Skybridge

DECEMBER 8, 2022

I am happy to announce that Christine (Chris) Guzman has joined Skybridge Americas as Chief Financial Officer. Chris brings an extraordinary combination of industry success and thought leadership to her role. A respected expert in finance, strategy, functional integrations, and merger and acquisition transactions, she has earned a reputation for building high-performing teams and delivering innovative, balanced solutions that consistently drive superior client, employee, and investor satisfactio

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Skybridge

OCTOBER 26, 2022

‘Tis the season for spooks, scares, and spine-tingling surprises. And while most of us enjoy greeting the unknown at our front door on Halloween night, no one is amused by an unexpected nightmare experience with customer service. What happens when your customers reach out to you? Is it a treat? Or a bad dream that’s impossible to shake off? Here are three of the most horrifying encounters sure to send your customers running away, screaming.

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Skybridge

OCTOBER 10, 2022

In a recent article for Forbes, business trend forecaster Brian Solis describes “a circle” with a picture of a customer in the middle of it. This, he says, is how most of us define “customer centricity.” It’s a promise to consider the impact on our customers in everything we do. Is that your current model? Beneath that compelling little graphic or statement, you probably have a long list of IT investments and process improvements that make it easier for customers to make purchases, access custom

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Skybridge

SEPTEMBER 7, 2022

As a consumer, I know how I feel when I have to reach out to customer care. So do you. Some brands (our favorite brands) make it so easy. One call or text or chat is all it takes to get what we need. So quick and painless that we barely stop to think about how well it all works with that brand. . Then, of course, there are those other brands. The long hold times.

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Skybridge

AUGUST 24, 2022

We spend a lot of time in the customer care industry talking about consumer expectations: the trends, the unpredictable shifts, and of course, the latest and greatest innovations we can employ to better meet them. We invest in ever-greater organizational flexibility, adaptability, and create nimble, forward-thinking leadership teams. For those of us who define ourselves and our brands by our ability to exceed expectations, this focus on “consumer expectation” is an obsession.

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Skybridge

AUGUST 11, 2022

Even tiny shifts in leadership focus can lead to costly drops in customer experience. After showing an impressive post-covid CX rebound – and steady gains in 2021, US brands appear to have hit the wall. That’s according to Forrester’s 2022 US Customer Experience Index. This year’s survey of 96,000 American consumers showed that nearly one-fifth (19%) of brands experienced a drop in CX quality, according to their own customers, the largest drop in rankings since the study’s inception seven years

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Skybridge

JUNE 7, 2022

“You can make or break a brand relationship in a single conversation…”. That was an opening sentence that caught my eye the other day. Instantly, I thought, “Agreed!” It was an article about the tumultuous shifts that contact centers – and the brands that depend on them – are still undergoing today, two-plus years after the pandemic began.

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Skybridge

MAY 24, 2022

Why brand intimacy might be a smarter way to gauge the health (and profitability) of your customer relationships. Sure, “loyalty” measurements can be useful indicators of a customer’s repeat business and potential long-term profitability. But what leads to loyalty? A recent survey of 3,000 consumers, conducted by Praxis Research for branding agency MBLM, has confirmed a reality that many brands have known – but have struggled to leverage: consumers are more likely to return to those brands with

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Skybridge

MAY 10, 2022

These 5 Emerging CX Trends Will Determine Your Brand’s Success. Get the breakdown from North America’s leader in customer care. For North American brands and the customer care teams who support them, 2020 launched a period of upheaval, unforeseen challenges, and wildly fluctuating consumer needs. In the earliest months of the pandemic, most customer contact centers were scrambling to react and struggling to keep up with call volumes, customer fears, and the astronomical rise of agent attri

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Skybridge

APRIL 26, 2022

“Many organizations claim to be customer-centric. So why do some continue lose customers, while others deliver phenomenal experiences?”. That’s the opening line in a recent CMS Wire article by Jason VandeBoom. It’s also the central, multi-million-dollar question at the heart of retail business plans these days. In his piece, VandeBoom highlights three critical steps that CX winners consistently take that allow them to deliver best-in-class experiences.

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Skybridge

JUNE 11, 2021

7 Habits to Guide and Inspire Every CX Leader. For many people, myself included, Stephen R. Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” lays out a wonderfully simple but powerful set of guidelines for working well, collaborating successfully, and achieving meaningful goals. It’s also timeless. Feeling stuck? Feeling like your CX vision is stuck? Chances are, even a quick review of the 7 habits can offer up the reassuring reset, renewed optimism, and clarity of thought necessary to move forwar

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Skybridge

JULY 28, 2021

Why brand intimacy might be a smarter way to gauge the health (and profitability) of your customer relationships. Sure, “loyalty” measurements can be useful indicators of a customer’s repeat business and potential long-term profitability. But what leads to loyalty? A recent survey of 3,000 consumers, conducted by Praxis Research for branding agency MBLM, has confirmed a reality that many brands have known – but have struggled to leverage: consumers are more likely to return to those brands with

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Skybridge

NOVEMBER 10, 2021

Today, as we honor the service and sacrifice of all American Veterans, I would like to highlight one especially meaningful way that businesses across the country can show their appreciation: Hire a Veteran. A few years ago, I wrote about my Top 10 Reasons to Hire a Veteran. They’re as true today as they ever were, and I’d like to share them with you here; along with a few updates.

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Skybridge

MARCH 22, 2022

Andrew Bosko Has Helped Transform Skybridge Americas’ Brand. Since he joined the company in 2016, Andrew Bosko has helped Skybridge Americas’ transform its brand, upgrade its technology, and grow in sales. Learn more how Andrew has helped transform Skybridge Americas’ brand in his interview with The Silicon Review®. View Full Andrew Bosko Interview.

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Skybridge

MARCH 31, 2022

I don’t know your number. But I have a good guess it’s not small. Recently, I came across an article by Peter Dooley about the various ways that marketing insights are gathered. In that piece, he makes a critical point: some of the most powerful insights on how well a brand’s customers feel about that brand are actually derived from personal observation.

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Skybridge

APRIL 12, 2022

In their recent 2021 survey of contact center leaders, Deloitte Digital explores how post-pandemic contact centers are rapidly evolving into customer experience (CX) hubs. The survey is well worth the read, outlining 5 critical findings. For me, the most striking insight underlying them all is this fundamental reality: CX is the dominant strategic force driving customer care, customer loyalty, and customer profitability.

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Skybridge

JUNE 2, 2021

How strong is your partnership with your contact center leadership? Not that long ago, strong, strategic collaborations between CMO and Customer Care were rare. While the marketing role was focused on everything related to attracting customers and driving sales revenue, the contact center was perceived as a cost center. While the word empathy is easy to define for individual human beings, it has proven to be a lot trickier when asking an entire organization to be a consistently deliver an empath

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Skybridge

MARCH 23, 2021

How well do you know – I mean really know – what your customers want and need most from your brand right now? It’s a tricky question to answer. When business consultant Adrian Swinscoe recently tackled it, he drew on lessons he’s been learning from a number of CX leaders around the world, whittling his findings down to 4 simple but powerful best practices.

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Skybridge

MARCH 31, 2021

The events of the past year caused dramatic disruptions in consumer behaviors. While many were obvious and, potentially, short-term, other changes were a lot tougher for brands to notice or easily understand. When brick-and-mortar retailers were forced close their doors, for example, retailers understood that their sales – and customer retention – depended on their ability to shift quickly to online ordering, curbside pick-ups, and/or home delivery.

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Skybridge

APRIL 14, 2021

As countless North American brands are discovering (and rediscovering) these days, the post-pandemic path forward continues to be a bumpy one. Indeed, many “customer-centric” brands of the pre-2020 era are coming to the sobering realization that, in order to fully rebound, they’ll need to do a lot more than “re-open” or scale up. For many organizations, success in 2021 and beyond will require a reassessment – and radical redefinition – of “customer-centricity” in a post-COVID world.

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Skybridge

APRIL 19, 2021

Here are 5 Things You Probably Forgot. Advice on initiating, launching, and perfecting CX strategy is everywhere. Everywhere. Problem is, it’s not all good or useful advice. Bigger problem: even the best advice might not get you where you need to go. You can have access to all the tips, pointers, consultants – and robust strategic plans – in the world but, without a collaborative leadership team willing to embrace a CX mindset and some fundamental change… your CX dreams are unlikely to come true

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Skybridge

APRIL 23, 2021

Several years ago, Annette Franz, the founder and CEO of CX Journey, wrote about 6 tools to ensuring that everyone involved in a brand’s success have a clear view and understanding of the customer. Delivering great CX isn’t just up to the employees at the front line, she argued. It’s the result of ensuring that every single person owns the brand promise and is invested in delivering on it.

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Skybridge

APRIL 28, 2021

A True Story of Patient Experience Gone Wrong and 3 Ways to Make it Right. In one short year, everyone in the healthcare industry has experienced radical, upheaval. (Much of it painful. Some of it surprisingly positive.) It’s important to clarify that, when I say that, I’m not just talking about all that happened for providers. As clinics and hospitals scrambled to figure out new, safe ways of delivering care, their patients were forced to abandon old preferences, accept delays, disruptions, and

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Skybridge

MAY 3, 2021

The Most Successful Businesswomen to watch, 2021. Some leaders like to help others and grow with them to make a better place around them. With the free spirit to help others and transform the financial sector, Laresa McIntyre joined forces with Skybridge Americas Inc. With a can-do attitude, she takes on all challenges with a positive mindset. She adds, “I enjoy setting pretty big goals and then doing my best to empower everyone on the team to achieve them.”.

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Skybridge

MAY 7, 2021

As a growing mountain of studies continues to show, the events and effects of the past year have driven – and continue to drive – profound shifts in customer needs, preferences, and standards. For better or worse, this great reshuffling of buying behaviors has many North American brands in a tizzy. Sure, most organizations have long understood – to varying degrees – that CX (customer experience) is a driving influence on loyalty.

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Skybridge

MAY 19, 2021

I’ve said it before: there are countless ways to measure a contact center’s performance. While each metric means something , the truth is, some are more useful and informative than others. More importantly, no single performance measurement is capable of helping a brand leader understand how well the customer care team is taking care of customers. Recently, Sharpen CMO, Murph Krajewski suggested that, in order to truly understand if customers are getting what they really want and need, brand CMO

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Skybridge

MAY 25, 2021

How strong is your partnership with your contact center leadership? Not that long ago, strong, strategic collaborations between CMO and Customer Care were rare. While the marketing role was focused on everything related to attracting customers and driving sales revenue, the contact center was perceived as a cost center. Keeping these two functions in their separate silos was never a good idea and, over the past several years, many brands have come to recognize that their contact centers are at t

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Skybridge

MARCH 12, 2021

No one said the path forward in 2021 would be easy. Over the past several months, a growing number of research studies points to the extreme customer upheaval many brands have endured. As consumers were increasingly disappointed by the brands they patronized, they took advantage of the ease with which they could simply shop around online – and keep trying until they found something that made them feel valued, cared for, and satisfied with their purchase.

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Skybridge

MARCH 9, 2021

After the year we’ve all experienced, many American brands are taking a long, hard look at their current CX performance. In the wake of COVID many organizations are still sorting through the data to understand where their customers are today. For most, this will lead to some serious decisions about what it will take to win back lost customers, win over new ones, and retain them all.

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Skybridge

DECEMBER 10, 2020

A New Standard in Customer Experience. Laresa McIntyre, CFO of Skybridge Americas possesses that rare combination of visionary leadership, an acute focus on bottom line results, and a passion for building and leading motivated, high performing teams. She believes that, by inspiring all team members to approach their work collaboratively and innovatively, the organization can maintain the superior operational and financial excellence that benefits all stakeholders: customers, investors, and team

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Skybridge

DECEMBER 14, 2020

What does the future hold? How will 2021 unfold? I’m sure that most of us in the customer care realm have formed a few (or more) opinions on that topic. But I’m also pretty sure that none of us would be willing to bet our last dollar on the specifics. How could we? After the year we’ve had, if there’s one lesson we can all take with us into next year, it’s this: disruptions, by their very nature, are unpredictable.

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Skybridge

DECEMBER 21, 2020

I’ve been writing a lot lately about customer expectations, the changes we’re seeing, and how some customer care providers have been able to step up to meet those expectations. As I’ve mentioned, part of the challenge that every retail brand faces now is that the rate of change during this strange year has outpaced anything we’ve seen in the past. Customer needs, expectations and – critically – even many of their core values are undergoing rapid, seismic shifts.

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Skybridge

DECEMBER 21, 2020

A few times in the past, I’ve written about the deep and long-lasting positive impact of Tony Hsieh on the world of customer service and the profound, inextricable link between employee happiness and customer happiness. Hsieh, former CEO of Zappos, seemed to approach his work from a sincere desire to make the world a better place by creating a sense of community wherever he went.

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Skybridge

JANUARY 5, 2021

The next normal may be a ways off. In the meantime, here are three trends that will likely influence how customers connect with brands. “Leaders who identified how to quickly pivot … not only saw new sustainable paths to profitability but also increased brand value.” That’s how Jason Edelboim recently described a key defining feature of brands who survived and thrived in 2020 – and are poised to apply the lessons they learned to a profitable 2021.

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Skybridge

JANUARY 7, 2021

After a year of getting the rug get pulled out from under nearly every plan you thought you had last January, you’d be forgiven for approaching 2021 with some trepidation. So, how can you best position your brand to meet your customers’ expectations next year? How can you protect those relationships in the face of changing tastes and a revolving door of new competition?

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Skybridge

JANUARY 26, 2021

Every January carries the promise of new beginnings, fresh starts, and high hopes. For many of us, this is a time of committing to specific resolutions, aimed at making us better leaders. That’s all well and good. But this year, after the year we’ve just had, I’m hearing a lot of folks say that the whole New Year’s Resolution exercise seems like it’s just too much.

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Skybridge

FEBRUARY 2, 2021

The white-knuckle ride known as 2020 has taught us many things, from the foolishness of taking anything for granted, to the importance of being resilient. And this year, more than ever, it feels impossible to avoid reflecting on the lessons we’ve learned and which ones we’ll carry with us from this incredible, sometimes regrettable year into 2021. That’s a good thing.

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