Category: Customer Experience

Happy Friday! ‘This week in CX’ brings you the latest roundup of industry news.This week, we’re looking at solutions to expedite digital expertise, research into attitudes towards digital experiences, and research into how businesses are adapted to hybrid working. Plus, we have exclusive commentary from Medallia’s Eduardo Crespo on the UK Customer Satisfaction Index. Key news The…
The post This week in CX: new research into digital experiences and solutions; plus Medallia & Forrester appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

A recent survey by Accenture found that 52% of consumers have switched providers due to poor customer service alone. If the service a customer receives is long-winded and tedious, they’re 96% more likely to break their brand loyalty.  These are staggering figures, and only further support what we already know about customer service – it…
The post What are you doing to improve your customer service efficiency? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

If you’ve been following the CX and contact center industries over the past few years, you know the landscape has drastically changed. The industry players are bigger and more intimidating, and the customers are more demanding.
There’s so much industry new out there – where should you focus your attention? We asked nine influencers and leaders in the CX and contact center spaces to weigh in on the biggest trends for 2023. And their answers may not be what you expect.

Agent Empowerment
The evolving role of the agent in the contact center was one key trend many of our influencers are watching. They discuss the importance of driving employee engagement and by extension, customer satisfaction.
“I think one of the biggest trends is the focus on agent and employee experience, not just customer experience,” says Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst at Commfusion. “We’ve been seeing that for a little while, but it’s definitely been picking up a lot more now.”
“The trend in 2023 I would be paying attention to is the empowerment of agents,” says Dennis Wakabayashi, Chief Collaborator and CX Expert at Team Wakabayashi. “[Also,] the tools and the business practices that continue to drive greater support and experience for those agents, so customer experiences can be better.”
Bigger Players in the Contact Center Space
Over the past few years, the contact center industry has seen many players step into the ring. These companies are shaking up the space with new solutions and services, and our influencers are taking notice.
“The new competitors that have entered the space are notable, not just by how many there are, but the size and scale of the players that are joining us,” says Shai Berger, Founder and CEO of Fonolo. Berger refers to huge companies like Amazon and Zoom who have recently been making headlines in the contact center world.
Frictionless Self-Service
Customers definitely appreciate white glove service, but there is a growing number that are looking for good self-service options too. The catch? Contact centers need to ensure their self-service is as frictionless as possible and that it delivers the results customers want.
“One thing that drives customers crazy and gets them to leave is inconsistent information,” says Shep Hyken, CS & CX Expert. “Have you ever gone to a website and couldn’t find the number to call? That’s frustration. That’s friction.”
“You want to make your customer aware and self-sufficient,” says David Beaumont, Customer Support Expert at customerserviceisreal.com. “Especially if there are things like FAQs that they can pull up on the internet and find an answer for quickly.”
AI and Natural Language Processing
With the rise of the bots looming, many contact centers are left wondering where that leaves agents. Fear not – according to our influencers, AI will soon take the role of helpful assistant, performing repetitive and monotonous tasks, and leaving agents free to handle more complex queries.
What’s more, this technology can measure customer sentiment based on voice tone and speech patterns. Thomas Laird, CEO at Expivia Interaction Marketing Group, says this technology could take over the role of customer feedback forms.
“We all talk about NPS and CSat and I think 2023 is the year that those start to go away,” says Thomas. “I think you’re going to start to hear sentiment scores be used more than NPS or CSAT.”The post CX4Now: These CX and Contact Center Trends are Ones to Watch, According to These Influencers first appeared on Fonolo.

A business that says its mission is to, “reinvent local commerce to better serve our customers and neighborhoods,” can spend a lot of time doing not much of anything before they realize that they’re not actually creating value.

A non-profit that seeks to create “fairness and equity” can also fall into a non-specific trap.

Far more useful to say, “we sell a good cup of coffee at a fair price,” and see if you can pull that off first.

Google claims they want to organize the world’s information. But they began by simply building a search engine that people would switch to.

We need a goal. But the more specific and measurable, the better.

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There are lots of useful, honest answers. Some might include:

I do what I’m told

I challenge the status quo

I show up on time

I solve complicate problems

I absorb nonsense and create calm for others

I raise our standards

I help people feel seen

I’m steady

I don’t cause trouble

I bring energy

I lead the way

I turn mountains into molehills

People like me

The ones that aren’t helpful are things like:

I’m just passing through

I give people a hard time

I’m a bully

I make mountains out of molehills

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I’ve been fascinated by the way we set type since I did my first packaging forty years ago. It’s a combination of tech, art, systems, culture and most of all, deciding to put in the effort to get it right.

[This is a long post, it would have been a podcast, but it doesn’t really lend itself to audio.]

When airplanes first started flying passengers, there was a need for labels. Labels for passengers and pilots. WEAR SEATBELT WHEN SEATED. Why is it in all caps? My guess is that at the dawn of aviation, the machine that made the little metal signs only had the capacity to easily handle 26 letters, and they choose all caps. Certainly, over time the labeling tech got better, but we stuck with all caps because that’s what airplane signs are supposed to be like, even though they’re more difficult to read that way.

Typography is a signal not just a way to put letters on a page.

Before mechanical type was set by pressmen in the basements of newspapers, type was handwritten by monks. As a result, we see the beautiful kerning of letters, nestling the ‘a’ under the ‘W’. That takes effort and as a result, it simply looks right. It’s not right because your brain demands kerning, it’s right because the signal is something we associate with confidence and care.

Once we see the magic of kerning, it becomes impossible to avoid how careless people who don’t use it appear to be…

There have been many golden ages of typography, but the 60s and 70s saw a combination of high-stakes mass production (in ads and media) combined with innovations in typesetting that meant that instead of using handmade metal type, marketers could simply spec whatever they imagined. It also meant that instead of one person working on a document, a committee would spend days or weeks agonizing over how an ad looked, or whether the new layout of Time magazine would send the right message to millions of people each week.

Pundits were sure that the launch of the Mac would destroy all of this progress. Now that anyone could set type, anyone would. So resumes ended up looking like ransom notes, Comic Sans became a joke that was taken seriously by some, and folks like David Carson set type on fire.

Instead, the Mac and the laser printer pushed the best examples of type quality forward. Once again, culture combined with tech to create a new cycle. Now, small teams of people working on small projects could also agonize about type. Now, as beautiful typefaces increased in availability and diversity, it was possible to set more type, more beautifully. If you worked in an industry or segment where the standard demanded careful expression through type, it was possible and it was expected.

More good type, a lot more lazy type.

And then smart phones arrived.

And the type culture changed in response. If you don’t have a mouse or a keyboard, if your screen is the size of a deck of playing cards, you’re probably not being very careful with typography. Whatever is built in is what you use. People create so much content that there’s no time for meetings, for care, for awareness. Speech to text, type with your thumbs, take a picture, hit send.

The culture shifts. Now, the appearance of authenticity matters more than ever. And one way to do that is to not put on airs with fonts that remind us of craft, or kerning that reminds us that you took the time to do something more than the automatic minimum.

And this won’t last, because the cycles continue.

They say you can tell a lot about someone from their handwriting. For my professional life, my handwriting has always involved a keyboard. I know that even if people don’t consciously know that they’re judging the way our words look or sound, they are.