Category: Customer Experience

Brittle systems are weak.

Short-term wins feel like a demonstration of will by those that seek to be strong.

But the only run is the long run.

When we embrace flexible, renewable and diverse approaches, we create actual progress.

Coming out of the pandemic, the global economy is at a crossroads. Throughout Europe and North America, inflation remains stubbornly persistent, markets are in a slump, and tech faces growing economic headwinds. It’s a time that will make or break businesses. It has many leaders scrambling to plan for the uncertainty ahead.  For businesses in…
The post What can we learn from product-led companies? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Technology, by virtue, perpetuates a constantly evolving cycle of improvement. A look around any desk or office will showcase many examples – from your phone, to the laptop you’re working on, or the smartwatch on your wrist. But there have also been some forgotten elements on this fast road to the future. Technology functions that…
The post What is needed for the best-in-class virtual assistant? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Healthcare providers are placing more emphasis on care than ever before. That means they’re shifting to a new paradigm for service interaction that doesn’t only focus on providing patient care. But this now also aims to deliver a superior customer experience (CX).   This runs from digitally onboarding new patients to providing alternative healthcare delivery methods,…
The post Top three trends in healthcare CX appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Joni wrote,

“Rows and floes of angel hairAnd ice cream castles in the airAnd feather canyons everywhereI’ve looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sunThey rain and snow on everyoneSo many things I would have doneBut clouds got in my way

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides nowFrom up and down, and still somehowIt’s cloud illusions I recallI really don’t know clouds at all”

We’d like to believe that our experiences are aligned with the world as it is.

They can’t be. Everything we encounter is filtered through what we know. And what we know comes from the very human cultures we inhabit.

When someone rejects you for a job, they’re not rejecting you. How could they be? They don’t know you. Instead, they’re rejecting their story of you, the best approximation they had combined with the complicated story they (all of us) tell ourselves about our needs, dreams and fears.

We take these stories and we compound them. We sharpen them, rehearse them and turn them into an augmented version of the world as we see it, not the world as it is.

If it’s not working for us, the best thing we can do is begin to do the very hard work of telling a new story, a better story, one that’s more useful.

The clouds are up to us.

Happy Friday! We’re bringing you the latest roundup of industry news. This week, we’re looking at Zendesk’s newest integration, Amazon Prime changes, and the recent Gartner survey.  Key news Alida introduced its newest Summer 2022 product release – Customer Journeys – as well as 15 new features to the Total Experience Management platform NICE has…
The post This week in CX: Alida, Zendesk, and Amazon appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Over the past couple of years, inclusivity in hiring has taken center stage in HR departments across every industry; and that includes inclusive hiring practices for call centers. More than ever, employers are recognizing how important it is to have an individual or a hiring team that’s dedicated to maintaining high Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) standards. Diversity is great for employees and businesses, too. Let’s take a closer look.
What does DEI really mean?
University of Toronto professor George Dei said: “Inclusion is not bringing people into what already exists; it is making a new space, a better space, for everyone.” This logic is the driving force behind every successful DEI plan and it also helps steer inclusive recruitment and hiring practices that really work. Inclusion initiatives should start with the mission to understand employees’ individual needs, based on their life experience. We all know that life experiences are dramatically different from one person to another. Some of the factors that impact our life experience include race, gender, sexual preference, class, religion, culture, and physical and cognitive ability.
Three Ways to Drive Inclusive Agent Engagement
What are Inclusive Hiring Practices?
Inclusive hiring practices are a set of recruiting processes that businesses put into place to ensure they’re hiring diverse candidates. These recruiting and hiring practices are aimed at recruiting people with different perspectives, backgrounds, knowledge, and diverse talents by reducing the potential for unconscious bias during the application and interview stages.

FACT:
The University of California San Francisco’s Office of Diversity and Outreach defines unconscious bias as social stereotypes about certain groups of people that a person forms outside of their conscious awareness. Every individual has different unconscious biases they must recognize and unpack. These implicit biases can deeply impact the way employees are hired, promoted and supported throughout their careers.

Why are These Recruitment Processes Important?
When it comes to business, having a diverse team means more success for everyone! Research proves that diversity in the workplace and inclusive work environments lead to higher levels of innovation, engagement, productivity, overall performance and agent retention. No matter how you look at it, employing inclusive hiring practices for your business is the right thing to do.

DID YOU KNOW:
A diverse call center team also tends to represent the customer base more thoroughly, which can lead to improved customer interactions and better customer satisfaction scores, too.

Top 6 Inclusive Hiring Practices for Your Call Center
Now that we’ve covered some of the basics, here are our top 6 inclusive hiring practices you should start using at your contact center right away.
1. Make a plan that defines what DEI looks like at your organization.
In addition to taking the basic steps we’ve mentioned above, it’s important to write out what DEI means for your specific call center. Every business’ plan will be unique to their own needs and the needs of their employees. For example, a remote contact center’s DEI plan will be distinct from a hybrid center’s in terms of accessibility and accessible technology. Though the end goal should be the same—to provide a safe and equal workspace for every employee—the way your call center gets there will be entirely unique.
It’s also important to assess your current level of diversity. Are you in a good spot or do you need major improvements when it comes to diverse hiring? If major improvements are on the table, think about what brought you to a lack of diversity in the first place? Answering this question is your first step to being able to make significant change.
2. Focus on writing inclusive job postings.
Be sure to use gender-neutral language in your job posting when describing the candidate your company is seeking; use they or them instead of he or she. You should also keep any text legible without bolding, italics, or other formatting that could be difficult to read. Finally, make sure you emphasize the responsibilities that accompany the job, rather than requirements that could be limiting. Only add in a degree or diploma requirement if it’s essential.
3. Update your website and employer image.
Take a careful look at your employer branding and remember, the way your company is portrayed online speaks volumes to potential employees about whether they’ll feel welcome and safe working within your organization. Any lifestyle imagery should include a variety of individuals that represent as many different backgrounds as possible. Also, make sure your website is legible and accessible to all visitors. Do a quick Google search for accessibility checkers—they’ll give you a glimpse into the type of design changes you should make to ensure people with different abilities can properly navigate your site.
4. Consider removing candidate names from resumes.
An easy way to reduce the level of unconscious bias that goes into the interview selection process is to remove names from resumes before they’re reviewed by managers. This allows your staff to take a more objective look at someone’s skills without any personal connection to who they are, outside of their professional experience.
5. Diversify your interview panel.
Make sure the people who are doing the hiring reflect the diverse talent you would like to hire. That may mean diversifying your interview panel, HR team, leadership and board members.
6. Ask your employees about their experience with inclusion in the workplace.
The key to a successful diversity and inclusion plan is to create both personal and anonymous feedback opportunities for current employees. Although frequent personal check-ins are an excellent way to make employees feel cared for and respected at their place of work, offering team members the opportunity to submit anonymous feedback via online surveys is essential to making significant change.

TIP:
Anonymous surveys give employees the space to voice concerns without fear of reprisal. It can be hard to tell the people who you work for that they need to improve certain aspects of the company, but no one knows your workplace better than the people who work there!

 The post 6 Inclusive Hiring Practices for Call Centers first appeared on Fonolo.

If you’re basing your proposal on facts, the scientific method, calculations and effectiveness, please show your work. Eagerly share your reasoning, your sources and how you came to this proposed plan. Even better, adopt a posture that welcomes improvements and corrections to your work, because after all, the purpose of your plan is to make change happen.

If, on the other hand, your proposal is based on belief and opinion, tell us. You’re entitled to both. And the rest of us are allowed to disagree.

When we confuse the two, it causes stress. When we feel the need to provide proof to back up our belief, we’re undermining both.

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When Frederic Taylor brought the world Scientific Management a hundred years ago, it changed what it meant to run a factory. Stopwatches and assembly lines dramatically outperformed the traditional piecemeal approach.

Henry Ford wrote a four page article for Encyclopedia Brittanica about how organizations could embrace the new model, and his focus on this lowered the price of a car by 80% or more.

I’m confident that car companies like Dusenberg and Pierce Arrow felt this new approach was beneath them. They probably made thoughtful arguments about esprit de corps and the magic of a hand-built auto. But they’re gone now.

Video conferencing, the pandemic and the powerful shifts that knowledge work and the internet have caused are at least as significant a shift in work as the stopwatch was.

And yet the Washington Post sent a memo to its reporters telling them that if they didn’t come into the office three days a week, they’d be fired.

That’s because an executive there has decided that “the office” and “work” are the same thing. Even though reporters generally report, and reporting is generally done anywhere except in the office.

Was there something special about hanging out over coffee, greeting people in the lobby and gossiping every day at the water cooler? Of course. But these were side effects of good work in the office, not the cause of it.

If a manager says, “the only way I can create connections, loyalty and a sense of purpose is to force people to shlep to an office every day,” they’re being lazy. Surely we can come up with something better than simply taking attendance.

If it’s important to have your brilliant designer review the work of junior architects in person, then do it on purpose. Schedule it and make it worth the focus and effort. If you believe that loyalty and communication increase when people have regular physical interactions without a screen in between them, then build this into the schedule for the work that’s being done, don’t simply wait for it to accidentally happen.

As knowledge work has shifted to a remote-first setting, organizations have generally done an astonishingly bad job of bringing any intent at all to how they will build a culture that they care about. Forcing people to show up so they can hide behind a screen in the office is lazy.

Yes, the old culture happened organically over the course of decades. No, it’s unlikely you’ll end up with a new culture you like if you simply pretend that nothing has changed.