Category: Customer Experience

Humans gossipped before we figured out fire, housing or farming. It’s built into our culture and possibly our DNA.

Gossip informs culture and can influence connection and hierarchies. And in many communities, it’s destructive.

If office gossip is benefitting you and the people you work with, good for you. But if office gossip is leading to stress, turnover or low satisfaction, it might be time to do something about it.

Two suggestions:

The first is a simple boundary. Don’t talk about anyone on the team unless they’re in the room.

This is simple to say and surprisingly difficult to do. Talking about people behind their back is built into the practice of management. It’s also the main sport of the water cooler and the fuel for gossip.

One boss meets with another boss to talk about an employee. And now there’s a reason to gossip and wonder.

With Zoom calls transcending space and time, there’s no longer a logistical reason to leave someone out. And you can adopt the posture that if it’s worth talking about someone, it’s worth including the person being talked about.

Once this becomes your practice, it gets more difficult to speculate about what was said, because nothing was said.

The second, which can’t work until you’ve consistently done the first, is to challenge office gossip at every turn. Thriving DM traffic on your Slack, cliques in the lunchroom–these undermine the organization you’re building. You wouldn’t tolerate people stealing petty cash or telling off your customers… the culture becomes what you tolerate.

Gossip won’t disappear. It can’t. But making it clear to the high performers that things aren’t like that around here–and meaning it–sends a message about the focus and culture of the team you’re working so hard to build.

Scheduling is vital to any call center leader’s job – down to the last break. We all know the ramifications: if you’re short an agent at peak time, your customers will feel the brunt of long waiting times.
If you are looking to improve call center agent productivity and optimize your contact center operations, you must learn how to calculate call center schedule adherence.
What is Call Center Schedule Adherence?
Call center schedule adherence is the amount of time agents spend sticking to their schedule. The schedule includes call time, wrap-ups, meetings, and training. But the concept is more complex than call center agents simply being at work or not.
4 Ways to Improve Contact Center Operational Efficiency

Call center scheduling is meticulous because every manager needs the right number of agents to meet call volumes. That means scheduling agents for breaks at different times and ensuring someone’s always on-call if an agent calls in sick.
Sometimes, agents might not adhere to their schedule by accident. Perhaps training took a while longer than expected. Or a customer needed extensive support, dragging the call past a scheduled break. Technically, those instances are examples of a lack of adherence.
But adherence isn’t the same as conformance.
Adherence vs. Conformance
Conformance is the amount of time an agent worked compared with how much time they were supposed to work. Same as adherence, right? Not quite.
Adherence includes call center agents’ entire schedules, encompassing meetings, breaks, training, etc. Conformance narrows in on the scheduled working time, where agents take calls and perform related job duties.
Both are essential calculations for any effective workforce management system. But why?
How to Calculate Occupancy Rate in a Call Center

Why Does Call Center Schedule Adherence Matter?
If too many agents aren’t sticking to their schedule, your customers and profits will suffer. At first glance, a break taken 5 minutes late shouldn’t matter. But think about how that affects your operations over time.
Through no fault of an agent, the schedule isn’t aligned with when an agent takes their break.
Say it’s a consistent five minutes late. That makes it likely for the agent to return to work five minutes past their scheduled time.
Five minutes every day accounts for 25 minutes a week. That’s 1,300 minutes per year or almost 22 hours.
And that’s only one agent at one particular time. Tack on other agents that aren’t adhering to the schedule, and you’ve got a recipe for:

Lower customer satisfaction scores
Higher abandonment rates
Longer wait times

That hurts the customer experience and your profits. It also impacts your agents. Angrier customers affect agent engagement, impacting customer satisfaction and sparking a downward spiral.
To sum it up: contact center schedule adherence matters because it measures your agents’ productivity and engagement and can be a warning sign that agent morale is slipping.
Schedule adherence is a great metric for tracking agent engagement and identifying individual underperformance. #cctr #cctrmanagement Click To Tweet
Call Center Adherence Calculation
Adherence rate is a percentage. Here’s what you need to do to calculate call center schedule adherence:
Adherence Rate = 100  X  (Total scheduled time – Time off schedule) / Total scheduled time
Here’s an example:
Let’s say an agent is scheduled for 480 minutes of work (8 hours) in a workday. The agent follows the schedule, except they take too long handling a call before a break. They spend an extra ten minutes working when their break is scheduled and another ten minutes on break when they are scheduled to work.
That means the agent was off-schedule for a total of 20 minutes. The calculation would be:
Adherence Rate = 100  X  (480 – 20) / 480
SO:

Adherence Rate = 100  X  460 / 480
Adherence Rate =  95.8%

This calculation represents call center agent productivity.
When setting goals with your call center agents, only factor in the times you expect your agent to be available to customers and clients. You may also want to add some cushion time. For example, if your agents are scheduled for 8 hours, factoring in two 15-minute breaks and one half-hour break, 100% adherence would have the agent available for 7 hours. If they are available for 6 hours and 45 minutes, they would have an adherence rate of 96%.
8 Simple Ways to Improve Call Center Agent Performance

If you have a goal for a wind-down time after an interaction, say three minutes, then you know that your call center would never hit 100%, and a more realistic goal would be 90%.
Once you discover the root cause of adherence issues, you might need time to get back on track. Fonolo’s Voice Call-Backs is a fantastic resource to smooth our call volumes in the interim. Instead of accepting long waiting times, customers have the autonomy to decide when they’d like to chat with an agent, drastically improving customer satisfaction and helping to optimize contact flow and handle times.
 The post How to Calculate Schedule Adherence in the Call Center first appeared on Fonolo.

There are two kinds of skills, resources and tools:

Ones that get used up as you use them.

And ones that get better when you do.

Nobody wants there to be a crowd at the ski area on a bluebird powder day–too many people use up the new snow.

On the other hand, it’s no fun at all to go dancing when you’re the only one in the club.

A painting or a song that’s experienced by more people is worth more. A carpenter increases her skills when she works on new projects (to a point). On the other hand, a sharp knife gets dull if you use it too often…

If you’ve got something that benefits from use, from practice and community, use it and share it.

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

The inaugural edition of the US Customer Experience Awards, organised by Awards International, announced the winners for this year’s program. The first-ever edition of USCXA® brought together leading businesses from across Europe to share the most remarkable achievements in customer experience. Top companies and organisations participated in this premium program, competing for the most coveted accolades in customer…
The post Winners announced for US Customer Experience Awards 2022 appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

First, let’s agree that there’s a problem.

It may be that I think we’re facing something serious, something costly, something urgent–and you don’t.

We can have an honest conversation about the problem without worrying about whether there’s an easy or certain solution.

We can also have a conversation about whether it’s a problem (problems have solutions) or whether it’s simply a situation, something like gravity that we have to live with.

Once we agree that we have a problem, the status quo will show up. It will argue with every tool it has that any variation from the current path is too risky, too expensive and too painful to consider. The status quo will stall. It will argue for studies and will amplify the pain that will be caused to some as we try to make things better for everyone.

And the status quo usually wins. That’s because the makers of change are now playing defense, forced to justify every choice and ameliorate every inconvenience.

Perhaps there’s a more useful way forward.

We begin by agreeing that there’s a problem.

And then each party, every single one, needs to put forward a plan. A plan that either addresses the problem or takes responsibility for not addressing it.

And for each plan, we can consider the likely outcomes. For each plan, we can ask, “will that work?” and follow it up with, “why?” and “how?”

Perhaps you don’t think it’s a problem worth solving. That’s important to bring up before we ask you if you have a plan.

Delay might be the best option. But then let’s be honest and announce that instead of simply stalling.

Hello Friends, I’m an ex-Apple & ex-Google Founder. I’m excited to be here to learn from y’all and contribute to this community. I’ve published an article on ‘Support metrics to inspire action’ to ensure customers are successful on the support side. This post covers a list of support metrics (quality, efficiency, and correlation to top line) and ways to share the metrics. Please let me know your feedback, I’d love to hear from y’all 🙂 submitted by /u/Interesting_Time8303 [link] [comments]

Steve Jobs once said,
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
That first sentence is a home run for call center quality monitoring. But these days, customers expect excellence. 
Today’s customer has evolved, with no patience for anything less than exceptional. Your first step to meeting them is through call center quality monitoring.
But how do you monitor and analyze a call center that receives thousands of daily calls?
How do you keep track of so many agent interactions?
This article will cover everything you need to know about call quality monitoring in the call center and why it’s essential to reach your business goals.
What is Call Center Quality Monitoring?
In its most basic sense, call quality monitoring requires leaders to monitor and analyze agent interactions with customers. With that data, you can inform performance management and improve the customer experience.
How to Measure Customer Perception of Your Brand

Maybe you have a library of call recordings on your system. That’s an excellent start but insufficient to measure, monitor, and improve call quality.
Here are a few things you might monitor:

Agent tone of voice
Speaking speed
Language
Personalized service
Resolution effectiveness and time
Effective questions
Credibility building
Empathy
Script

Call center quality monitoring is a big task. You should assess call recordings for tone of voice, resolutions, empathy, process adherence, customer satisfaction, and more. #QualityAssurance #CallCenterLifeClick To Tweet
But to take your call center quality assurance process to the next level, you should find out:

How agents use tools to provide excellent service and find ways to improve those tools
Resolutions that are proven to solve common customer inquiries

Here’s the thing: you can’t afford NOT to invest in call quality monitoring. Why? Your call center will suffer in these critical areas:

Customer experience
Customer satisfaction and loyalty
Business efficiency
Agent engagement 

A high-quality call means the customer leaves satisfied with a clear, effective solution to their problem. But how do you get started with quality monitoring?
6 Tips for Boosting Customer Satisfaction in the Call Center

Call Quality Monitoring Approaches
The good news is that you have a few approaches you can take to monitor and analyze call quality.
Sample Monitoring:
Managers will select random agent interactions and call recordings for review. The quality assurance team (managers and agents) will listen and assess the interaction for agent performance and customer satisfaction.
But are samples foolproof? Not quite. You might only pick ordinary samples and miss out on interactions that offer insights into operational issues. We recommend you opt for more targeted monitoring to get a fuller picture – pick super short or long calls to start. 
Targeted Monitoring:
This approach helps you identify key areas where agents perform superbly or poorly. You might target agent interactions with cancellations or low customer satisfaction scores. That’s valuable data you can use to do better with difficult customer support issues. Other targets might include loyal or high-paying customers or first-time callers.
Many contact centers use targeted monitoring to create agent quality scores. Scoring individual calls at random and assessing speech analytics can be used for baseline scores and examples of excellent quality for use in future call center training sessions.

TIP:
Target agent interactions with high-performers in your quality monitoring strategy to create a golden standard for training.

Automation and Call Detail Monitoring with Fonolo:
The right technology is essential for effective quality monitoring. Fonolo’s Portal lets you monitor your call-backs in real-time. You can access rich reports and analytics and monitor call details to inform your strategies and improve quality.
Quick-Start Guide to Call Quality Monitoring
Call center quality monitoring isn’t a walk in the park. Even with the right technology and manpower, quality assurance may fall short. Here are some common challenges:
●     Data overwhelm: too much data to sift through
●     Misinterpreted data: Correct data that’s misinterpreted by managers and agents
●     Insufficient technology: Outdated or ineffective software that doesn’t make monitoring efficient
●     Time restraints: No time in the day to dedicate to quality monitoring
Here are some best practices to overcome these challenges:
1. Seek Customer Feedback
Who can distinguish a great customer experience from a bad one better than your customers? Inform your quality assurance strategy with valuable customer feedback. You might send customer surveys via email or request a call rating through your IVR system. Fonolo’s Visual IVR lets you display a custom message after every interaction — an excellent opportunity to solicit feedback.
You can use this feedback to inform training priorities and metrics to focus on and shed light on misinterpreted data.
2. Select Key Metrics and Standards
We know how many call center metrics and KPIs we have available. First-call resolution (FCR), average handle time (AHT) occupancy rate, customer satisfaction score, and abandonment rate.
A Guide to the Top Call Center Metrics

But if you spread yourself thin across all metrics, you’ll miss the essential ones. Look back at your customer feedback. For example: if customers can’t resolve issues fast enough, FCR and AHT are vital metrics.
You should also establish clear standards for quality, process, and compliance. Ask questions like:

Did the agent provide a resolution and add value?
Was the customer impressed and satisfied?
Did the agent follow the script to a reasonable degree?
Did the agent follow established business processes?

DID YOU KNOW?
Fonolo’s Voice Call-Backs are proven to improve key metrics like CSat, AHT, net promoter score, and more!

3. Dedicate Resources to Quality Assurance
Call quality assurance links to improved profits, happier customers, and significant efficiencies. Such a valuable aspect of business deserves focused attention. That means dedicating a team to call center quality monitoring.
Think of your QA team as a task force with the common goal of maintaining excellent service through a data-driven strategy. Members should be veterans within your call center — managers, supervisors, and best call center agents. Team members should know your business goals, have access to metrics, and have enough time to develop a quality assurance strategy alongside their duties.The post 3 Call Center Quality Monitoring Best Practices first appeared on Fonolo.

If your plan, your idea or your art doesn’t involve any significant hurdles in moving forward, it’s probably not worth that much.

If it were easy, everyone would do it.

The tactic is to seek a path where you see and understand the significant hurdles that kept others away. And then dance with them.

They’re not a problem, they’re a feature.

Advertisers pride themselves on knowing their customers. But what happens when their customer is suddenly not where they expected?   As work and school shifted online during early stages of the pandemic, advertisers had faced this exact scenario and were initially slow on the uptake. While consumers faced the convergence of their work and personal lives,…
The post Who is the new ‘Workday Consumer’? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.