly.

Multiple transfers. Don’t be the company that shuffles customers around from department to department. Review your strategy and consider whether your call center approach and structure works for a scenario with increased demand. It may be a matter of reviewing your customer touchpoints or providing additional training to agents, so they are better equipped to handle different issues.

‘Robotic’ responses. Your customers call you because they want service with a human touch. So if your agents are clinging to their scripted responses and templates, it can negatively impact the customer’s experience. Consider providing additional training to increase their comfort level with the required information.

6. Hire additional agents
Suppose your business doesn’t have call-back technology or alternative channels to manage customer inquiries. In that case, it’s crucial to ensure that you have enough agents on staff to address increased demand over the holidays.

How to Prepare your Call Center for Cyber Monday and Black Friday

You may want to consider adding extra agents per shift or hiring additional agents. However, having extra bodies on hand is expensive, so we recommend exploring tech solutions to address the demand!
7. Create a crisis plan
Anything from a significant website error to a PR issue can trigger overwhelming demand for your contact center. And if the pandemic has taught us anything this year, it pays to be prepared.
Getting a crisis plan and the proper tools in place will help your agents control messaging, prioritize customer inquiries, and manage high call volumes. This will also bode well for customer perception — after all, a poor response can inflict more damage to your business’ reputation.
The post How to Prepare for Increased Call Center Workload During the 2020 Holiday Shopping Season first appeared on Fonolo.

When Ignaz Semmelweis pioneered statistics in order to save countless women from dying in childbirth, his fellow doctors refused to believe him. They ignored his work, didn’t wash their hands and it was another twenty years before his insights on the spread of disease were adopted.

We live in a faster, more competitive world than he did.

When Jethro Tull wrote about the rotation of crops, many farmers continued to do things in the old way. Over time, though, the yields don’t lie. You don’t have to like the idea, but you can see that it works.

Results show up. They’re easy to see, easy to measure and they persist.

The bridge falls down or it doesn’t. Market share goes up or it doesn’t.

We can view results as a threat, or see them as an opportunity. It depends on whether we’re defending a little-understood status quo or seeking to make things work better.

Results don’t care about our explanation. We need a useful explanation if we’re going to improve, but denying the results doesn’t change them.

As the world has become ever more filled with results, it has crowded out each individual’s personal narrative of how the world works. Particularly in times of change and negative outcomes, this can cause a lot of distress.

Our narrative is ours, and it informs who we are and the story we tell ourselves.

Beliefs are powerful. They’re personal. They can have a significant impact on the way we engage with ourselves and others. But results are universal and concrete, and no matter how much we’d like them to go away, there they are.

When people talk about how modernity has changed humanity, they often overlook the fundamental impact that results have had. Competitive environments create more results, at greater speed, and those results compound over time.

We still need a narrative and we still need our individual outlook. But over the last century, we’ve had to make more and more room for the systems that create results. Our shared reality demands it.

Being smart often has little to do with being persuasive.

And yet we often assume that one leads to the other.

We spend years and years educating people to do well on tests in the belief that this will make them smart.

And we assume that they’ll figure out the persuasive stuff on their own.

We conflate the two on a regular basis, assuming that charisma or followers or influence is somehow aligned with insight, foresight, and learning.

The good news is that being persuasive is a skill. If you’re smart, we’ll all benefit if you’ll also invest the effort to find a way to lead.

Net Promoter Score is one of the most trusted and popular metrics used by brands to measure the health of their customer relationships. Businesses who experience high levels of brand advocacy have been shown to outgrow their competition by 2.5 times.  A single NPS score has the advantage of letting businesses quickly gauge their overall health and…
The post Does Net Promoter Score Adequately Empower Organisations To Be Customer-centric? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

We thought we were bold when we said more than 65% of contact centers would move to the cloud in 2020.
It happened even faster than we thought.

Read the Full Industry Report Here:
The State of the Contact Center in 2020

We’ve spoken to the experts for our State of the Contact Center 2020 report.
And it looks like it’s here to stay…
Contact Centers Made an Unprecedented Pivot to Virtual Working
“60-80% of agents moved to work at home during ‘shelter in place,’ and ~30% will continue to stay home once there is a vaccine.”
— Sheila McGee-Smith, Contact Center Industry Analyst.
There was no deliberating. It just got done.
“COVID-19 brought about a “perfect storm” that forced businesses to rethink their entire approach to their contact centers. What surprised me most is how quickly they responded. Contact centers that have been hesitating on technology upgrades for years transformed their operations in a matter of weeks because it was a matter of survival. “
— Travis Jones, Senior Vice President at Logic 2020
Many contact centers were miserably unprepared.
“I think that contact centers, in some cases, were not necessarily ready for what remote work would mean to them during the pandemic. Some businesses were ready for this and shifted seamlessly. Others found that clunky transfers and dropped calls were the norm.”— Tony Johnson, CX Leader, Author, Speaker Founder at Ignite Your Service
The pace of change was unrelenting.
“When looking back at it, we really only had about 10 days to get all the hundreds of our call center associates home. The speed that we had to operate to stay viable was pretty surprising. All the managers and executives that for years pushed back on moving to the cloud found themselves in a really tough place.”
— Thomas Laird, CEO of Expivia
It wasn’t easy — but you did it. And it worked.
“Organizations that had planned on years of eventual transformation were able to dedicate resources to do so in weeks. Creating digital ordering, delivering hybrid experiences, and revamping their org charts suddenly weren’t obstacles; they were opportunities to better serve customers.”
— Jeannie Walters, CX Expert, CEO of Experience Investigators, TEDx Speaker, Consultant
It’s Hard to Deny the Benefits of Remote Working
“We saw many of our contact center customers taking advantage of the capabilities of their platforms, like callback options in the IVR, to improve their customer experience while addressing the increased volume load. Sometimes, external factors force us to challenge the status quo of how we’ve delivered the customer experience and run operations. These optimizations will continue long after the epidemic subsides.”
— Matt Beatty, Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Brightmetrics™
You can’t just ‘undo’ prolonged systemic change.
“Many companies have been able to greatly streamline and optimize case routing, service calls, and even handle common service calls through virtual methods. That greatly reduces customer service costs and improves time to resolution, leading to better customer experiences.”— Flavio Martins, Snr. Product Manager, Author of Win the Customer, Customer Service Expert
And providing a safe environment will be crucial.
“Offering employees the flexibility to work remotely long-term, as well as providing a safe environment for employees who wish to return to an office setting, will be a critical step for upper management next year. Team leaders will need quick and efficient ways of managing and motivating their distributed employees, requiring reliable analytics on agent and customer satisfaction.”
— Matt Beaty, Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Brightmetrics™
A virtual workforce is an advantage.
“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. Employees can be located anywhere, allowing organizations to hire a more diverse workforce – a workforce based on skills and ability, rather than geographic location.”— Blair Pleasant, Contact Center Industry Analyst & Consultant at BCStrategies
Lockdown has created a whole new level of customer expectation.
If I had to pick one trend, 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 both CX management and measurement. Digital is the key enabler of this for both bot and person-to-person interactions.”
— Peter Lavers, Customer Service Consultant & Influencer at ThinkCX
And remote work is better for agents too.
“The move to remote work and a better quality of life for contact center workers is a big trend. When contact center employees can effectively and happily work from home, customers will reap those benefits.”— Evan Kirstel, B2B Tech & Marketing Consultant
Data Security is a Big Barrier, for Now
“For those businesses that have the basics down, the major focus areas into the near future must be on data, data quality, data access, data analytics, and systems integration in order to not only design and deliver a great customer experience but also to facilitate – and to realize the benefits of – a digital transformation.”— Annette Franz CEO of CXJourney, Official Forbes Coach, CX Consultant & Keynote Speaker, Board Chair of CXPA
Businesses are already know how to solve many data security problems.
“Home operations can be the weakest link in a data protection program. Automating processes with RPA and using alternate channels that reduce the volume of voice-first contacts will reduce the data protection risks and prepare the business for next-gen contact centers.”
— Jill Reber, General Manager, Data Privacy at Logic 20/20
And they’re ready to focus on doing Work from Home better long-term.
“The biggest trend will focus on doing WFH better. Remote training, QM, and making sure WFM is secure as you can be. Now is the time to be looking at our call center and asking: how do we evolve the work from home to make it easier, more secure, and efficient for the business and for our associates?”
— Thomas Laird, CEO of Expivia
It’s time to embrace the change.
“The lasting impact of COVID-19 will be a shift towards embracing technology solutions that remove friction in a customer’s journey over hiring additional agents. Self-service channels, augmented by bio-authentication and automation software will take routine requests away, and let humans focus on the customer’s issue rather than performing repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Additionally, AI-powered applications help the 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. So, 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 world has changed, and so should your technology.
“If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that people need human connection and clear communication. To achieve that within a remote or hybrid work environment, we’re going to see more contact centers reach for cloud-based technology that drives camaraderie, allows supervisors to coach from anywhere, and enables agents to self-manage. The world has changed, and so should your technology. Get out there and explore.”
— Paul Liljenquist, President of ClearView
And it may be about to change even more than you realize…
“The biggest trend in 2021 will be the ongoing shift of CX delivery toward a gig platform. The interest in gig working by both enterprise executives and potential employees is building to a crescendo. With platforms being developed to support this business model, watch for it to become the hot topic of customer management in 2021. It will also require operators to diversify their delivery platform across multiple points. The days of supporting a client from a single location are finished!”— Peter Ryan, Contact Center Industry Expert & Senior Analyst at Ryan Strategic Advisory
The post Why the Future of the Contact Center is Remote first appeared on Fonolo.

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Today, the primary marketplace differentiator (the key competitive factor) is the experience. While many companies compete primarily on customer experience (CX), successful companies keep a keen eye on the intersection of brand experience (BX) and CX to ensure the two are aligned and unified. Full Article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2020/03/31/how-to-be-remarkable-brand-reputation-customer-experience-and-purpose/#4132c8bad793
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