Category: Customer Experience

If you do anything at the last minute that takes more than a minute, you’re not organizing your project properly.

The last minute is not a buffer zone, nor is it the moment to double-check your work.

The last minute is simply sixty seconds to enjoy and to remind yourself that you successfully planned ahead.

Happy Friday! We’re bringing you the latest roundup of industry news. This week, we’re looking at customer loyalty to ridesharing services, the focus of digital strategies, Pendo’s inefficiency report, and AI in the hardware industry.  Key news Gartner predicts conversational AI will reduce contact centre agent labour costs by $80 billion by 2026. 10% of…
The post This week in CX: Pendo, Chattermill, and Gartner appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

It’s simple: If you can’t engage and retain employees, you’ll have trouble satisfying customers, too. Company culture consultant Stan Slap puts it this way: “If you can’t sell it inside, you can’t sell it outside.”
Of course, call centers are notorious for high turnover rates. But if you’re a call center leader, it’s your job to combat that damaging trend. If you don’t, your customer service will suffer, and your call center operations will too. Don’t worry! There are plenty of ways to improve your turnover rates, including better agent training and recruitment practices. First, let’s understand why it matters.
Why is Call Center Employee Retention Important?
Poor agent retention has a domino effect that hurts your budget. Here’s how:
Unproductive floor time
New agents need about eight months on the job to reach regular performance and productivity levels. Imagine the benefits of having eight months of regular productivity if you just managed to hold onto that senior agent!
Recruitment and hiring costs
Setting aside time to sift through resumes, interview candidates, and negotiate packages—all this takes up valuable time from your managers. Recruitment might also pose advertising costs. All in all, you could be looking at spending anywhere from $5,000-$7,000 on each new hire.
Overtime costs
You might be short-staffed when you lose agents and have to pay other agents overtime. On top of that, your customer experience might suffer while new hires learn the specifics of their new role. They might add hiccups to the customer call or take longer to process a request. Average handle time and hold times increase, while eventually, customer satisfaction decreases.

TIP:
Assess your call center’s retention by calculating agent attrition rates.

Common Causes of Low Call Center Retention
Call center attrition is widespread, so there must be some common denominators. Here’s why you might be losing your agents:
Stress and burnout
High call volumes and angry customers can easily stress out your agents. These stressors might be the result of poor scheduling, inadequate training, or insufficient technology. Almost 74% of call center agents are at risk of burnout.
Low compensation
You’re not the only call center on the block—if your agents notice more attractive packages elsewhere, they won’t hesitate to leave. And who can blame them? The best way to show agents you care is to pay them fairly.
Poor management
Half of all employees quit because of their bosses, while two-thirds say their managers have insufficient experience.
Rushed recruitment
Imagine the time you can save by hiring the right call center agent. Often, candidates aren’t prepared for what call center jobs entail, and they leave within a few months.
Sometimes, it feels like the call center industry works against you. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
5 Tips to Improve Call Center Employee Retention
An agent is more likely to leave if you don’t invest in an effective retention strategy. Are you ready to hire, train, and keep solid agents? Let’s see how we can improve call center employee retention.
1.   Invest in training
Today’s contact center agent wants to feel like a valued asset—and the best way to make that happen is with ongoing, quality training. Your agents will feel more confident and less likely to become another attrition stat. The good news is you have countless training resources at your disposal. Storytelling, tech, lunch-and-learn sessions, job shadowing, and incentives are all fantastic training methods.
2.   Adopt a tech-forward mindset
Your biggest competitors are leveraging technology to improve every aspect of the call center operation. Follow suit and pay for software that’ll improve employee productivity and agent experience. The result? You’ll satisfy customers more and enhance call center employee retention. Don’t take our word for it. Here’s what one of our clients had to say about Fonolo’s Voice Call-Backs.

CUSTOMER FEEDBACK:
“We saw a reduction in our abandon rate, an increase in member satisfaction, and an upsurge in agent morale.” – Mark Edelmen, VP of Digital Member Services, Stanford Federal Credit Union.

3.   Improve the recruitment process
One of the best ways to improve call center employee retention is to start from the beginning. Your recruitment process should entail detailed screening, the right interview questions, and even pre-hire training quizzes to assess fit. A strong recruitment process helps you find employees that’ll stay in the long term.  Look for soft skills in your candidate, too. Flexibility, communication, and assertiveness are harder to develop than technical skills.
4.   Add more value to compensation packages
A slightly higher-than-average salary will improve call center employee retention. If budget constraints make that difficult, consider adding more vacation days, personal days, fitness allocations, and other benefits to buff up your offers.
5.   Invite feedback
We all know how valuable customer feedback is—the same is true for employee feedback. Encourage employees to provide feedback on your management style, operation, and anything else. This is a great way to encourage open communication and catch issues before an agent leaves! Some places to gather feedback are:

Anonymous suggestion boxes
Performance meetings
Training sessions
Team meetings
The post How to Improve Call Center Employee Retention first appeared on Fonolo.

If you leave your cheese out and the mouse eats it, the mouse is simply being a mouse.

While it might be nice if the mouse didn’t wreck your dinner, that’s his job.

Often, we show up with our cheese and then become indignant when the mouse does what mice do.

“Oh, you’re a mouse.”

That makes it a lot easier to navigate.

Wisdom and good advice are everywhere, now more than ever.

And yet, despite the abundance that’s available, people often make errors in job searches, product launches, or even planning a party.

There might be three reasons:

The advice might not be good, or it doesn’t appear to be valid. It’s hard to tell good advice from the not-so-good, so it may pay to simply ignore it.The advice might be good for “someone,” but it’s easy to imagine that it doesn’t apply to us. After all, the advice giver hardly knows us, we’re a special case and this is a special situation. Not to mention that good advice is often conservative and intended to maintain the status quo, which isn’t apparently helpful for someone who wants to make a ruckus.The person who needs advice might not actually want advice. They might simply want reassurance. Reassurance that their instincts are right, that they and they alone are the ones that can make a difference. Of course, reassurance is futile (because it needs constant replenishment) but that doesn’t keep this from being the biggest of the three categories.

We don’t have an advice shortage. We have a gap in selection and application.

Hi, guys! How do you onboard new and existing users? Do you use any tools? submitted by /u/Bianca_Dicu [link] [comments]

Google has killed more than 200 projects over the last few decades. They fail all the time. More than once a month they shut down a business that frightened the competition and seduced consumers.

That’s part of the recipe for becoming an unbeatable behemoth. Fail a lot.

Institutions like Western Union and A & P and Woolworth’s and Sears forget this part.

PS Generation Carbon, an almanac for kids, is now freely available in more than ten languages worldwide. Please share it with someone you care about.

Small businesses account for 99.9% of all businesses in the United States. However, less than half have stayed in business for more than five years. In a competitive market, brands must use every tool at their disposal to stand out and stay open.   In the last few years, customers have become more comfortable interacting with…
The post 3 technological processes to help small businesses compete with larger enterprises appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Technology is now deeply woven into how customer experience (CX) is delivered. So it would be fair to assume that the human touch is missing. 59% of consumers feel companies have lost touch with the human element of CX. They are sacrificing personal interaction for the sake of efficiency and productivity.  However, technology and empathy…
The post Making empathy core to customer experience appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Currently, CX professionals rely heavily on survey data to keep their finger on the pulse of their customers’ thoughts, feelings, and opinions. However, amidst the growing pressure, there’s been a demand for more context and clarity. This clarity comes from a deep, emotion-driven understanding of the interactions between customers and brands.   What’s the missing component…
The post Employing empathy in healthcare to facilitate actionable change appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.