August, 2017

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Differentiator Series, Part 5: Selling and Promoting the Contact Center

Contact Center Pipeline

Our final installment of the differentiator series is perhaps the most important for customer service leadership. Our topic is selling and promoting the contact center. This activity starts at the highest levels, and the objective is to help all key decision-makers understand how valuable a contact center is to a successful enterprise. Getting to this […].

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Guest Blog: The Do’s and Dont’s of Using Chatbots for Customer Service

ShepHyken

This week we feature an article by Reuben Yonatan who writes about how using chatbots for customer service properly can be a powerful customer service tool. Chatbots can be great for handling basic customer support functions, communicating with customers when a rep isn’t available and more. – Shep Hyken. Many small businesses are looking for ways to streamline communication.

Chatbots 367
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Secrets Revealed! How to Thrive in an Uncertain World

Beyond Philosophy

By nature, I’m an organized person. I like things clear and orderly, laid out in black and white. So, some years ago, as a new senior manager, I asked my boss to explain what my responsibilities would be after a company reorganization. I wanted to know, with absolute certainty. But my boss just looked at me and said, “Colin, in a senior position you need to deal with ambiguity.”.

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25 Call Center Leaders Share the Most Effective Ways to Boost Contact Center Efficiency

Callminer

Most call centers struggle with efficiency at one time or another. And because efficiency is directly tied to minimizing overhead costs in the call center, it’s a prominent challenge. Coping with unanticipated upticks in demand, staff turnover, and other common call center challenges only further complicate matters for managers working to create an efficient, productive, and effective team.

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Reimagine Your Communications With A Unified Platform

Cut complexity and boost efficiency while empowering your customers with Nextiva's unified communications platform. Nextiva streamlines workflows and centralizes customer interactions, all while simplifying business collaboration, increasing productivity, and reducing employee burnout.

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The 3 Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make with Customer Support

Myra Golden Media

My website was down for 37 hours this week. Not only was the website down, but we couldn’t send or receive emails. The outage happened because something went wrong in a scheduled site upgrade on Sunday night. My hosting company was to perform a simple process that I thought would take a few minutes. I reached out to my hosting company more than a dozen times during the 2-day outage, desperately trying to get the issue resolved and to check the status of the problem.

More Trending

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Hot Trends Impacting Contact Centers: A Sole Source of Data

Contact Center Pipeline

In our mid-year series discussing hot topics impacting contact centers, we have presented insights from industry experts on employee engagement, IoT-enabled service strategies, artificial intelligence and millennials. In this fifth and final post, LANtelligence CEO Martin Tracey presents his thoughts on why it’s critical to have a sole source of data in today’s dynamic, data-driven […].

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Which Customers Do You Want to Keep?

ShepHyken

There is an old joke in the dental world that a patient asked his dentist, “Which teeth should I floss?” The dentist answered, “Only the ones you want to keep.” Customer Service is the same. All customers are good customers. Okay, maybe not all. Every business has customers – or should I call them former customers – that companies choose not to do business with.

Sales 387
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Why Cash Is No Longer King!

Beyond Philosophy

A Canadian food chain Iq Food Co. is like most of the others. It has an assortment of food choices ranging from snacks to meals and even coffee and tea. But if you want to buy anything at their soon-to-be eleven locations, your money is no good there—quite literally. Iq Food Co. does not take cash. The restaurant’s founder Alan Bekerman said it was one less thing to think about when he made the decision back in February 2016.

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Top Customer Experience Podcasts: 50 Must-Listen Podcasts on Customer Experience from Industry Experts and Influencers

Callminer

We’ve rounded up 50 of the top customer experience podcasts so you can spend more time listening to industry thought leaders and less time searching.

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The Verint Experience Index: Retail

Reports of the death of in-store shopping have been greatly exaggerated. This year’s retail survey found that more than 60 percent of consumers start and end their journey by visiting a store. Retail customers value price above everything, but the importance of other factors varies for different brands. In-store shopping is valued highly by grocery and home improvement customers Technology retail customers place less importance on in-store experiences – for them it only ranks sixth Digital exper

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Do You Have Trouble De-escalating Angry Customers? If So, Try This.

Myra Golden Media

Four minutes into the call and I could see I was heading for trouble. The customer was a storyteller and a rambler. Plus, she was mad. She’d already spoken to an employee in the field and to one of my employees at the corporate office. Now the call had come to me. I got the call literally just as I was picking up my book to head to the park to enjoy a quick lunch and hopefully a couple of chapters of my novel.

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A Learner Centered Approach: Retaining Your Tenured Employees Through Client Transition

Call Center Weekly

By Jennifer Boston At the start of my contact center training career, I was propelled into an uncomfortable situation whose lessons haven proven invaluable in how I approach training new skills to a tenured staff. A long-term client unexpectedly shifted their customer service operations in-house, in response to the recession. After nearly a decade of being the key factor to a successful partnership, over 100 veteran employees were suddenly unsure of what came next.

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3 Mistakes Contact Centers Are Making That Turn Away Millennial Customers

Contact Center Pipeline

When it comes to brands, millennials are not lacking for options. The first generation raised on digital tools, the ability to research and choose among thousands of search results is second nature. This has fundamentally changed the nature of their relationships with businesses, as they now favor experience over function. The 1:1 relationship—the interactions that […].

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The Power of a Personal Handwritten Note

ShepHyken

There is a lot of power in a handwritten, personal note. This isn’t just about a thank you note to a customer, although those are important as well. This is also about the note of appreciation to someone who has done a great job or hit their goals. You get the idea. Anything you might want to congratulate them on. Ted Janusz is one of our amazing trainers at Shepard Presentations.

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Strategic CX: A Deep Dive into Voice of the Customer Insights for Clarity

Speaker: Nicholas Zeisler, CX Strategist & Fractional CXO

The first step in a successful Customer Experience endeavor (or for that matter, any business proposition) is to find out what’s wrong. If you can’t identify it, you can’t fix it! 💡 That’s where the Voice of the Customer (VoC) comes in. Today, far too many brands do VoC simply because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do; that’s what all their competitors do.

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What Type of Employee Are You? Room For Improvement?

Beyond Philosophy

How committed are you to your present employer? Are you wild about what you do or simply content in your position? Do you hate your job or are you ambivalent? It’s an important set of questions to consider. How you feel about where you work has a lot of influence on the job you are doing there. This concept becomes even more crucial when you become a manager and assess your team—especially as it pertains to how they work with or on behalf of customers.

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The Importance of Contact Center Efficiency and Customer Experience as Energy Pricing Faces Scrutiny

Callminer

With energy prices rising, the UK government recently announced an independent review into the total cost of electricity and factors that could be driving up the cost.

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Five Stats That Prove Your Agents Need Better Coaching

Aspect

Famed football coach Vince Lombardi once said, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” As a contact center leader saddled with huge responsibilities and challenges, you may know this better than most. But having the time to impart your knowledge and experience onto your agents is another story entirely. Nonetheless, you should never stop striving to provide your agents with all the coaching they need to stay engaged, productive and provide a superior c

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Mobile Self-service Modernizes Your WFM

CX Global Media

Effective Workforce Management (WFM) in contact centers seems to be fairly straight forward. That’s until you have to deal with all of the exceptions. But when agents use their mobile devices to help themselves with managing exceptions, your burden becomes a whole lot easier. Mobile Self-service Modernizes your WFM Click to Tweet. While it does take a lot of skill and experience to develop good forecasts and schedules, the most difficult aspect of WFM has always been managing all of the schedule

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SME Relationships: Proven Solutions for Seamless Collaboration and Success

Speaker: Tim Buteyn, President of ThinkingKap Learning Solutions

💢 Do you find yourself stuck in never-ending review cycles? Are you wondering if your Subject Matter Expert actually got that last review request? Are you having trouble trying to decipher impractical or conflicting feedback? 💢 If any of these scenarios sounds familiar, you may benefit from a crash course on managing SME relationships!

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The Straight Scoop on Contact Center Analytics

Contact Center Pipeline

Most contact centers know they need a more analytical approach to understanding the customer experience. In our 2017 Workforce Optimization Survey, a high percentage of centers indicated that analytics falls within the “Have but do not use effectively” category. We also see many centers evaluating analytics offerings while others place them on their wish lists. […].

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Guest Blog: How to Get Customer Obsession to Start at the Top

ShepHyken

This week we feature an article by Borge Hald who writes about the importance of being a customer obsessed company and how it is the key to success. We need to obsess about creating such an amazing customer experience that our customers will want to do business with us and nobody else. – Shep Hyken. In a recent letter to shareholders that went viral, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos talked about customer obsession and its criticality to remaining a Day 1 company.

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Exposed: How To Measure Your Customer’s Loyalty and CX

Beyond Philosophy

Many organizations measure their Customer Experience (CX) in the wrong way. Chances are, you are too. So, what is it? How are you inadvertently thwarting your efforts to improve your CX? It is how you measure it and it’s one of the fundamental failures of many CX programs. Measuring is a critical part of any effort to quantify progress (or failures) when you have a goal of improving your CX.

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What is Omnichannel Customer Engagement?

Callminer

Omnichannel customer engagement best practices and solutions empower companies to deliver consistent, personalized customer experiences.

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Contact Center Dialers Demystified

Dive into the realm of contact center dialers with our infographic! Explore the various types – Preview, Predictive, Automatic, and Progressive Dialers – and unravel their roles in boosting call center performance.

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How to Create The Perfect Cold Calling Script For Call Centers

Convoso

When was the last time you sat through a cold call? Probably was a very, very, very long time ago. With today’s advanced customer expectations, you will be lucky to even get someone to answer their phone. With so many other channels that customers prefer like social media, texting, email, and automation it has become increasingly harder to convince customers to answer calls from unknown and unfamiliar numbers.

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This One Word Unleashes Contact Center Peak Performance

CX Global Media

People, process, technology, reporting, culture, competition, morale, data, automation, self-service – which word matters most? In my 20+ years in the contact center industry, the past three years elevated this one word to utmost importance. This word is now more important than any other word. And if your supervisors don’t have it, your entire frontline staff will never reach peak performance.

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Hot Trends Impacting Contact Centers: IoT-enabled Service Strategies

Contact Center Pipeline

In our mid-year look at five“hot” topics that have been garnering much attention recently, our last post offered insights into why employee engagement is so critical to modern contact centers. Next on our list, and equally vital to contact centers, are the challenges brought about by the Internet of Things (IoT) and the increased complexity […].

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Pay Attention! Don’t Just Go Through the Motions!

ShepHyken

A friend of mine went to the airport rental car agency and had a chance to upgrade to a Tesla. He had never driven a Tesla so he was happy to pay the upcharge to have the experience. If you’ve ever rented a car at the airport, you typically are stopped at a gated exit where the car rental employee looks over the paperwork, checks your driver’s license and sends you on your way.

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The New GTM Playbook: 18 Ways to Future-Proof Your Sales Team

Longer sales cycles. Increasingly discerning buyers. More meetings. Intensifying competition. Economic uncertainty. Go-to-market teams of every size, in every industry, are grappling with these challenges firsthand. Thankfully, there’s an answer. We’ve developed an entirely new way for GTM leaders to identify and execute proven, data-driven strategies that drive revenue.

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Remarkable! What Invisible Influence Controls Your Behavior?

Beyond Philosophy

Why did you buy the shirt you are wearing today? What about the car you drive, how did you choose it? Why did you go with the financial advisor you did? If “because I felt like it” wasn’t the answer to each of these questions, you are missing the biggest reason that you did these things at all —and the reason you do almost anything for that matter. It isn’t your fault you got it wrong, however.

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Streamlining Contact Center Processes for More Effective Use of Human Resources

Callminer

Finding ways to streamline contact center processes is the best way to effectively increase efficiency and make better use of resources.

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Purposeful People Are More Loyal Customers and Employees

Customer Experience Matters

Temkin Group has labelled 2017 The Year of Purpose, so we have been examining the topic of purpose across many different angles. One of the areas we are interested in is the impact that a person’s level of purpose and meaning has on how they behave as an employee and customer. It turns out that it has a pretty significant impact in both of these areas.

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