Category: Customer Experience

What would you do if you had one day off each week? Would this make you more productive, healthier, and focused on things you want to do for your career, your family, or your side business? In the latest episode of CX Lore™, we talked with Charlotte Lockhart, a founder and managing director at the…
The post Is a 4-day week the future of work? An interview with Charlotte Lockhart appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

In 1993, when I was raising investment for one of the first internet companies, there weren’t any firms that specialized in this sort of thing. They were VCs from a different era, looking for the next Fedex or pharma company.

I pitched dozens of them, and the answer was consistent, “get back to us when this is irresistible and then of course we’ll say yes.”

The same thinking is applied to many new products, from vegan burgers to online services. None of them are perfect at first, just as none of the things we’re reliant on today began as perfect.

And yet, some folks went first. Some, like Jerry and Fred, started a VC fund that had record returns because they invested in internet companies that weren’t perfect (yet). And some consumers bought things from the local store when version .5 wasn’t quite ready yet.

If you want to leap forward, you’ll need to ship things before they’re perfect, mostly to people who want to buy them before they are.

The customer service climate is constantly evolving, which means your contact center’s operation must adapt to keep up.
Contact center technology is a key component of the way your business functions. From good old headsets to online chat functionality, social media posts, and cloud-based management systems, the contact center technology your company employs makes a big difference to customer satisfaction (CSat) scores and agent retention.
Industry Report: State of the Contact Center 2022
The Shift to Remote Work
Over the past couple of years, there has been a huge shift in the way contact centers do business. Because of the uncertainty that came with periodic lockdowns, many contact centers have moved partially or fully to remote work.
We’ve also seen a diversification of communication channels used by contact centers (often called omnichannel solutions), providing more ways for customers to interact with businesses.
And let’s not forget the boom in cloud-based technology adoption. Any technology that utilizes the cloud for functionality comes with added security, peace of mind, and scaling flexibility—generally with a cheaper price tag to boot.
With these trends in mind, we’ve compiled a list of our top contact center technology picks for 2022, to ensure your virtual contact center is staying ahead of the curve. Let’s dive in!
How to Foster Agent Engagement in a Hybrid Contact Center
Our Top 6 Contact Center Technology Picks for 2022
1. Visual IVR
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) has been a staple of contact center technology for decades and is better known to customers as a phone menu. A well-organized IVR system will help to improve your First Call Resolution rate, decrease queue time, and increase CSat scores as well.
Visual IVR is a more modern take on this classic tool. It’s designed to engage your digital users through your website or mobile app, and lets you set up menu options and questions so you can direct customers to the right channel. It’s feature-rich and allows you to customize your service to best fit your customer’s needs.
Best of all, it allows customers to schedule a call-back from a live agent during a time window of their choice. In other words, you can optimize the user experience and easily escalate online users to the voice channel with minimal risk of abandonment.
Learn More About Visual IVR
2. Call-Back Technology
Picture this: it’s a Monday morning after a weekend of your call center being closed. The queue is full to the brim with customers who were unable to call in over the last couple of days. Your agents are rushing through each call, letting their customer service level slip to meet the demands. This backlog causes agents to fall behind on their post-call paperwork, resulting in longer hours worked and burnout.
If the above sounds familiar, call-back technology may be a step in the right direction. This valuable tool improves and streamlines the customer journey while also giving contact center agents time back in their days to feel less rushed on calls and deliver the best customer support possible.
How does it work? It’s as simple as recording a call-back 0ffer on your phone menu for customers who prefer not to wait on hold. If they select this option, their line will be held in the queue, and when an agent picks up, it will automatically call the customer’s phone.
This freedom empowers the customer and helps ensure they’re in a better mood than they would’ve been had they been waiting in the queue for a long time. As a result, your CSat scores will improve, and you’ll experience better agent retention—a true win/win.

DID YOU KNOW?
On average, Fonolo Voice Call-Backs save customers over 77 years of hold time annually.

3. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Take the manual out of manual labor and start automating everyday tasks with help from AI.
Whether you want to streamline your hiring process and candidate selection or take online chatting off your agents’ shoulders, AI has something to offer every department. Plus, it can be utilized to monitor customer interactions and determine whether the experience was positive or negative for them based on the tone of their voice—the future is now!
This technology can be pricey, so it stands to reason medium- to large-sized businesses have the most to gain. However, if the budget is there, it can also streamline tasks for smaller call centers, too.
4. Workforce Management Systems (WFM)
With WFM technology, management can easily track agent performance. All the stats you need will be collected for you and delivered in a way that’s easy to analyze—you can keep a pulse on agent engagement and help agents set and reach performance goals.
WFM systems can also optimize your scheduling to ensure the right agents are working at the right times, a tool that’s especially helpful for remote call centers.
3 Things to Consider When Picking a Call Center Workforce Management Software
5. Video Chat Functionality
The last couple of years of lockdowns has revolutionized the world of video chatting. Adding in video chat interactions ups the connection between your agents and customers, potentially improving customer experience and satisfaction.
Video chats can also simplify tech support by providing agents the opportunity to see the products that need repairing. In short, this is a great option for any type of customer support, repair, or issue resolution department.
6. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM systems are designed to help you get to know your customer on a deeper level so you can provide a tailored service experience. Contact centers can use a CRM system to gather and store customer data in a way that’s helpful to their bottom line.
Salesforce is one of the most well-known CRM systems on the market, but there are plenty of others that could be a great fit for you, too. Make sure to look for mobile access, simple team adoption, customizable reports, and automatic contact syncing.
Don’t Just Follow Trends–Find the Tech that Suits Your Contact Center Best
What’s our number one tip about contact center technology? Do your research and find the tech that suits your specific needs. Before you dip into your budget, be sure you understand your needs and do comparative research about the different products on the market.
There’s so much to choose from but no one knows your contact center as well as you do. You’ve got this!The post Essential Technology for the Virtual Contact Center in 2022 first appeared on Fonolo.

Just because they’re easy to measure doesn’t mean they matter.

If they appear in round numbers and are easily compared to those from others, we’re tempted to compare.

But something that looks like a useful metric might not be.

If you’re working with people who say they care about measurement, it might not pay to persuade them to stop measuring.

It might make more sense to give them useful numbers to measure instead.

And that’s the paradox, because the closer possibility gets to reality, the more it engages with the unforgiving edges of the real world.

As we begin to imagine something better, it’s important to have some insulation, room to believe and a chance to fill in the missing pieces.

But then we have to allow the constraints of reality to intersect with our beautiful new conception.

And when that happens, it’s easy for all of our imaginings to simply evaporate.

But fragile doesn’t mean impossible. Possibility looms around every corner if we’re willing to bring resilience and iteration to the dance as well.

Yes, it might not work. But deciding that in advance undermines the value of the gift we intended to bring people.

This is a common sort of feedback/criticism/brainstorming, and it deserves a name.

Show up toward the end, when most of the work has been done and it’s almost time to ship…

Make a suggestion that would require changing a great deal of what’s been done. It might even be a good suggestion on its face, but it’s hard to tell…

Contribute your suggestion without having built a body of work, without evidence of significant expertise and without being willing to take responsibility for what happens next.

It’s a form of yelling from the bleachers.

The fact that your idea is fresh or innovative doesn’t change the role of Resistance. This sort of suggestion is a great place to hide. You’re helping, aren’t you? And if they ignore you, well, that’s on them.

The grandstander wants to be part of things, but isn’t showing up to do the hard part.

This might be the guest who shows up half an hour before dinner and suggests you change the menu.

Or the publicist that wants to weigh in on the product’s design a week before launch.

Or the good friend who wonders out loud if you should marry him, right after your four-year relationship turns into an engagement.

The alternative is to get out of the bleachers and into the field. Do the training. Show your work. Engage early. Own the outcomes.

We need that more than ever.

submitted by /u/inqoob-Constructor [link] [comments]

Krispy Kreme grew to become a doughnut behemoth in the US. The formula was simple: Scarce supply, high short-term taste satisfaction, and a dozen priced almost the same as just four.

As a result, most people bought a dozen. But few could eat a dozen, and you can’t really save them, so you realized that sharing a warm doughnut was the way to go.

Carmine’s restaurant in New York was the hot ticket for decades. One reason was that the only way to get a reservation was to come with five other people. So you needed to talk about it.

I’ve learned in sharing galleys of The Carbon Almanac that sending two is far more useful and beneficial than sending one. Because when someone gets two, they immediately decide to share the other one. Organizing around ‘please share’ is a choice.

We’re building a Wall of Fame on our website to celebrate companies that care enough about our future to share copies of the Almanac when it comes out. Small companies can easily find a good use for five or ten copies, and we’ve made it easy and cost-effective to pre-order. The form is to sign up is here. All participants get a link back to their site and a chance to make an impact in the world.

Please share with someone who trusts you.

ALSO! We’re inviting you to join our worldwide group of volunteers as we prepare to launch the Almanac in June. Our launch team is forming now, and it’s a chance to be part of something and make a difference. Please check out this page for the details. Thank you.

As inflation hits, good CX is paramount for consumer businesses. Our research* shows that 49% of people already say the increasing cost of living is impacting them or making them concerned. Across the board shoppers are reconsidering their discretionary spending and where they can make savings.  Brands with a poor record on customer experience are likely to…
The post Trust is your most important weapon to fight inflation appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

The paradox of most tightly-knit communities is that they have an internal culture.

And that culture often makes it difficult for a new person to join. It’s hard to have insiders if you don’t have outsiders. This is true for guilds of copy editors, fans of anime or branches of science.

The key transition point for any cause or tribe or movement that seeks to grow is to shift from an insular desire to keep things as they are to a willingness–or better, a desire–to water things down by getting bigger.

It’s hard to have it both ways.