Category: Customer Experience

Soap is 85 cents a bar or two for a dollar. Which should you buy?

It depends. It depends on how much space you have, whether you like this brand, how full your cart is and whether or not you’re sure if the person who sent you to the market wants you to buy two.

It’s easy to focus on these sorts of low-value decisions.

There are organizations that spend far more time discussing a new logo than analyzing where to place the new office. One is filled with emotion and no economic importance, the other is fuzzy, complicated and incredibly expensive.

Perhaps you’ve seen someone spend emotion and focus figuring out a tip to the penny, but impulsively use credit card debt to go on a fancy vacation.

Marketers have pushed us to spend as little time as possible thinking about things like long-term debt, the implications of going to a famous college or the lifetime emissions of buying a certain kind of car or house. But we end up spending countless cycles on the trivial choices that make us feel like we have control over the world around us.

We may believe that if one takes care of the little things, the big ones won’t matter. Or the opposite.

It turns out that staring at an uncomfortable big decision might pay for a thousand of the little ones.

This is the season for all the lists–the hot authors, singers and restaurants in any given genre.

If you’re on the list, congratulations! You’re the next big thing.

For now.

But the truth of the next big thing is that you can’t stay that way. The hot bands of yesterday aren’t hot the same way they were.

After you build something great, sooner or later you’ll need to figure out how to thrive without being the new flavor of the day.

The internet doesn’t have to be this way. It seems like the structure we live with and struggle with and sometimes work against is pre-ordained and obvious, but much of it is the result of the origin of the consumer net.

Slow modems in particular.

When the WELL and AOL and other services began to define how billions of people would eventually connect, the physics were clear:

We had incredibly slow connections

We had dumb, underpowered computers

That meant that a central server was essential, and the person who owned that server was likely to want to make a profit.

Which led to:

Subsidized cost of signing up

Ongoing cost (in ads or fees) of staying

Emphasis on network effects to spread the word

Emphasis on lock-in to maximize profitability to pay for the subsidized sign up

And so we ended up with the following expectations:

Anonymous or multiple accounts

No transferability of data (it belongs to the host, not you)

Surveillance/trading privacy for convenience

More invasive ads

Aversion to adversarial interoperability

In 2022, just about everyone online has a connection speed at least 1,000 times faster than the original consumer dial-up modems, and a computer that is as powerful (even if it’s a phone) as those original hosts.

If we cared enough, we could imagine a federated internet. One where the control and the power doesn’t lie with a single corporate titan with whims, with lock in and with spam, but with individuals showing up much more like we do in real life, owning our words and our data and our participation.

[PS I’m not currently allowed to tweet that this blog is automatically retweeted at Mastodon. And hosted here for the foreseeable future–Wordpress is celebrating 20 years of consistent performance this year. Federation and open source and owning your own words in a low-noise environment feels far more resilient than the alternative.]

Customer Experience Magazine is delighted to announce that CXMStars™ 2023 is now open for entries! This is the fourth year that we have celebrated the Top 50 CXM Stars from across the globe.  We’re so excited to invite you to submit personal entries or nominate professionals and influencers. This is the time to celebrate those who…
The post CXMStars™ 2023 is here! appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

If you want reach and engagement, optimizing for small screens is usually the way to go. There are more mobile devices in the world than we can count, and large numbers of people spend their days consuming content from the palm of their hand.

But productivity? In just about every context I’m aware of, important work doesn’t come from large numbers of people looking for convenience, connection or a smile. It comes from committed individuals who are willing to sit and do the work.

As soon as you stop using a keyboard, you’re sending a signal about the focus you’re prepared to give to the work at hand.

PS new podcast episode this week, a short rant about important work. I hope it’s useful.

Happy Friday! And welcome to the final news roundup of 2022. Thank you all so much for supporting CXM’s news coverage that we launched earlier this year. We will be back on 6th January!  ‘This week in CX’ brings you the latest roundup of industry news.  This week, we’re focusing on digital CX – including the…
The post This week in CX: developing the role of digital CX, and Christmas employee standards appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Call center leaders are always looking for ways to take their operations to the next level. But the question is: what does that next level look like for your business?
That all depends on the goals your contact center sets. Success will look different for every organization. It’s up to you to set those standards and provide the right support and motivation for your call center team to achieve them.
The first step is deciding where to focus your efforts. And that can be an undertaking, considering all the areas of the contact center that can affect performance. Below we’ll discuss some areas you can address when developing your call center improvement strategy.
The Executive Guide to Improving 6 Contact Center Metrics
1. Improve the Customer Journey
When it comes to customer experience, you first need to understand the customer journey with your call center. No doubt, this can be a huge undertaking, as each individual caller or online user will have their own habits, frustrations, and values.
The first step in tackling this monumental task is to create a series of customer personas. These personas should reflect the types of individuals who most often reach out to your contact center for support. Leveraging customer data will be key here — by gathering these insights, you’ll be able to pinpoint what keeps your customers engaged, and how you can keep them from going to your competitors.
How to Use Customer Profiles to Improve Call Center Training
Another way you can shape your ideal customer journey is to collect feedback directly from your customers. After-call surveys are a great way to achieve this. This approach lets you gather impressions and insights directly from the source, while the call center interaction is still fresh in the caller’s mind.
Lastly, you’ll want to regularly review and analyze your data. The contact center is a ripe field of information ready to harvest, and you don’t want to ignore the valuable insights that come with that. Your call center platform will give you plenty of quantitative data, such as abandonment rates and service levels, which you can compare against your qualitative data, which includes customer feedback and surveys.
2. Invest in the Right Contact Center Software
We hear a lot about reducing friction for customers in this industry. In practice, this simply means eliminating as many barriers as possible so they can achieve their goal without frustration. Easier said than done, right?
Fortunately, there’s a ton of great contact center software out there to help achieve a near-frictionless customer experience. Here are a few of our favorites:
Call-Back Technology
Did you know that 44% of callers say they become annoyed or irritated when kept on hold for more than 5 minutes? If you’re experiencing high call volumes, this can become a huge problem, fast.
Call-back technology is a simple, yet powerful solution that offers your callers an alternative to waiting on hold. Not only that, but it helps flatten call spikes, so your agents won’t be overwhelmed with mounting call queues.
Visual IVR
While you may be familiar with traditional IVR, you may not have met its modern counterpart. Visual IVR can be easily installed on your website or mobile app to help direct online users to the correct support channels. This solution can be customized with pre-call questions, which can be escalated to a live agent for a quicker resolution.
Chatbots
If your voice channel is in high demand, an AI-driven chatbot may be just what you need to alleviate the strain from your call center. While not as efficient as your friendly neighborhood agent, these are great for supporting your online users with basic queries, leaving the bigger fish for your call center team to handle.
How to Buy Contact Center Software
3. Provide Self-Service Options
Did you know that 45% of companies that offer web or mobile self-service report an increase in site traffic and reduced phone inquiries? It’s no wonder that self-service technologies are on the rise in the call center industry. And while the voice channel is still the most popular for support, it’s important not to underestimate these solutions.
Modern AI-driven tools are gaining popularity with contact centers. From AI chatbots to Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to online knowledge bases, these tools are getting smarter with the ability to simulate human interaction. Still, these tools aren’t ready to handle fully complex queries — that’s where your highly trained agents come into play.
Call center employees love self-service tools because they help them stay focused on customer interactions. These solutions address basic queries and interactions, so agents can focus on bigger issues. It’s a great way to streamline operations and create a better experience for your employees as well as your callers.
4. Invest in Training and Onboarding
Contact center technology and self-service options are great to have. But don’t stop there — you’ll need to invest in your agents to achieve a well-rounded operation with strong, consistent performance.
First, audit the quality of service that your call center is currently offering. As a contact center manager, you might choose to listen in on some phone calls, review recordings, or even use a “mystery shopper” to get a sense of what’s working and what isn’t.
Once you have a grasp on the state of your call center services, you’ll want to reflect your findings in your onboarding and training. Agents today need to have a very strong grasp of the products or services they’re supporting callers with, as well as the proper skills to maintain control of the conversation.
Training isn’t just for new hires. In fact, the best call centers prioritize ongoing learning for their agents. Think of regular training sessions as a tune-up on their knowledge and skill set, so your employees can feel confident in their abilities when managing the phone lines. Keep them up to date on new policies, best customer support practices, adjustments to the call center script, and more.

TIP:
Call center scripts should be considered living documents, as they’ll need to be regularly updated to align with new industry trends, department goals, and both agent and customer feedback.

5. Involve Your Agents in Strategic Planning
As a contact center leader, it’s easy to get caught up in high-level metrics and reports. But ignoring employee input is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Why? They’re on the ground level and experience customer interactions firsthand. They’ll be able to offer valuable insights into what’s working in your operation, and what isn’t.
Managers should check in with their agents on a regular basis and use each opportunity to find out what is working in the call center and what isn’t. But be warned: gathering this information and not doing anything with it can backfire and create disengaged employees.
6. Keep Employees Engaged and Informed
Of course, communication is a two-way street. You can’t expect your employees to offer up information and support your call center initiatives if they feel constantly left in the dark. In order to achieve this type of relationship, you need to show that you trust them.
Employee engagement can be an undertaking all on its own. Start by giving your agents autonomy in their work. With the right training and support, they should feel they have control over their daily work and feel empowered to make decisions. Keep them up to date on new initiatives and changes within the department so they aren’t blindsided by new announcements.
How to Foster Agent Engagement in Today’s Contact Center
7. Establish KPIs and Monitor Them
That sounds like a no-brainer, right? Yet many contact centers struggle with setting proper benchmarks for their performance reporting. Earlier, we talked about the importance of gathering customer data and feedback and analyzing those trends regularly.
What are the most important goals for your call center to hit? You may set targets around Service Level Agreements, Abandonment Rates, First Call Resolution, or even Customer Satisfaction (CSat). Make sure that the KPIs you select align with your business objectives.The post 7 Highly Effective Call Center Improvement Strategies first appeared on Fonolo.

It began with what bosses needed to say to get workers to do what they needed done.

And then it became widespread, because typing the right things into Google makes it more likely you will find what you’re looking for.

(True aside: When I worked at Yahoo, they had a secret list of the 100 most searched-for terms. It was secret because it was filled with juvenile Playboy-level porn requests as well as pretty unsophisticated single-word searches. And the number one search was: “Yahoo”)

Now, with GPT and Stable Diffusion and other machine learning AI tools gaining widespread use, there’s a gap between people who are simply stumbling around with silly short prompts and folks who are figuring out how to engineer an excellent prompt.

We’re all the boss. Giving better instructions gets better results.

Random events are unevenly distributed and rarely arrive on time.

Resilience and frequency increase the chances that the break we are hoping for will arrive when we need it.

The resilience to keep at it so that we can live with later instead of sooner.

And the frequency of interaction and shipping so that we get more chances for the good to happen.

Hi community, we created a holistic course on how to set up your own Customer Health Score model using integrations from CRM in a simple way. Because we saw the manager had difficulty figuring out in this all formulas and metrics, and we want to help build a useful tool for data-driven decisions. It would be great to hear feedback from the community about the course description, an agenda, and maybe you’ll add something. Link for the course: https://try.revos.ai/customer-health-scoring-course Thank you in advance. Have a good day! submitted by /u/Mundane-Register-772 [link] [comments]