Category: Customer Experience

If, every time there’s a dish in the sink, you load and run the dishwasher and scrub the entire kitchen, you’re never going to get anything else done.

On the other hand, if you wait until the sink is overflowing and the kitchen is filthy before you work on it, you’re going to spend a lot of time living with a dirty kitchen.

Somewhere in between the two extremes is a productive steady state.

The same goes for your relationship with a customer, your staffing decisions and just about everything else we do all day. Setting the triggers for action is best done in advance, and maintained regularly. Waiting for a crisis is expensive and risky.

submitted by /u/Mustangdork [link] [comments]

Skills-based call routing sounds super technical! While there is a tech side to it, at its heart, skills-based call routing is all about people. Still with me? Picture this: You’re the coach of a soccer team. The opposing team is about to make a penalty kick, trying to score on your goalie. In net, you need the best of the best to ensure a goal isn’t scored. If you were to use a forward player as your goalie for the penalty kick, you would not be setting your team up for success. The same goes for contact center management. If some agents are ill-equipped to handle certain calls, why have them answer the call in the first place? Enter skills-based call routing.
3 Tips to Improve Call Routing in Your Contact Center
What is skills-based call routing?
Just as the name sounds, skills-based call routing is a strategy that passes incoming calls to the agents who are best suited to handle the caller’s queries. Say a customer would like to upgrade their package. Their call would be automatically routed to a skilled sales agent. Or maybe they need a piece of hardware fixed. In this case, the call would be routed to technical support.
When callers are immediately connected with the best person to handle their issues using intelligent routing, plenty of benefits follow:

The customer’s total time on the line will decrease
First-call resolution (FCR) will increase
Customer satisfaction (CSat) scores will improve
Agent interactions will become more efficient
Wait times will decrease
Customer service and overall customer experiences will improve

FACT:
The proof is in the numbers—a great customer experience leads to more revenue. 86% of people surveyed said they would pay more if that price tag came with exceptional customer service.

How does intelligent call routing work?
A skills-based call routing phone system will take several different factors into account when deciding where to queue a call, including the number that was dialed, the caller’s account details, and selections made by the customer in the IVR. Once the customer is connected with the correct agent or channel, they likely won’t need to be transferred and the call will be completed on the first go.

TIP
Did you know, Fonolo’s Visual IVR technology allows customers to schedule a call back at any time during their journey, even when they’re surfing your site or mobile app?

4 steps to implement a skills-based routing system
1. Establish essential skillsets.
Decide which skillsets best suit the needs and services of your contact center. For example, if you provide service to a variety of locations, consider languages that will be required to best serve your customer base. Other potential items include:

Sales experience
Customer support
Training
Technical repairs
Software expertise

Then, group any relevant skill sets together. Maybe your software and hardware go together, in which case your agents in that skillset grouping should show proficiency in both those areas.
2. Assess your agents’ skills.
Your next step is to determine which agents are most proficient in which areas. If your team is small, listen to recorded inbound customer calls to see which issues are resolved fastest and how agents handle the interactions. If an agent effectively upsells in every sales call, this likely indicates a stronger proficiency in sales. If they can always help a customer fix technical issues, perhaps they’re best suited for repair inquiries.
Larger contact centers with hundreds of agents may require a broader method to determine skill levels. Start with a self-assessment survey for employees, with questions that help to determine where their specialties lie.
3. Determine your call-routing priorities.
The best skills-based call routing solutions can be programmed to consider multiple factors, including language as well as skill-set, when determining where to send a customer.
Try to think of a variety of different customer scenarios, then start to prioritize from there. Things like language and accessibility should be at the top of the list as they are essential to successful customer service.
4. Use analytics to monitor results.
Before implementing your new call-routing strategy, set measurable and time-bound goals. Look at our benefits list above and start from there. Maybe your goal is to improve your FCR by 2% over three months or decrease wait times by 20 seconds in four weeks. After the set period, take stock of your results and see if they’ve changed. Be sure to keep your team members informed on what your goals are and how the team is progressing.
How to Effectively Set Goals with Your Contact Center Team
 The post 4 Tips for Effective Skills-Based Call Routing first appeared on Fonolo.

What do the dishwashers eat for lunch?

What’s the user experience of accounts payable for that big tech company?

How does the head of sales treat the receptionist?

If it’s good enough for your customers, it should be good enough for your team, your vendors and your friends. And vice versa.

The key is this: In many organizations, customers have a choice and customers have a voice. Treating everyone as if they have that sort of power makes it far more likely you’re earning trust and respect, not cutting corners.

Friends, sharing this Issue resolution flowchart across Tier1, Tier2 Support through Engineering and QA. Is this close or far away from the process at your organization? Let me know your thoughts. https://www.rejoy.io/blog/issue-resolution-process submitted by /u/Interesting_Time8303 [link] [comments]

When entrepreneurs talk about their CX strategy, they often refer to the experience in customer services — i.e. sales and support. Just a few years ago, this may have worked. But not now. Today, the flawless CX design must be factored into every business process from day one. And here’s why. Modern consumers are different. They attribute value to an omnichannel customer experience. It means they look for consistent brand identity, utility, and personalization everywhere — on your website, store, social media, and even a chat — as well as across every business function from sales to logistics to marketing. New-gen customers expect you to deliver exactly what they like, want, or need in a way that is convenient for them. Companies that understand those expectations will ride high. But if you haven’t embraced the change yet, you risk going obsolete and losing your clients to more flexible competitors. In order to drive customer-centric transformation throughout the entire company, you need to keep 3 CX commandments: ​ CX Thinking + Technology Adoption + Agile Culture ​ CX Thinking You must adopt the CX philosophy company-wide. It means you have to understand your customer and demonstrate empathy in everything you do. Mastering CX thinking will help you shift the focus from chasing solely business gains to achieving outcomes that are mutually beneficial and satisfying to you and your customer. This is a proven formula for sustainable growth. Technology Adoption Modern customers are more connected, that’s why digital-first interaction is an important determinant of a good customer experience for them. They expect your business to be available 24 hours a day, every day, across all channels. You can’t achieve it without technology backing. It helps optimize the entire end-to-end experience, while also doing it at scale, on any medium, and in real-time. At the very least, you need to have a digital platform with a variety of integrated services like product management, customer management, billing, payment, etc. But in order to deliver a truly exceptional personalized customer experience, you also need to embrace analytics for a single view of the customer journey across channels, as well as have a tech stack that can enhance every interaction on the customer experience map. Agile Culture Customer behavior is dynamic. It is largely shaped by constantly evolving innovations. Some of the changes are here to stay for years to come, while others will undergo further transformations. The old-school approach won’t work here. The modern business environment calls for highly agile practices. It is critical for companies to be ready for iterating or pivoting when working on customer experience design. Once the team comes up with a new solution for improving the customer experience, it must quickly be prototyped and tested with real users in order to get first-hand feedback. This gives you a contextual understanding of customer interactions and points to the weak links in your CX strategy. Simply put, the agile culture helps you experiment fast, measure the results fast, and learn fast. submitted by /u/joe_dojo [link] [comments]

Sarah’s story I, and other members of the local community occasionally assist at our local food bank. The food bank provides emergency food and support to community members in need, like Sarah. Prior to her recent divorce, she and her partner lived off a modest joint income. Her husband’s income represented over 65% of the…
The post The reality of vulnerability within CX appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Lost calls refer to a call a customer makes that fails to reach an advisor at the other end. There are different types of these that occur for a plethora of reasons. But ultimately, they are all logged as lost calls.  The rate of these should, ideally, lay between 5 and 8 percent per company….
The post Lost calls: the ultimate guide to monitoring, preventing, and learning from them  appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Travelling over the past three years have become an emotionally charged and uncertain experience. Have our feelings towards airports changed? I decided to ask two groups of people to help me understand the current travel disruption: CX professionals working for airline companies, and frequent passengers.   These testimonials are from those who once loved to travel,…
The post Stories from the airport: the post-Covid flying experience appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

This common question no longer means anything.

Every TV show is on. All the time.

Our record collection streams every record ever recorded.

And our readers can find and display just about any book we can name.

We haven’t thought about the impacts of this abundance nearly as much as it deserves. Live matters less, scarcity is not really a factor, and ubiquity of access can easily lead to boredom, lack of status and a search for real-time connection.

Success used to be based on gatekeepers and access to access. What are the new rules?