Category: Customer Experience

Of course, we’ve always had snake oil salesmen. We’ve always had patent medicines, odd electric probes and copper bracelets. That’s partly because placebos work, and partly because when someone isn’t feeling well, it’s tempting to seek relief and belief.

In the last fifty years, peer-reviewed and tested medicine has gotten dramatically more effective at the same time that these regulated medicines have spent a fortune on ads and marketing. As a result, the sham snake oil purveyors have worked hard to copy the scientific umbra and language of tested and regulated treatments. And thanks to aggressive lobbying, in many countries, the folk remedies are nearly unregulated.

So we’ve got greedy public pharma companies, with a tested product and an ad budget that often exceeds their R&D budget. They’re using every tool they can to sell something expensive that sometimes works. And then we have folk medicine companies that are responding to the high prices and ad influx by raising their own prices and sharpening their own ads, blurring the gap and grabbing some of the trust that people have in verified and tested results.

Belief is useful and placebos work. But you can see the widening gap here. It’s hard to tell from the website or ad which are the actual focused, tested, double-blind and effective treatments, and which are simply scams. A cheap benign placebo is a bargain. One that costs too much or hurts you is not.

If someone tells you that they’re offering a diagnostic test of your micro-biome and has you send in a sample for scientific analysis and testing, it’s almost certain that they’re doing nothing of the sort. If there’s a simple device you can buy online for $100 or so, it is likely that it doesn’t cure pain the way they say it does. If a practitioner insists that they have powers that transcend the laws of physics or reason, they’re actually only offering you the power of suggestion. And yes, if a famous doctor insists that an expensive over-the-counter magical bean is what you need, think twice.

Regulated medicine has gotten dramatically more effective in the last few decades. Folk medicine hasn’t changed at all, even if it costs ten times more than it used to, and even if the packaging and hype is significantly more sophisticated.

And so: targeting people in distress, charging ever more and honing the sales pitch to make it ever sharper.

It’s a shame that the folks who do this don’t have the self-respect and generosity it would take to be honest about what they’re offering. Instead, they hide behind a facade of jargon and process that conceals the fact that they’re simply making it up. That oil isn’t essential, except in the way it makes a profit.

There are few areas of our lives where we tolerate this much fraud. Because we really want it to be true.

The CX & Loyalty Summit MENA 2022 will bring together senior industry executives from various sectors and industries. The summit will discuss CX, EX, Loyalty, Customer Service, Digital Trends, and much more. The Summit will explore cutting-edge technology, including digital and automation, as well as best practices that will keep your business at the forefront…
The post CX & Loyalty Summit MENA 2022: driving revenue through CX transformation appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

No great call center achieves success without implementing dozens of processes—especially when it comes to call center quality monitoring. Why does it matter? The main goal is to ensure your customers are receiving consistent, top-notch service and customer satisfaction (CSat) scores are high. After all, what is a contact center without happy customers? Staying on top of agent performance and keeping quality levels high across the board can feel overwhelming. But nailing down the right quality monitoring process for your business will make all the difference to your contact center.
What is Call Center Quality Monitoring?
Just as it sounds, call center quality monitoring is the act of tracking how well agents are leading and responding throughout their customer interactions. Monitoring the level of service on phone calls is just one piece of the puzzle. Quality monitoring should also involve every part of your party that leads to customer engagement; think online chat messages (live or automated), social media interactions, and emails.
Keeping tabs on customer interaction quality can help you determine where your business stands. Quality scores can help identify weaknesses in your training programs and management, and pinpoint areas of improvement for agents. Plus, consistently tracking call quality will give you further insights into why key performance indicators (KPIs) may be falling behind.
How to Monitor Call Center Performance
7 Steps to Developing the Perfect Quality Monitoring Process
 Building a successful quality monitoring process for your call center can seem stressful, but it’s easier to manage when you break it down. These seven steps can help you create the quality monitoring process that best suits the needs of your contact center.
1. Elect or hire a committee that’s dedicated to quality management
Depending on the size of your contact center, you may choose committee members who are already employees or hire a team of experts who have experience in quality monitoring. Either way, giving this task to one group will streamline your quality monitoring process from the get-go.

TIP:
Don’t underestimate the work it takes to prep, monitor, and assess the quality of your customer interactions. Quality assurance is not one of those simple tasks that adds an extra half-hour to someone’s week. The data collection and analysis involved take considerable time and effort.

2. Know your numbers—past and present
Thoroughly understanding your historical and current KPIs will help you create goals for the future. Some important metrics to keep in mind include:
CSat Scores: If your CSat scores are on the lower side, it may be an indication of poor customer service. Your CSat score should be the first KPI you analyze, and your guiding light throughout the quality monitoring process.
First Call Resolution: Knowing how efficiently customers’ queries are being resolved can help determine whether the quality is lagging.
Average Handle Time: Are your customer’s issues being resolved quickly? High AHTs generally point to low-quality interactions.
Average Wait Time: The time a customer waits in a queue or on hold doesn’t necessarily determine the quality of a call, but it can heavily impact the customer’s overall opinion of service. Once they finally connect with an agent, they’ll likely be less friendly, making it more difficult for your agents to provide quality service.

DID YOU KNOW:
Fonolo’s Voice Call-Back technology has saved customers about 77 years of hold time annually.

3. Determine what a quality call sounds like for your company
Before starting to monitor and analyze your agents’ interactions, it’s essential that your team unanimously decides what a high-quality call sounds like. Consider these attributes:

Quick call answer time
A friendly and warm greeting
Active listening by the agent
Clear communication
Effective questioning
Fast handling and resolution time
No or low transfers

4. Employ the right technology to collect and analyze data
 Depending on the size of your contact center, you might need to step up your tech game. If your team has just a few agents, you can simply analyze recorded calls, chats, and emails. Larger contact centers with hundreds of agents would benefit from an all-in-one quality monitoring software; a quick Google search will provide loads of options.
5. Set measurable goals based on your KPIs
 After combing through historical data and measuring your current KPIs, determine where you are now and decide where you want to be in a set period. Goals are only effective if they’re SMART—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, your goal may read something like this:

Lower AHT by 1 minute over the next 3 months.

Contact center #goals are only effective if they’re SMART—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, your goal may read something like this: “Lower AHT by 1 minute over the next 3 months.” #businesstipsClick To Tweet
6. Develop a quality monitoring scorecard for your team
 Now that you’ve determined your goals, it’s time to gather them all into one handy scorecard. List the KPI you’d like to improve along with its current number, the goal number, and the date by which you’d like to reach that goal. It’s also important to indicate the steps your agents can take to hit those goals.
For example, while reviewing recorded calls, you may have noticed that many agents weren’t properly greeting their customers. This would be the first step in improving overall call quality.
After you’ve made a comprehensive list of goals, meet with your agents and present the information in a way that’s digestible and encouraging. Agent engagement not only leads to happier agents and less turnover, but it also helps to improve the quality of customer interactions.
Happy agents make for happier customers, so the benefits of getting agents excited about their goals will be felt by your customers, too. One way to entice agents to elevate their customer service is to offer incentives. You could offer small prizes for stand-out employees or team incentives like a pizza party or team activity.
7. Set up goal check-ins and encourage feedback
Ongoing training and regular check-ins will help keep your agents on track with their goals. Ask them if they’ve changed their approach. Have they noticed a difference in their customer interactions? What are they liking about the process? What isn’t working? Collecting feedback from your agents shows them that you appreciate their contributions. It will also help you streamline and improve your process over time.The post 7 Steps to Better Call Center Quality Monitoring first appeared on Fonolo.

People don’t talk about end-of-life suffering or the cost of healthcare in the last year of life, so it never gets better. Instead, we pretend it isn’t an issue and the problem persists.

We don’t talk about the ongoing and escalating costs (human and financial) of our changing climate, so the systems that are making it worse continue, unimpeded.

We don’t talk about all the time we waste in meetings, the persistence of caste and injustice, the manipulation of our communication platforms, the creeping aristocracy disguised as a meritocracy or even the ridiculous nature of the wedding-industrial complex.

What all of these systems have in common is that they maintain their position in the status quo by creating a force field that somehow keeps us from talking about them.

On the other hand, we talk about quarterly profits, sports rankings, celebrities and the horserace of the day’s politics all the time. Which is why so much time and energy is spent on polishing and optimizing those systems.

Figure out what’s important, then create the conditions for people to talk about it.

PS thanks to Eileen Fisher for doing just that. Last month, their stores gave away thousands of copies of The Carbon Almanac to people who stopped by. Simply that. To encourage people to talk about our future.

Also congratulations to Gabe for 2,000 daily posts. Good stuff.

B2B SaaS customer support is different. In B2B space it is important for support teams to analyze the issue at hand, discover the broader problem, look for patterns to solve at scale, and keep customers in the loop until the issue is resolved. We sat down with PJ Ople, Head of support and solutions engineering at Sendbird to discuss: – Unique challenges of B2B SaaS support – What great SaaS customer experience feels like – Career advice for upcoming CX professionals Link to video chat: https://youtu.be/wa8GQgy2UjQ. Hope you find this helpful! submitted by /u/Interesting_Time8303 [link] [comments]

“If only” is a soothing refrain. If only the constraints were lifted, and the things that are scarce were abundant. If only the barriers were lifted and there was more time or fewer obstacles…

That’s a trap.

If the constraints went away, you’d be playing a totally different game, because your competitors would see their constraints lifted as well.

Constraints are a gift because they bring us something to lean against, and they give us the chance to focus on work we can actually do.

Every once in a while, the situation changes and constraints are lifted. In those moments, we need to be hyper-aware of the new possibilities. The rest of the time, instead of cursing the boundaries, we can celebrate them.

Businesses that have aligned themselves with customer empowerment have gained customer loyalty and retention rates have increased for their businesses as well. Research shows that when businesses help customers in making choices, they develop a stronger affinity with their users. This kind of empowerment is what customers of today are rooting for. https://www.embitel.com/blog/ecommerce-blog/4-essential-tips-for-customer-empowerment-and-retention submitted by /u/HippieSwat [link] [comments]

Whether to use CRM software in your organization is a no-brainer but the hard part is choosing the right CRM software service for your organization. We have made a list of factors that you should consider while choosing a Customer Relationship management Software. Check it out: https://www.embitel.com/blog/ecommerce-blog/13-things-to-consider-while-choosing-the-crm-system submitted by /u/HippieSwat [link] [comments]

Hey Guys, We are working on a new RevOps Product, it is Excel but with super-powers! Please join us for free for testing our MVP. You can calculate Customer’s Health Score in minutes. Build, enrich and share data insights with the team by automatically pushing data into the operational systems. Our product enables you to easily connect disparate systems into one unified data model and calculate critical KPIs specific to your business in hours, not weeks. Pics of our super-power spreadsheet. Use your favorite tools: Salesforce, HubSpot, Pendo, Zendesk, Slack, Microsoft Excel, Snowflake, Mixpanel, Microsoft Dynamics, and many others. Furthermore, we also build a Health Score Template which is free so if you are interested you can get that and maybe tell us what you think about it. Best Regards submitted by /u/andrewrymarenko [link] [comments]

This seems to be cultural, not based on income, caste, race or genetics.

Some professions and communities give a greater percentage of their income to charity than others. Some towns have no-kill dog shelters while others have a reputation for abandonment. You might find an online community that welcomes and supports newcomers, and another that simply trolls and argues with them.

You can find a surf beach where the norm is to let others have the right of way and lend a hand, and others where surfers would rather go to jail than let you have a shot at a wave.

A sailboat is more respectful than a Jetski. It’s silent, picturesque and safer for those around it. Given the choice, some groups of people choose one, some the other. And while we can have productive conversations about what actually helps the most bystanders in the best possible way, it’s also pretty clear that some organizations and cultures are more aware of their impact than others.

Bystanders, by definition, can’t give you anything in return. Treating others with care and dignity isn’t a shortcut to a sale or profit, it’s simply something that gets done around here (or doesn’t.)

Part of our opportunity is to normalize the behaviors we’d like to be around.