Category: Customer Experience

Who’s it for?

What’s it for?

What change do you seek to make?

What’s the hard part?

If you could learn one skill that would help your project, what would it be?

How can you tell if it’s working?

Would it be easier if you had help?

Would it be easier to make an impact if you were willing to give up credit or control?

Does this project matter?

Is the journey worth it?

What are you afraid of?

Would they miss you if you stopped?

People always address now problems before they work on later problems.

Every time.

On one night in 2004, you might have had two choices. You could go out for a fancy dinner with friends, or you could buy one share of Google at their IPO. A couple of decades later, your dinner is forgotten but the shares are up many times.

Of course, some people did buy that stock. That’s not because they encountered an opportunity to save for their retirement 18 years later. It’s because they told themselves a story that people in their shoes sent money to the market that day. They turned a problem in the future (retirement) into a problem for the now (I’m a loser if I go out to this dinner instead).

Our story about the future is in the now, regardless of how far away the future is.

All we can do with the future is experience our story about it right now.

All problems are short-term problems if we tell ourselves the right story. But we usually don’t, because we discount the future significantly. A grilled cheese sandwich today is more important than two grilled cheese sandwiches next week. Unless we tell ourselves a present and urgent story about what it feels like to ignore the future.

Because sooner or later, we live in the present. A present filled with stories and cultural pressure and the urgencies we invent for ourselves.

Marketing tools and brand awareness are rapidly advancing to accommodate the progression of our tech-world. We are now constantly in the search for innovative, energetic new campaigns to impress customers and other competitive businesses alike. Experiential marketing to show off your brand is proving to be particularly impactful. Prestigious fashion house, Dolce&Gabbana, has even stepped…
The post Boutique Bliss: Dolce&Gabbana advancing immersive experiences appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

While we may all be grateful, we no longer live in a ‘digital only’ world, the digital experience has become core to how we interact with brands.
The number of digital products and services we use day-to-day has increased rapidly, with digital elements playing a part in almost every customer interaction. To maintain service levels and meet customer demands, customer service delivery must be designed with the digital experience at its core. Contact centers must become “digital-first.”
Read on for a sneak peek, or download it for free.

READ THE FULL WHITE PAPER:
Why Digital-First Contact Centers Remain Ahead of the Competition
(It’s 100% free, we promise.)

What does “Digital-First” mean in the contact center?
Where once phone, mail, and in-person support and resources were the pillars of a great customer experience, these channels are increasingly moving to the periphery. They are still important, but digital experience forms the core, and even in-person and voice interactions are supported by digital technology.
Digital-first doesn’t just refer to a selection of tools or ability to communicate through certain channels — it’s a strategy and philosophy.
It means updating and rebuilding all contact center systems — software, content, communications, reporting, analysis, and even culture — focusing on optimizing for digital use. All the stages and building blocks of the customer journey must be designed with flexibility, compatibility, and scalability in mind. Ideally, that means a single platform that can support communications and content delivery across every channel now and in the future.

TIP:
Has your contact center adopted call-back technology? If not, you’ll soon be in the minority. Learn more.

Why go “Digital-First”?
Customers want to be able to communicate with brands and organizations on every platform they use and move between them as and when it suits them.
This ‘trend’ isn’t going anywhere. NICE found that 90% of Gen Z use digital channels as their channel of choice, with only 10% choosing voice. More interesting still, nearly half of GenX (49%) prefer digital channels as their channel of choice. The other half prefer voice, but their numbers are diminishing.
While voice and in-person will certainly remain an important element for delivering great customer service, it’s clear that contact centers in the future must go “digital-first” to stay competitive.
Beyond the Transformation: Digital-First Customer Service
Implementing a new tech stack or unified Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform isn’t enough to call yourself a digital-first contact center. It’s about more than just the tools you use; it’s a completely different
approach. Going digital-first is a strategy to help organizations easily manage and navigate the rapid change the market forces on them.
As technology accelerates change in the business landscape, companies must become digital-first to keep up with customer expectations. Where customer service in the past was static, reactive, and efficiency-orientated, great customer service in the future must be dynamic, proactive, and convenience-focused.
How to Set Team Customer Service Goals

Proactive vs. Reactive Service
The entire customer service experience is based on the principle that the customer goes first. They are the ones who reach out with a problem or request, and the entirety of the customer support framework is based around responding to that in an efficient, timely manner. Even new tools like chatbots and knowledge bases rely on the customer taking the initiative.
A proactive customer support operation uses data from its entire array of channels — and relevant external, telemetry, product usage, profile, and historical transactional data — to anticipate when a customer may need support.
That might mean predicting the failure of a key component and suggesting a service check. It could be as simple as offering a customer a call-back when they encounter a complex problem. A customer experience where the company reaches out to you to solve your problem is worlds away from one that requires navigating endless web pages
and a long wait on hold.

READ THE FULL WHITE PAPER:
Why Digital-First Contact Centers Remain Ahead of the Competition
(It’s 100% free, we promise.)
The post Why Digital-First Contact Centers Remain Ahead of the Competition first appeared on Fonolo.

There are still pockets of our culture where a single individual can create and share a body of work that’s resonant and unique.

I’ve become hooked on a podcast called A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs.

I’m now a backer on Patreon. The show is at https://500songs.com/ [My suggestion is that you start with a song you know and love instead of beginning at the beginning.]

It’s simply extraordinary. Trivia connected to cultural commentary connected to the endless web of the pop music world. Hundreds of hours of insight and connection, all written, narrated and produced by a single person.

There’s a lot to be said about the power of teams to create art and magic. But there’s still room for individuals to do this as well.

[While we’re talking music, happy to suggest a piece of software that might change how you find and play it. Built by a team, not an individual, Roon is a game-changer.]

The non-networked world was driven by push. The merchant stocked goods and waited for you to come buy them. The manufacturer made things in advance and advertised so you’d go buy them. The cab waited by the corner hoping you’d come out and hail it. The door-to-door salesperson went door to door…

But the web amplifies pull instead. When you need something, you tell Google or Amazon or Lyft or Shopify and they bring it to you. The ratio of inventory to demand has shifted dramatically–instead of one encyclopedia in every single house that sits idly waiting for you to need it, there’s just one Wikipedia, available to be pulled by anyone, at will.

When we seek to make change, our instinct is to start pushing. But shifting to pull can create efficiencies that can’t be matched by mass promotion.

It’s one of the best metaphors for life, marketing, achievement, community and possibility in all of TV cartooning.

The coyote is always looking for a quick win. Because he doesn’t persist with a plan that builds over time, all of his outlandish stunts add up to nothing but frustration.

The coyote is obsessed with gaining at the expense of his enemy. As a result, he’s faced with either defeat or short-lived and ultimately empty victory.

The coyote is obviously immortal, but he’s always in pain. Either in the pain that comes from hitting a wall at 100 miles an hour, or the pain of knowing that yet another short-term plan came to no good.

The coyote challenges the laws of physics in the belief that he, and he alone is entitled to his own rules.

The coyote is happy to spend money on ludicrous devices that make promises he must know are empty, but instead of investing, he keeps chasing the gimmicks.

The coyote picked the wrong goal. Even though it’s clear he can’t succeed, he doesn’t switch, obsessing about sunk costs instead.

And even though he has experienced the frustration of the short-term selfish shortcut again and again, he never pauses to consider what would happen if he created something of value instead.

People often use the words to mean the same thing, but they’re different.

If an exterminator puts signs and banners in front of a fancy house when they’re inside killing rats, that’s promotion. But it’s not good marketing.

Marketing is creating the conditions for a story to spread so you can help people get to where they hope to go. Marketing is work that matters for people who care, a chance to create products and services that lead to change.

Promotion can support that. Or it might simply be a selfish hustle for attention.

If you have to interrupt, trick or coerce people to get the word out, you might be doing too much promotion and not enough marketing.

After interviewing over 70 customer success professionals, we created an easy-to-use spreadsheet to calculate customer health score and predict churn. We build a Health Score Template for customer success, sales and revenue operation managers so if you are interested you can get that and tell us what you think about it. The template is free for you. Right now, we are searching for people to test the product and give us feedback on what we can improve on. It’s a template view Can’t add pics to the post 🙁 Best Regards submitted by /u/andrewrymarenko [link] [comments]

Smart is no longer memorization. It’s not worth much.

Smart is no longer access to information. Everyone has that.

Smart is:

• Situational awareness

• Clarity of goals

• Good taste

• Empathy for others

• The ability to make decisions that further your goals

The good news is that smart is a choice, and smart is a skill.