Category: Customer Experience

The retail industry has become accustomed to dealing with disruption over the past few years. COVID-19 lockdowns brought about unpredictable challenges, such as overstocked warehouses, port issues and order cancellation due to suppliers shutting down. This has continued into 2022. Retailers were braced for the fresh challenge of updating their business models to keep up…
The post How to implement data-driven decision making through Supply Chain 4.0 appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Decisions and crises and moments of significant effort and risk can be stressful.

But the challenge of a stressful day is rarely directly related to today, it’s about tomorrow or years from now.

Which means that pushing your way through some critical choices now will probably pay off in far more good days later. How many good days later does hard decision work today earn us?

Stalling costs us more than we expect. We get stressed from the act of stalling, and then later, we will have to pay the ongoing cost of putting off work and decisions that would have been easier and more profitable a while ago.

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Many offices and public settings are putting up clear plexiglas barriers to insulate staff from the spread of disease. While we can easily see through these partitions, it ends up creating a lot of yelling.

What if there were a disc, about the size of a hockey puck and the thickness of a few coasters… it would come in pairs, be low-powered and Bluetooth enabled. Stick one on one side of the glass, one on the other. It’s a microphone and a speaker… boom. At scale, they’d probably be really cheap.

One extension: allow the disc to also hook up to a wifi router or laptop. Now, you can have a disc at your home office and your colleague can have one too. Tap it to turn it on, and if the other person chooses to unmute, you can have a casual conversation the way we might in the old office-bound days.

It’s pretty easy to imagine creating a simple app that could record and create a transcript of every transaction, which could be useful for bureaucracies and public records.

Another extension: Integrate it with real-time translation and now the disk allows you to talk to anyone in any language…

It’s hopeful to believe that the NFT, baseball card or even car that we next purchase is going to go up in value.

It probably won’t.

The secret is to only acquire things where the resale value doesn’t matter to your overall satisfaction. That’s one reason there’s a huge difference between investing in stocks and owning a home.

“The number of people who say that Moore’s Law can’t continue doubles every 24 months.”

Even if you don’t understand this at first, it’s worth a second to understand it.

Moore’s Law, now nearly sixty years old, describes a simple engineering fact that has changed the life of everyone on the planet. The number of transistors that can be put on a chip doubles every two years. This doesn’t sound like much, but if you double even a number as small as 2 thirty times, it increases to more than a billion.

If the price of a house followed Moore’s Law, you could buy a mansion for a few pennies. Moore’s law describes the tech path that gives us artificial intelligence, smart phones and the internet.

And ever since he described the law, experts have been pointing out that it won’t continue, it can’t continue and we’ve exhausted any chance for more progress.

Like most things, it probably won’t go on forever. But that doesn’t mean it’s done.

Perhaps our job is to create the conditions for things to get better, not to predict that they won’t.

HT to Jay.

Happy Friday! We’re bringing you the latest roundup of industry news. This week, we’re looking at a new product from Qualtrics, the launch of a new digital company, new M-Cube research into Gen-Z shopping attitudes, and the latest business updates from the cost-of-living crisis. Key news Odigo has been named a global leader for the third consecutive…
The post This week in CX: Odigo, Authenticx, and Qualtrics appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

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The great migration of contact centers transitioning from on-site to hybrid work environments isn’t slowing down–and an air-tight call center security strategy has never mattered more.
There’s a staggering amount of sensitive information that flows through a contact center every day. The personal email addresses, passwords, and credit card numbers that are all in a day’s work for a call center, are very desirable to cyber criminals.
Keeping your company’s data secure is essential, but it can seem like an overwhelming task. With so many interconnected touchpoints, remote agents, and constantly changing goal posts, it’s hard to know where to begin.
Fear not! There are effective tools, training, and technology you can implement to make sure private data stays that way. And employing the right solutions WILL keep your customers and your business safe.
Read on for a quick overview of call center security, or take a deep dive on the topic with our comprehensive white paper.

READ THE FULL GUIDE:
Contact Center Security: A Guide to Keeping Your Data Safe
(It won’t cost you a penny, we promise.)

Why a Data Security Strategy is Essential
Let’s start at the beginning. You likely have a few ideas about why data safety matters, but may wonder what targets you’re trying to hit. There are industry standards to guide you.
If you collect any payment information from your customers, you must meet the extensive security requirements set by the PCI Security Standards Council. They require all vendors to have secure networks and systems, strong access control and regular testing, among other requirements.
Call centers working in the health care industry and handling patient data have their own strict security guidelines set by the US Department of Health and Human Services. But it’s not just an industry regulation. Your customers expect you to keep their data safe too. And more than ever, they’re making their preferences known with their pocketbooks and moving their allegiance to businesses who are transparent about their robust security practices.

DID YOU KNOW?:
86% of people say they care about data privacy and 47% say they’ve switched companies over their data policies.

Understanding the Threats to Call Center Security
Who hasn’t received a robocall from an unknown number, claiming you’re in deep trouble with local authorities and need to call back right away or face terrible consequences like jail time? Annoying! That scam may be easy to spot (though many people are fooled), but there are others that aren’t so simple.
Account Take Overs
An Account Take Over (ATO) describes a situation where a hacker poses as a customer while talking to a call center agent and tries to gain access to another person’s personal information. These attacks are becoming more common and more convincing. Often the cyber criminal will pose as another employee or even your boss, using psychological manipulation to intimidate you into revealing or sharing personal data.
Understaffed Security Teams
Like many North American industries, contact centers are suffering staff shortages. Skilled IT staff who are well-versed in current cybersecurity trends are hard to find and difficult to keep. It’s one of the biggest challenges facing contact centers today. With insufficient technical staff, it’s difficult to keep employees up to date on security risks and maintain vigilance against cyberattacks. In this case, what you don’t know certainly can hurt you—and compromise your company’s data, too.  
Remote Workers
Now that many agents are working remotely, the personal and the professional are starting to overlap, especially when it comes to technology. IT teams must take precautions around the use of personal devices for work calls, email and data management. Personal devices may lack proper encryption, making sensitive customer data that much more vulnerable. Practicing good password hygiene, implementing role-based access, and using a secure VPN service for remote workers are among the tools and techniques to help keep data safe in a remote call center.  
Developing a Comprehensive Security Strategy
Once you understand the threats your company may face, your team can develop a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. Your plan should layer up security best practices, tools and technologies. The specifics will vary depending on your unique needs but a comprehensive call center security strategy will include: 

Physical security measures
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) and password control
User access control (UAC)
IVR security
Zero Trust
Comprehensive employee training

Developing and executing a security plan takes time, effort, frequent updates, and constant training. But it’s important to remember that many security breaches are preventable. You can vastly improve your company’s data security by hiring trained staff, testing your vulnerabilities, and embracing a robust data security strategy that works for your call center’s specific needs.   

READ THE FULL GUIDE:
Contact Center Security: A Guide to Keeping Your Data Safe
(It won’t cost you a penny, we promise.)
The post Call Center Security: A Guide to Keeping Your Data Safe first appeared on Fonolo.

Objections are helpful. We object by holding back action or support because we question one or more pieces of data.

But the other half of this is the obligation: if the data ends up meeting the standard of proof we set for it, we have to change our minds and spend as much energy supporting the idea as we did opposing it.