January, 2021

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Unexpected Lessons from the 2020 Contact Center

Contact Center Pipeline

About a year ago, I tried something that we would all agree now was a bit foolish: predict what the 2020 contact center would look like. Before the COVID-19 pandemic sent agents home on a massive scale, before economic disruption reinforced the need for consistent, digitally enabled customer experiences (CX), I outlined several ongoing trends […].

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What is Customer Perception of Service?

Fonolo

Customer perception of service is a key component of customer perception. How well you service and support your customers will distinctly impact how your customers feel about your brand, product, or service. How to Improve Customer Perception of Your Brand. That said, it’s important to know the difference between customer perception of service, general customer perceptions, and customer satisfaction.

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The Light At The End of The Tunnel: Reimagine Your Customer Experience

Beyond Philosophy

It is not often in life that you get the opportunity to reset things. However, as the COVID-19 vaccine rolls out, we have a chance that is, dare I say, unprecedented to reimagine Customer Experience. We have been through a shocking year of change. Now, we can decide what parts of the change we want to keep to respond to what customers want now. We’ve been doing some work with one of our clients recently who will be doing some research.

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Shep’s 2021 Top 10 Business Predictions

ShepHyken

Every year I write my customer service and customer experience (CX) predictions in my Forbes.com column. This year, I thought I would share a brief version of them with our Shepard Letter subscribers. So, here are my Top 10 Predictions for 2021: Customers continue to get smarter. This has led to my list of predictions for several years. Our customers keep getting smarter about customer service and experience.

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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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Regain control of a conversation with a customer using the jump rope technique

Myra Golden Media

Continue the training with me? Join me at De-escalation Academy. This tip is from my De-escalation Academy. In De-escalation Academy, your employees go from feeling overwhelmed and powerless when they have to give customers bad news, to feeling confident, firm, and in-control as they bring down the temperature in interactions and guide customers to next steps.

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25 Things Chief Compliance Officers Want Every Contact Center Agent to Know

Callminer

See how maintaining contact center compliance requires cooperation between CCOs, contact center agents and an entire organization.

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McDonald’s Hot Coffee Case and the Customer Experience

Steve DiGioia

We all know that the coffee McDonald’s sells is too hot to drink when served. If you put it to your lips, you’ll most likely receive a burn that will be far worse than anything most people have ever encountered. So why do they make their coffee so hot? And how does this affect the customer experience? By now you must have heard about the famous “McDonald’s Hot Coffee Case”.

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The One Thing to Improve Your Customer Experience in 2021

Beyond Philosophy

Many organizations want a silver-bullet solution for Customer Experience , one quick thing they can do that will fix everything. However, there isn’t one for Customer Experience. It takes constant attention and small, deliberate changes to improve Customer Experience. When faced with this expectation from my clients, I think of what Prime Minister Winston Churchill told his cabinet after the election: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” People read books and

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Small Improvements in Customer Service Create Big Wins

ShepHyken

Little successes added together make for large success down the road. Small successes add up. To put it in baseball terms, you don’t need to hit a home run every time it’s your turn at bat. So, here’s the question to consider: What small change will enhance the experience for the customer, even if it is just by 1%? My friend and client, Jason Bradshaw of Volkswagen in Australia, was tasked with improving the customer experience for the VW dealerships.

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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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4 Things Chat Agents Can Do to Move Chat Interactions Along Faster

Myra Golden Media

Here are four things you can do to move your chat interactions along faster. One. Check for understanding early on and as often as it takes. Don’t assume you understand what the customer is saying. Just ask the customer what they mean. Like this: “You’re asking me how your employees can add an avatar to their eLearning profile, correct?

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Celebrating Tony Hsieh's Contribution to CX

CX Accelerator

by Jeremy Watkin and Community. The all-too-sudden and tragic passing of former Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh has sent a ripple through the business world, and the customer experience (CX) community is no exception. In the past, I’ve often chuckled upon reading about Zappos in a book or hearing the name mentioned in a keynote address as a model for customer-centricity.

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International Contact Centre Operations Tips & Best Practices

Callminer

Learn how international contact centres can approach agent management optimisation, procedural improvements and more.

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What Does Management Want From You?

Steve DiGioia

Safety, security, and peace of mind. Nice calming words they are. They come with little worries and little stress. Every employee wants this. But what does management want from you? For many in the customer service industry, there is little room for advancement and few opportunities to make “change” – a change that is meaningful, impactful, and which enhances the customer experience.

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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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Vital for 2021 – Digital Nudging Will Revolutionize Your CX

Beyond Philosophy

As we all interact more online than we ever have before, digital experiences are becoming an essential part of your CX. Like a physical experience, digital experiences should center around customers and focus on what they want so you can get what you want, customer-driven growth. However, there is also nothing wrong with giving people a little Digital Nudge in the right direction.

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5 Top Customer Service Articles For the Week of January 25, 2021

ShepHyken

Each week I read a number of customer service and customer experience articles from various resources. Here are my top five picks from last week. I have added my comment about each article and would like to hear what you think too. “I Wish the CEO Would Try and Open This F@#!* Package” by Chip Bell. (Real Leaders) The title of this story is a line we use at my house when a product or service is unusually challenging.

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How to Use Psychological Priming to Get Customers to Accept Your Word As Final

Myra Golden Media

Some of you know my undergrad degree is in Psychology. I taught college psych several years before jumping into the customer service space. I apply psychological principles to all my work in de-escalation and call control. In last week’s super-fantastic 4-day De-escalation Academy , I taught my students how to use psychology to get angry customers to back down and accept their word as final.

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The New World for Contact Centers May Be Where We Were Already Headed

Contact Center Pipeline

2020 was nothing short of challenging for businesses. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, we all scrambled to adjust to the new state of the world. Virtually overnight, hundreds of thousands of agents transitioned to working remotely and the approach, management and infrastructure of contact centers were completely restructured. In the months following, we […].

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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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International Contact Centre Operations Tips & Best Practices

Callminer

Running a contact centre can be difficult, especially when your call centre operates in one geographic region while providing services to another. International contact centres face many of the same obstacles as domestic contact centres, but they must also overcome language and location-related barriers to function properly. With the added burden of soaring industry-wide turnover rates, leaders of international call centres must find new ways to keep operations under control while also keeping t

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Here’s 2 Sure-Fire Tactics That Have Never Let Me Down – Tip #25

Steve DiGioia

Most people have a few go-to strategies that they follow during times of need. They’re comforted knowing they have a tried-and-true method that works for them and have tactics that have never let them down. I’m no different. Experience has shown us the way and we are better off because of it. So, what tactics work for you? Oh, you don’t want to give up your secrets.

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This is the One Thing to Improve Your Customer Experience in 2021

Beyond Philosophy

We recently spoke to Customer Experience experts who shared an interesting insight. They all say they wish people understood that there was no one thing to do, no silver-bullet-solution for Customer Experience. We couldn’t agree more. We believe that the best way to improve Customer Experiences is to do a lot of little things that add up to significant improvements.

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Guest Post: How to Nail Automated Customer Service Email Writing

ShepHyken

This week we feature an article from Jessica Fender , head of the content team at Alltopreviews.com. Sh e provides tips and examples of how to improve the customer experience with automated support emails. Email automation is a way to keep your customers happy. With automation, you improve the quality of communication and keep customers updated in a timely manner.

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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 De-escalate in Chat and Email

Myra Golden Media

We kicked off De-escalation Academy yesterday, and a student asked a question that I think is important for us to discuss here. His question was: “Our team is working 99% by email, will we able to apply everything that we learn here and translate it into a purely written environment? Any advice is appreciated.” Customers escalate in chat and email interactions intensely!

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Leading with Empathy: Demonstrate Understanding, Care and Compassion for Customers and Employees

Contact Center Pipeline

Everyone could use a little more empathy these days. The desire to feel heard and understood is a basic human need, and one that has a proven impact for companies. Numerous studies have linked empathy in the workplace to increased revenue and higher employee and customer satisfaction. It’s no surprise then that the demand for […].

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25 Experts Reveal How Companies Can Use Omnichannel Technology to Improve Customer Service

Callminer

Read this article to learn how omnichannel technology can enhance customer service.

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Sometimes You Get the Hiring Right – Tip #26

Steve DiGioia

Yesterday my wife and I did a little shopping after work and stopped into our local Eddie Bauer clothing store. We were greeted by a mature woman with the biggest smile who showed a sincere interest in helping me find the exact pair of pants I wanted. With patience, poise, and grace, she asked the right “ qualifying questions ” to determine my needs, wants, and desires.

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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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The Most Significant Things We Learned in 2020

Beyond Philosophy

We are looking at ringing in 2021 with pleasure. How about you? Chances are you are ready to call this year last year, too. Although this year has been anything but usual, we typically look back at this time of year to review what we have learned. So, for better or worse, we shall do that for 2020 as well. The pandemic has presented an opportunity to participate in a forced-perspective taking exercise for all of us.

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An Empowerment Lesson From the Ritz-Carlton

ShepHyken

If you’ve been following my work, you know I’m a huge fan of the Ritz-Carlton. I was recently on a Zoom presentation with Horst Schulze , first president and co-founder of the Ritz-Carlton chain. When Horst speaks, I listen and take lots of notes. One of the questions he was asked had to do with empowerment, specifically about the $2,000 the Ladies and Gentlemen – what Ritz-Carlton calls its employees – are allowed to spend to ensure a guest has a great experience.

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8 Simple Ways to Improve Agent Performance in the Call Center

Fonolo

Ready to level up your call center team this year? Improving agent performance can seem overwhelming at first, and you may find yourself wondering, “Where to start?” Don’t fret — these eight simple methods are all you need. With some hard work and a little luck, your team will be reaching new heights of operational efficiency ! Set your KPIs. You can’t change what you don’t measure.