February, 2019

article thumbnail

A Roadmap to Success with Speech Analytics

8x8

Whether you’re heading to a new restaurant on the other side of town or taking a road trip across the country, a GPS helps get you there. Gone are the days of combing through maps, taking notes and picking what you think is the best route—only to be blindsided by traffic delays and detours. But a GPS needs precise guidance before starting out. You wouldn’t want to get halfway to Springfield, Missouri when you intended to go to Springfield, Massachusetts.

article thumbnail

Improving Contact Center Operations: Happiness All Around to a “T”

Contact Center Pipeline

The contact center environment can be hectic—you probably have don’t have much time or patience for a third-party outsourcer telling you how to “transform” your call center operations. Right? You’re thinking: “Give me a break. I’m hard-pressed just to staff the third shift, much less transform it.” I get it, having run brick-and-mortar call centers […].

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Customer Experience ROI: How You Prove You Understand Customer Experience Strategy

Beyond Philosophy

Customer Experience as an industry is at a crossroads. As I have written before , the results that we should be seeing are not there. It’s time to put up or shut up. If we as an industry do not turn it around, we might see our budgets and headcounts reassigned somewhere else. In our recent podcast, we had a guest Bob Thompson, CEO of Customer Think Corp., an independent research and publishing firm focused on customer-centric business management and the founder and editor-in-chief of CustomerTh

article thumbnail

Five Ways to Say Thank You to Your Customers

ShepHyken

Valentine’s Day is tomorrow. This is the day where we send our spouses, partners, and loved ones a gift. Often it is out of obligation. I have plenty of friends who tell me if they don’t get their spouse some flowers and a card, they will pay for it. So we feel obligated to express our love and appreciation to those close to us. I’ve written several articles about this before, and my favorite one is called The Valentine Obligation.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

Reality Check: Are your customers channels or people?

CX Global Media

I’m cursed. Are you? For years I fell into a trap that I see many in the contact center industry fall in to. It’s the trap of managing workflow for efficiency. I need to be careful not to manage queues of interactions because that’s how it’s always been done. My reality check is to remember, those are people in queue. Not efficiency metrics or channels to be managed.

More Trending

article thumbnail

Contact Center CX: Next Issue Avoidance

CX Accelerator

Last week, Brittany Naylor (Vice President of Customer Support for Service Direct) queued up a wonderful topic in our CX Accelerator slack channel. It was "Next Issue Avoidance" and how support leaders are bringing this critical concept to life. For those not familiar, the idea of "Next Issue Avoidance" was introduced as part of "The Effortless Experience " in 2011.

article thumbnail

Hear from the Experts How AI Drives Better Customer Experiences

Callminer

Using artificial intelligence to evaluate and understand past contact center conversations shows businesses what to expect and gives them the opportunity to be proactive in the future.

article thumbnail

The Framework You Need to Survive in Retail

Beyond Philosophy

Organizations cannot afford to be operationally driven. A Customer Experience focus is a necessity of survival in today’s hyper-competitive and disrupted retail market. That said, not every organization realizes this fact yet, which I find disappointing. I was talking to the C-Suite of a retailer (who shall remain nameless) about Customer Experience.

Benchmark 356
article thumbnail

Make Your Company’s Name Your Brand Promise

ShepHyken

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure and honor of being the keynote presentation for River Valley Bank, soon to be Incredible Bank , as they merge the names of their brick-and-mortar banks and their online bank. I love that word, incredible , almost as much as my favorite word, amazing. If someone told you the customer service at a bank was incredible, you would only think positive things.

Banking 284
article thumbnail

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

article thumbnail

Tear Apart and Put Together Your New Contact Center

CX Global Media

Flexibility is often an innocently misunderstood element in the contact center technology evaluation criteria. Afterall, unless you’re evaluating and implementing a wide-array of contact center technology as part of your everyday job, it’s just impossible to keep up with. But you can’t ignore this issue, or else you’ll be tearing apart and ripping out your new technology as quickly as you’ve put it in.

article thumbnail

6 Reasons Why You’re a Rookie At De-escalating

Myra Golden Media

Inflammatory words and an aggressive tone heat up an interaction like an oven heats up a room. The five biggest mistakes I see customer service professionals make when talking to upset customers are: Aggressive tone – A direct or authoritative tone will quickly lead to an escalation in aggression or to a supervisor. Making threats – Spitting off, “Calm down or I can’t help you” will assuredly not make a customer calm down.

article thumbnail

The 5 Things You Need to Know About Great Service

Steve DiGioia

While celebrating my daughter’s 20th birthday at a local steak restaurant – yes, the chicken finger & fries meals are a thing of the past, I was reminded that great service and experience doesn’t happen by accident. There must be a series of steps planned for and actions taken to allow for great service. Here is my list of 5 things you need to know about great service.

Sales 212
article thumbnail

How Contact Center Agent Self-Assessment Improves Results

Callminer

Contact centers are just looking for love. They want their customers to adore them, striving to provide the best customer experience so these customers will return month after month.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

How To Measure Authentic Customer Emotions In Real Time

Beyond Philosophy

There is a big challenge when measuring customer emotions as you are asking customers how they felt in an experience, as this is done retrospectively, a while after they had the experience. Many times, Customers don’t remember how they felt or, for several reasons, they don’t want to tell you. Using technology, you can now measure customer’s emotions in real time!

article thumbnail

Core Values are Decision Filters

ShepHyken

I’m honored to be the keynote speaker later this year at Office Pride , a franchisor of commercial cleaning service companies. All of the franchisees will be attending their annual meeting to network and learn about the latest and greatest opportunities happening in their industry. My job is to talk to them about customer service. As part of my homework, Todd Hopkins, their CEO, shared the Office Pride Culture book.

article thumbnail

12 Ways To Show Some Love To Supervisors

CX Global Media

80% of contact center agents leave because of their relationship with their immediate supervisor. But with all relationships, it’s much better to give first – so that you shall receive. Follow these tips for building a better relationship with your Supervisor. She’ll likely love you for it! Your Supervisor today is like that elementary school teacher that you are still in touch with and will most likely be in touch with for the rest of your life.

Coaching 220
article thumbnail

The One Word That Makes Customers Accept Your Word As Final

Myra Golden Media

If you say “because” when you’re telling a customer something, you’ll significantly increase the chance that they’ll accept your word as final. Here’s Why Saying “Because” Works. Research by psychologist Ellen Langer found that saying “because,” and then tossing out a reason as insignificant as a discarded rubber band, got people to agree.

article thumbnail

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!

article thumbnail

Attrition Analysis & The Psychology of Disengagement

Call Center Weekly

Ron Rhodes Without a doubt, my most perplexing and profound observation from years of leading large organizations is a behavioral complex I refer to as the psychology of disengagement. In the back office BPO and contact center business, competition for labor is heavy and aggressive. The work can be repetitive, mundane, offering considerable risk to workforce stability.

Finance 185
article thumbnail

10 Valentine Blogs That Show Your Call Center Agents You Appreciate Them

Callminer

A call center employees job is not easy. But through technology, training and supportive management, employee engagement can thrive leading to a better customer experience.

article thumbnail

How Successful Retailers Win in Endless Disruption

Beyond Philosophy

Organizations do not have the luxury of focusing solely on operations these days. Over the past decade, retail as an industry has changed. To survive, retailers must put the customer at the center of everything they do. That said, not everyone believes it yet. <!–more–> Not so long ago, I was having a conversation in the C-Suite of a company about Customer Experience.

article thumbnail

Guest Blog: How One Experience Started My CX Passion

ShepHyken

This week we feature an article by Stacy Sherman who reminds us that brands must not compete on price alone and shares a great story to illustrate this point from Stacy’s Pita Chips. – Shep Hyken. My obsession for Customer Experience (CX) started when I received a package in the mail on a random afternoon. I was not anticipating the delivery of a large box with a label that said, “ To Stacy, From Stacy.

B2C 268
article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

Convoso Client success story: VSA

Convoso

VSA searched for a single contact center platform that would eliminate the inefficiencies created by using various CRM systems and dialer capabilities not at all suited for a unique client this company needed to support. With the existing systems, VSA would have been developing manual and time-consuming work-around processes.

CRM 175
article thumbnail

Two Factors Make It Easy for Contact Center Chat

CX Global Media

The contact center industry can seem very fragmented at times. One thing that we must remember is there are new contact centers being opened all of the time, and in a wide range of industries. When considering live chat the same thing is true. We have some new to supporting the chat channel and some experienced at chat. But success in both cases hinges on two key factors.

article thumbnail

Are You Ready, Willing and Able for Digital Access?

Contact Center Pipeline

Ready, willing and able is a self-explanatory idiom that describes an enthusiastic, well-prepared and eager response to change. Changes are abundant as we continue to move from 20th century approaches to the 21st in contact center management, infrastructure and technology. All indicators are contact centers must get serious about digital readiness that supports access to […].

article thumbnail

7 Things Contact Center Agents Know To Be Happy In Their Job

Callminer

Not every contact center is set up to make it easy to be a true problem solver and provider of excellent customer service.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

How to Create A Financial Times Award-Winning Consultancy from Scratch

Beyond Philosophy

Beyond Philosophy won an award named one of the Best Management Consultancy Firms in the UK, by the Financial Times (FT). This was voted on by clients and peers, we couldn’t be more honored or proud. This bonus episode podcast explores how you can take your idea and turn it into an Financial Times Award-Winning consultancy, too. We share our 10-Step Plan for Success and ask our listeners, what would you do if you weren’t afraid?

article thumbnail

Doing the Right Thing: A Habit Worth Mastering

ShepHyken

When it comes to taking care of customers, sometimes people go a little further than expected. When asked why, they often say, “It was the right thing to do.” There’s no incentive other than the desire to care for someone else. In a sense, that is what customer service is about. While we may be paid to do a job, sometimes doing something that is not required – and therefore not expected – is what the next level of a good customer service experience is all about.

article thumbnail

Top Themes from Think 2019

Peter Lavers

What were the key themes coming out of my coverage of February’s IBM’s showcase global conference Think 2019 in San Francisco? I was delighted to be invited by IBM Watson to Think 2019 in my role as an IBM Futurist. Think is IBM’s flagship conference designed to deliver all the technical training, strategic expertise, and impactful lessons that a company needs to compete in today’s changing world.