Category: Customer Experience

Call center leaders have their work cut out for them. From training new recruits to briefing executives and monitoring customer satisfaction levels, the days move fast. Sometimes, it’s hard to find the time to map out call center development goals.  
Maybe you have an old action plan from last year that you loosely stick to, but it could use a revamp. Here at Fonolo, our call center tech lends itself nicely to business and development planning. Our rich insights help inform your strategy and monitor progress, showing metrics like average handle time (AHT), and much more. 
But first? You need an action plan for call center development. We’ve taken care of the legwork and created a detailed template for you to start using right now!  
Let’s start with the basics: 
What should be included in a development plan? 
A business development plan should be a living document, constantly updated with your call center’s objectives, goals, financial information, milestones, and methods to measure progress. Individual agent development plans can also be included as subsections.  
You have tons of project management software to help you keep things organized — from Asana to monday.com. The productivity experts at monday.com recommend the following elements to any business development plan: 

Growth and scaling opportunities 
Budgets for hiring, tech, operational costs, and professional development 
Financial goals 
KPIs and milestones 
Timelines 
Marketing objectives 

All of these ideas work well for a call center development plan. However, you might need to get a bit more specific to meet the intricacies of an operational call center. For example, marketing objectives might not be a call center leader’s top priority. Instead, they’ll hammer down on meeting and exceeding customer service goals and SLAs.  
Still, every element of a call center development speaks to two overarching goals: improving your call center and nurturing your agent’s development and engagement.  
Here’s a structure you might consider for your call center development plan:  
Step #1: Create Professional Development Plans for Agents 
Employee development plans will vary, depending on your call center’s needs and individual agent goals. Here are a few methods you might try:  
Performance- and objective-based agent development  
Your agent’s performance should improve over time, right? Well, you wouldn’t know unless  you measured. Remember, like all development plans, performance-based goals should have clear metrics and timelines.  
This form of employee development could measure and aim to improve agent-specific KPIs like:  

First-call resolution: The ability to resolve customer issues in a single call is a great KPI to monitor for agents. Any improvements speak directly to their performance, which includes their knowledge and training.  
Average handle time (AHT): If an agent’s AHT is ten minutes at the start, you could develop a goal to lower it to three minutes, for example.    
Customer satisfaction score: Conduct customer surveys through Fonolo’s interactive voice response (IVR) to discover customer satisfaction scores. You can even do this for individual agents and monitor improvement.  

Now, you have timelines and KPIs — but how do you go about meeting those goals? Your performance-based plan should include opportunities for: 

Job shadowing 
Training 
Peak volume schedules 
One-on-one check-ins 

Of course, these plans should be tailored to specific agents. Let’s say you have one agent with a year’s worth of experience. We’ll call him Jerry. Now, Jerry has impeccable customer satisfaction scores, but long average handle times (AHT). A few meetings should illuminate the source of the long calls. Perhaps he’s great with customers but keeps them on the phone too long. You could have him shadow other agents who might be more efficient at closing calls.  

DID YOU KNOW
59% of millennials see training as a key consideration when applying for a new role. 

Succession-based agent development 
Succession planning also tracks agent’s performance and objectives, however, the overarching goal is career advancement. Your call center hierarchy probably looks something like this:  

Call center agents 
Team leaders 
Supervisors  
Managers 
Executives 

Succession planning helps suitable and interested candidates develop their skills, and rise through these ranks. It’s a win-win both for agents, who get career development and advancement, and call center leaders, who are given the opportunity and resources to nurture and develop their staff’s skills in alignment with the key goals they have for their call center.   
Our advice? Offer succession-planning opportunities to every agent. By presenting the option to see which agents are interested, you may also discover which employees are more likely to stay with your call center in the long term. Unfortunately, only 35% of organizations have clear succession planning processes.  
Those who don’t are missing out. The average cost of hiring and onboarding new leaders is $4,000 — much more expensive than training your loyal agents to move up within your organization. To ensure success, make sure you pepper your succession plan with regular check-ins, test-runs, and training to give your agents the best shot at advancement.  
Do you have a succession plan for your next #CallCenterManager? Creating one might save you $4,000 in average leader recruitment costs! #AgentEngagement #EmployeeHappinessClick To Tweet
Step #2: Develop Smart Goals for Agents 
Have you created a development plan for each of your agents? You probably listed some KPIs to help them meet their professional goals. But SMART goals will guide your agent with greater detail and intent.  
Smart goals are clear and attainable — in fact, you’re 33% more likely to achieve your goals if they’re SMART.  
What are SMART goals?   

Specific: “Agent X aims to improve their first-call resolution rate from 37% to 55%, from October 2022 to March 2023.” Here, we have a goal with clear qualifiers. 
Measurable: First-call resolution is a KPI you can identify with a simple calculation. Plus, you can add context to progress by monitoring calls and offering training.  
Attainable: 37% to 55% isn’t unrealistic over the course of a few months, especially with expedited training and job shadowing. 
Relevant: Need we say more? FCR is one of the most important KPIs in a call center. 
Time-based: October 2022 to February 2023 is a clear timeline.  

Step #3: Make a List of the Problems in Your Contact Center 
Conduct agent and customer surveys to find out exactly what’s holding your call center back from performing its very best.  You might hear feedback about things like long wait times, poor scheduling practices or workforce management problems. Listen to the feedback and take note of the overarching pain points your call center development plan needs to address.  
Some ways to garner feedback include:  

Sending automated post-call emails to customers. 
Using Visual IVR to send automated messages. 
Offering agent engagement surveys and incentives for completing them. 

Step #4: Invest in Employee Engagement 
Even if you believe every one of your agents is happy as can be — there’s probably something you can do to improve their experience. Agent engagement has a direct domino effect on productivity, customer satisfaction, and your company’s profits.  
4 Practical Ways to Drive Agent Engagement
Agent engagement goals should be clearly identified in your call center development plan. Remember the agent feedback we mentioned in step #3? Use that same feedback to develop engagement plans, too. Your plan should include things like:  

Rewarding great performance. 
Experiment with gamification.  
Investing in a healthy workplace. 
Offering training and advancement opportunities. 

Perhaps you want to improve agent satisfaction in their day-to-day work. If surveys described too many angry customers or difficult schedules, you might add these umbrellas to your plan:  

Ease agent stress with call-backs: Fonolo’s Voice Call-Backs are a great tool for this. Hundreds of our clients use them to smooth our peak call volume, which keeps angry customers at bay. That means your agents don’t have to take on the wrath of an impatient customer, which eventually boosts agent engagement.  
Flexible scheduling: How can you offer more autonomy to your agents? Perhaps you’ll use a more robust workforce management system, or hire more recruits to accommodate staffing needs. 

Step #5: Establish Call Center KPIs 
Remember the common call center issues you outlined in step #3? Solving them will require you to monitor KPIs for improvement. Here are some common issues and the KPIs that address them:  

Agent dissatisfaction: Keep your eye on your attrition rate (turnover rate) and absenteeism.  
Customer dissatisfaction: Watch your abandonment rate, net promoter score, and customer satisfaction score. 
 Long wait times: Track your abandonment rate and average handle time to keep an eye on this issue.  

Step #6: Audit Tools and Software 
Every call center leader should conduct market and competitor research. Why? It helps you become aware of the latest call center technology. Leaving your tech stack unexamined only hurts your customer satisfaction and agent engagement.  
Make sure you include a tech audit in your development plan. Ensure your tech stack meets your budget restraints, satisfies your employees, and brings you the insights and analytics you need to inform your strategy.  
Step #7: Review, Revise, and Review Again! 
Your call center development plan isn’t stagnant. Customer expectations change, industries shift and budgets are constantly being evaluated; your development plan should reflect those, changing realities too. The best way to ensure a relevant plan is to review and update it regularly. You might consider sharing parts of your plan with your agents to hear their feedback.  
But if you need support monitoring performance or meeting your goals, call center technology offers a helping hand. Our Programmable Call-Backs come with rich reports and real-time monitoring to help you understand the data behind your call center operations. Every successful call center has a development plan — and the right tech. Ready to improve your metrics? Try out a demo today! 
 The post 7 Step Action Plan for Call Center Development first appeared on Fonolo.

Ensuring customer satisfaction is a huge business driver, and the experience starts from all touchpoints. Business software can make your job simple by streamlining how you handle customers so you can focus on your core business.  Industry-specific customisation  For instance, if you’re in the plumbing business, your prospective customers are homeowners, real estate brokers, facility…
The post How can business software streamline and improve your customer experience? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

The question, of course, is how long?

We’ve been working hard on fusion for sixty years (using ‘we’ to include myself with all of humanity, not because I’m a physicist).

The Post writes: “To most of us, this was only a matter of time,” said a senior fusion scientist familiar with the work of the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where the discovery was made.

If fusion arrives in a workable fashion in the next few years, the entire world changes, forever, and for the better. Geopolitics and the axis of colonialism/petrostates will be quickly rewritten. Climate issues will be transformed. Our ability to feed, house and enrich the lives of billions of people will be dramatically amplified.

There are lots of things that are inevitable eventually. Betting on the arc of history often turns out okay.

The hard part is figuring out how long eventually is. And then doing what we can to help it arrive.

Soon, Zoomers will become the largest population cohort that shapes new consumption patterns and the way businesses interact with customers. So if you haven’t yet started nurturing relationships with them, it’s high time to add it to the list of your strategic priorities. To help you win the hearts and minds of today’s young consumers, I’ve collected some of the hottest trends in customer experience that Gen Z cares about. Does your business tick all the boxes? Trend #1: mobile-first 61% of Gen Zers got their first smartphone at 11–17, while 22% — at the age of 10 or younger. They are constantly connected and therefore, do everything on the go — i.e. shop, play games, socialize, study, etc. That’s why their expectation of your website performance and functionality is extremely high. Zoomers will not use a website that is incompatible with their mobile device, prone to errors, and hard to navigate. This translates into the fact that your mobile optimization efforts should go well beyond just making your website responsive. The experience you offer must be flawless and natural on smartphones — otherwise, you risk leaving the way open to competitors. A phone screen is essentially smaller than that of tablets or desktops, meaning your mobile website or app must contain only what is really important to the user and bring them to the target action faster. Today, however, mobile usability can hardly be regarded as a customer experience trend. Instead, it must be regarded as an absolute necessity. Trend #2: omnichannel It is a proven fact that Zoomers frequently balance the use of multiple devices simultaneously. Specifically, 66% of young customers do it. They can start making an order on a smartphone and complete it on a laptop. And naturally, they don’t want to experience interruptions and glitches on the way. But let’s face it, who does? Gen Z customer expects consistency across all channels and devices. It means their user experience should be so smooth and uniform that it is nearly indistinguishable which channel they use to interact with your brand at the moment. To achieve this, all touchpoints should be integrated with each other establishing a holistic end-to-end customer experience. But there’s more to it. A special place in your omnichannel strategy must be reserved for social media as it is now the most popular destination for brand research among Gen Zers. More likely than any other generation, they will reckon with online recommendations of social influencers or their followers when making a purchasing decision. Along with this, Zoomers are also more willing to engage with brands in a less formal environment — via comments, direct messages, or video streams. Trend #3: individualization This customer experience trend naturally stems from the previous one as you just can’t provide a great omnichannel experience if it is not personalized. Interestingly, 41% of Gen Zers are even ready to sacrifice privacy to a certain extent and provide a brand with their data for the sake of personalized experience. That said, keep your customer at the center of everything and try to understand how they perceive value at every point of interaction. For this, use advanced data analytics tools because they can inform you about the proper time, the proper context, and the proper message for Gen Z targeting. Zoomers also appreciate it when they can be creative and express their unique self, so provide them with an opportunity to customize your product as they see fit, even at the stage of a free trial. In their research, IBM calls this Gen-Z-inspired trend ‘individualization’ since it is driven by Zoomers’ desire to adapt customer experience so that it is perceived as uniquely their own. This is something I haven’t seen with other generations. Trend #4: self-service Another peculiarity of Generation Z is that they are largely self-reliant. They don’t want to speak to someone who can solve a problem for them. They want to and can do it themselves. Only 24% of Zoomers choose to talk to a human agent when they need help. Others prefer doing their own research and coming up with their own solutions. But even when they understand that the challenge is complex, they tend to turn to AI-powered channels like virtual assistants (85%) or chatbots (78%). What does it mean for businesses? Actually, this is one of the customer trends that can bring a tangible benefit in the form of cut expenses. Equipping your website with self-service options — such as FAQ, knowledge base, chatbot, etc. — will help you resolve customer issues faster and save on live support because a large chunk of work will be automated. submitted by /u/joe_dojo [link] [comments]

It’s undeniable that 2022 has been a challenging year for businesses everywhere. The repercussions of COVID-19 and political uncertainty have been key issues over the past 12 months. Unfortunately, experts believe the cost of living will rise further in 2023. This is likely to cause an economic crisis akin to the crash of 2008.  Despite…
The post How have businesses transformed this year? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

A gifting trend has arisen in the early 21st century: experiences in lieu of physical presents. In “the experience economy,” the new generation of consumers with disposable income focuses on experiences over materials, memories over tangibility. This consumer may still be wooed by products, but it’s ultimately the experience that matters. Consumers expect the full package The…
The post The importance of communication in the experience economy appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

As 2022 draws to a close, business leaders and CX professionals will already be working diligently to prepare for the year ahead. In 2023 we expect to see the continued proliferation of new focus areas within the CX industry. Alongside emerging trends and immersive engagement, however, businesses will have to navigate agent hiring and retention challenges as the…
The post The road to omnichannel approaches, immersive engagement and overcoming agent attrition appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

CX requires collective and collaborative effort. But unless you understand all the internal and external drivers influencing CX, it will be much harder to create a company culture that places CX at the heart of everything.  Fortunately, everyone nominated in the UK CX Awards this year had more than just a good handle on their…
The post Creating and measuring impact in CX: the four key indicators appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Once again, sadly, we’re entering a period of uncertainty and recession. Budgets are stretched, profit margins squeezed. People’s productivity at work matters more than ever, as we head into a stormy 2023. EX (employee experience) and CX (customer experience) strategies are being adapted accordingly. But is change being implemented in ways that won’t stir up trouble? When it comes to EX, there has seemingly been a knee-jerk reaction from some business leaders. Those whose employees are working…
The post Are you building a check-up or check-in workplace culture? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Measurable data, we know, is crucial. In particular, tracking performance metrics is a great way to access valuable information into your business. And many factors play into organisational performance too.  To help us understand, Zendesk have released a new whitepaper into performance metrics. From there, we have new insights into how to be future-driven and…
The post What can performance metrics reveal about customer standards? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.