Category: Customer Experience

The need states Content is about fulfilling needs. I don’t just mean need fulfilment in the form of a purchase. Along the decision journey towards purchase, the customer will experience a variety of need states that lead them from touchpoint to touchpoint along the path to fulfilment.   Need states undulate through a spectrum of emotions:…
The post Path to Purchase: Is your content delivering the best customer experience? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

In 2019, Merriam Webster finally accepted the term ‘influencer’ into its dictionary. But influencer culture had changed the way brands connect with consumers long before that. Major social media stars have long since graduated from the beauty and mum bloggers of the 2010s, to the Instagram megastars of today.  However, as quickly as influencers rose…
The post Social media influencers’ marketing power is declining: what are brands’ next steps? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

If you compare a Starbucks of ten years ago to a current one, they’re virtually the same. Compare this to the originals in Seattle, and the difference is startling.

The same goes for the design of a typical McDonald’s.

Apple launched the Mac with about a dozen full-time people working on its development. Today, they have more than a thousand times as many engineers and they haven’t launched a groundbreaking product in a while.

The same goes for Google. And Slack.

It’s not just famous big brands. Just about every organization hits a point where the pace of innovation slows as scale increases.

This happens for a number of reasons, and there are two ways to deal with them.

Technical debt is the result of shortcuts taken to get things to work right now. As a result of these shortcuts, the software (or hardware) isn’t easily expandable for future needs.

Handshake overhead is the result of the simple law of more people. n*(n – 1)/2. Two people need one handshake to be introduced. On the other hand, 9 people need 36 handshakes. More people involve more meetings, more approvals, more coordination.

Customer commitments are an asset but also a brake on innovation. The customers you already have didn’t necessarily sign up for you to change things.

Partner preferences are similar to customer commitments. The partners you work with have their own objectives and pace, the easiest common denominator is ‘slower.’

Wall Street’s fear is common, but fading a bit. This is the instinct that many institutional investors have to avoid the unknown. “The stock is going up, don’t blow it.”

Managerial anxiety is what happens when an operating bureaucracy comes to replace daring leadership. People get promoted because they’re good at their jobs, and innovation isn’t an opportunity, it’s a threat.

So, what to do? Ignoring everything above isn’t going to work. Tasking your people to burn all candles at both ends and to change their approach, while also violating the laws of institutional physics is simply not going to work. You’ll hit the wall. Every time.

There are two useful options:

Boring as a strategy is the approach that Apple and a large number of famous brands have taken. As you cross the chasm, the bulk of your new customers don’t want innovation at all. They want promises kept, a lack of surprises and reasonable prices and efficiency. Shipping your improvements on a regular schedule and bringing predictability to your offering allows you to reach more people and make a bigger impact. Small innovations allow an organization to avoid falling too far behind innovative competitors, and it can take decades before the gap is big enough to matter. And then you become Yahoo. Or Chrysler. Or Carvel.

Structural bankruptcy is a daring alternative. Create a skunkworks. Refactor your code from scratch. Spin off the cash cow and assemble a team to start something new from scratch. The new things probably won’t work at first, but if you do enough of them, your experience and persistence will pay off.

I’ve faced these choices many times in my career, and neither choice is easy or obvious, but the choice itself shouldn’t be ignored. If you simply hope for the best of both worlds, you’re likely to be frustrated at the same time you disappoint the people you work with and serve.

The CXM team are glad to announce that we will be hosting an innovative, exciting new webinar in partnership with Greene King, Ipsos and Reputation. This dynamic virtual event will explore the importance of Online Reputation Management and Customer Experience strategies.   On June 21st, 2pm BST, you will have the chance to hear these insightful…
The post Join a conversation on winning CX strategies with Reputation, Greene King, and Ipsos appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

Setting goals with your contact center agents will support your most important profit driver: your customer base.
Finance-focused CFO might see customer service as separate from the company’s financial goals. But that’s not true: they’re connected.
This article will cover the importance of customer service goals and how it’s vital to include agents in the strategy and some examples.
Why Team Customer Service Goals Important are — and Why Call Center Agents Need to Be Involved
Here’s the thing: you can’t improve customer satisfaction without customer service goals.
And you can’t meet call center goals without your customer service team (call center agents). Here are a few reasons why customer service goals are vital for your contact center.
Agent Engagement and Motivation
You don’t need us to tell you that call centers have the highest turnover rates. But what if we told you that customer service goals engage agents more than lunchtime pizza or the odd work event?
How to Effectively Set Goals with Your Call Center Team

Employees need to feel like they’re making a difference and working towards something tangible to feel accomplished. Job satisfaction plummets without that sense of accomplishment, and you’re left scrambling for new hires.
Your agents should have clear, measurable customer service goals to work towards something grander than the daily calls.
Contact Center Performance:
Do you regularly measure KPIs? Keep track of customer satisfaction and measure revenue over time? These are a couple of tools that call center leaders use to measure performance. But contact center performance is directly linked to customer satisfaction — and you can’t sustain that without customer service goals.
Customer Loyalty and Retention
Customer service goals include expanding your reach. However, they should also focus on customer retention. Why? Because retaining customers by an extra 5% improves profits by 25%-95%. It’s easier to sell a new product to someone who has already purchased from you and trusts your brand – customer service goals help you maximize that.
PS: If you want to retain more customers, give them autonomy in their customer experience with Fonolo’s Voice Call-Backs!

FACT:
Companies that heighten customer retention by 5% can improve profits by 25%-95%.

Example of a Successful Company with Customer Service Goals
Don’t just take our word for it. Thousands of companies worldwide experience excellent publicity, improved profits, and loyal customers through customer service goals.
Let’s look at one noteworthy example: the Ritz-Carlton.
Can you think of a better customer experience than the Ritz? That’s because they aim for a 5-star customer service experience every time. The Ritz propels their customer service goals by giving employees autonomy to personalize and enlighten every customer experience with the $2,000 rule.
See the Winners of Fonolo’s 2022 CX Excellence Awards

This means every staff member has the clearance to spend $2,000 on a guest to encourage them to come back to the Ritz every time.
But the $2,000 isn’t the important part. The idea is to give your agents enough autonomy to find ways to meet customer service goals.
How to Include Contact Center Agents in Customer Service Goals
You can have as many customer service goals as you’d like for your call center. But if you don’t include your agents in the plan, you’ll never reach them. Here are a few ways to involve your agents when setting a goal for your call center.
1. Garner employee feedback on:

Biggest barriers to customer service
Common customer complaints
Things that impress customers

2. Discuss customer service goals at:

Team meetings
Individual agent meetings
Performance reviews
Public displays in the call center

3. Review customer service goals as a team
Have your contact center agents review and provide feedback on the goals.
4. Makes sure your goals are S.M.A.R.T.
Ensure proposed customer service goals are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) and check with your agents.

TIP:
The best technology adapts to your goals. Fonolo’s Visual IVR is 100% customizable — you can tailor call-back times to your business hours and switch languages based on your customer base.

Examples of Strong Customer Service Goals for Call Center Agents
Ready to put your customer service strategy into actionable goals? Check out these excellent goal examples to get you started with some proposed strategies.
Improve FCR for all messaging inquiries by 50% by the end of December 2022

Regularly measure KPIs
Assess workforce management to ensure experienced team members are available during peak times

Reduce abandonment rate by 30% for all agents by January 2023

Hire more staff to meet peak volumes
Update technology and provide more communication channels with Fonolo’s Visual IVR
Retain more agents to meet call volumes through flex work and benefits

Improve net promoter score (NPS) by 20% by June 2023

Give experienced agents the authority to grant solutions that may require extra time for approval.
Remind agents of the importance of tone of voice and host more training sessions

 The post How to Set Team Customer Service Goals first appeared on Fonolo.

The second edition of the Turkey Customer Experience Awards, organised by Awards International, announced the winners for this year’s programme.  It was a successful year for leading companies in Turkey, with the best of the best being shortlisted for the finals. Top companies and organisations from Turkey have participated in this premium programme, competing for…
The post Winners announced for Turkey CXA’22: setting the example for all appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

For six years, if you wanted an electric car, you’d need to pay extra. It cost more than the regular kind.

Of course, if you decided to buy one, you weren’t paying extra. You were buying sustainability, community awareness, cachet, status, safety, quiet and the feeling of being an early adopter.

People never pay extra.

They buy something they want at a price that feels fair to them.

In the next few years, electric cars are actually going to be cheaper than their more-polluting brethren. And that means that anyone who wants to charge a premium is going to have to offer quality, service, design and a feeling that it’s worth whatever is being charged.

It’s very difficult to make a living selling something that doesn’t, by some apparent measure, cost extra.

The hard work is in keeping the promise that your extra isn’t extra at all.

TLDR: Want to make a career switch. For the last 5yrs have been working mainly around onboarding Marketing team to Marketing Technology and providing consulting to help them create automated customer Journeys in tools like (SFMC, Marketo) and helping them understand Data structures between CRM and analytics etc. I’ve been like a middle person who join the gaps for the marketing and IT teams. I want to grow into the person who designs the omni-chanel customer journey/experience based on insights (analytics/best practice/brand goal). Which is the best customer experience course/experience which will show I have what it takes to make this career move? (CXPA/Forrester/ CX University /anything else) I will be on a sabbatical for 6 months, I want to know how I should best utilise this time ( study or find job in customer experience – What skills do I need?) Original Post : I want to make a career switch. I have an MBA in Marketing so I have some idea about Marketing Basics, but my job for the last 5yrs has been mainly around onboarding Marketing team to Marketing Technology and providing consulting to help them create automated customer Journeys in tools like (SFMC, Marketo) and helping them understand Data structures between CRM and analytics etc. I’ve been like a middle person who join the gaps for the marketing teams. I am technically sound (both technologically API, HTML, Data models etc. and marketing – Brand Plans, Channel-mix etc.), but my interest lies in customer experience. As Digital Marketing grew, I felt I needed to know technology so that I can make the most of it as a marketer. Now I have enough knowledge about Email/Web/CRM/Social. It’s a growing field so I’ll have to keep growing from tech perspective, but I really really need to learn more from the customer experience side. ( According to me Marketing and Customer Experience are 70% same thing- I might be wrong please correct me) I want to help businesses handle customers better and bring in more customer loyalty. (Throught better customer experience and more targeted marketing campaigns ). I want to drive customer excellence. I will be on a sabbatical for 6 months (will be focusing on my health and marriage and career direction), I want to know how I should best utilise this time. Currently, I work for a consulting firm so I’m flagged as a MarTech consultant. I cannot move departments at the moment, so I’ll be quitting in a few months anyway. submitted by /u/Realistic-Doughnut55 [link] [comments]

Over the past months, we have been discovering books that might bring us some fresh ideas on becoming an even more connected, efficient, and aligned team. Out of the many publications we dwelled on, this has been whittled down to the top five books that each of us should read to create a joint vision…
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The concept of the metaverse is still nascent. However, it harbours immense potential for the fashion industry in this digital revolution. Moreover, the freedom and flexibility of WEB3 allows fashion vendors of any size to break into the virtual world and take advantage of its vast opportunities.   Metaverse has as much to offer to small…
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