Call Center Weekly

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

Your former Recruiting team just took you through a PowerPoint presentation in which they proudly announced that Recruiting should hence forth be referred to as “Talent Acquisition.” Great! But renaming the Recruiting team, Talent Acquisition, is part evolution, part trend and part semantics as I observe, yet this is far from unusual. Evolution, of course, just as we eventually learned to walk upright, our approach to recruiting labor eventually progressed in reaction to the threat of poor perfo

Contact Center 169

Contact Center Coaching Business Process Outsourcing Transportation 169

Nexmo

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

If the question “what is CPaaS?” led you to this article, you’re in good company. Many business professionals have been wondering what this latest example of techno-jargon alphabet soup actually means. CPaaS is a powerful business enabler that can launch multi-channel marketing campaigns, boost customer loyalty, and enhance ROI on your technology spend.

Marketing 78

Marketing Technology Contact Center Customer Experience 78

CallSource Insights

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

“CallSource ® Reflections” is a blog series by CallSource’s ® co-founder and President, Elliot Leiboff. Elliot co-founded CallSource ® alongside the late Jerry Feldman in 1992. Over the years, Elliot has developed a small call tracking company to a full service lead generation performance organization. CallSource ® invented call tracking.

Advertising 40

Advertising Metrics Marketing Technology 40

Beyond Philosophy

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

My local diner has a menu that looks like a spiral-bound book. “Breakfast served all day!” it says, before presenting me with four pages of breakfast fare, then another six that seem to span the globe. Fried chicken and waffles. Burritos. Spaghetti and meatballs. On a recent visit, I planned on having a sandwich, but the menu gave me pause. Maybe I really wanted breakfast.

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Consulting Consulting Customer centricity Sales 274

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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.

Steve DiGioia

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

This original article was written by Steve DiGioia. Here are two questions for you. 1) Where does an employee receive the necessary skill set to become a customer service superstar? 2) How can we identify the needed traits of a potentially great service provider? I was thinking back to my daughter’s high school awards ceremony. She, as well as over 100 other students, were being recognized for their athletic and academic achievements.

Customer Service 239

Customer Service Management 239

Callminer

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

I was fascinated by a recent story about the cost of complaints. I believe technology, particularly speech analytics can help in three ways.

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Analytics Technology 182

ConvergeOne

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

Cisco recently recognized ConvergeOne as its Software Partner of the Year for US West at the Cisco Partner Summit 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Cisco has continually awarded ConvergeOne for being a top partner to demonstrate innovation, business growth, alignment with Cisco’s strategic priorities, and commitment to Cisco and our customers.

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Aspect

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

Technology is becoming ever more prevalent in our daily shopping experiences, from in-store computer screens, to chatbots in the online channel. Despite the convenience of these methods however, there remains a strong desire amongst consumers to retain a distinct human element in the customer experience. This is supported by our new survey of over 2,000 UK-based consumers.

Self service 63

Self service Chatbots Technology Surveys 63

City Communications

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

Artificial Intelligence (AI) sometimes suffers from a bad rap. Fear mongers will have you believe that the technology will take jobs from human workers or, at worst, further isolate human beings from each other. Yet, AI also offers some of the exciting new possibilities in the ways we communicate and offer service to our customers. The combination of AI in contact centers, along with cloud-based delivery of the technology, is producing new value for businesses trying to understand how AI can hel

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Contact Center Interactive Voice Response First call resolution Chatbots 61

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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

Surveys

Talkdesk

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

CCaaS stands for ‘contact center as a service’ and is defined by call center software that is hosted (or built natively) in the cloud instead of hosted on-premises. CCaaS providers maintain and develop the software (hence “as a service”), which allows call centers to focus on using the software to provide better customer experiences. The primary purpose of CCaaS software is intelligently routing contacts from all communication channels, sometimes referred to as “skills-based routing”.

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Contact Center call center software Call Center Customer Experience 61

Topdown

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

As customer communications professionals, we have spent decades trying to “delight the customer.” Somehow, going above and beyond to create a “WOW” moment for the customer became conventional wisdom and accepted practice. Organizations recorded these moments through customer feedback and viewed them as a way to foster loyalty and build a positive ROI.

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Feedback Customer Experience 54

ClientSuccess

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

We’ll just come out and say it: customer marketing conversations and campaigns aren’t always the smoothest for customer success teams, nor do they tend to foster winning retention statistics. While many customer success managers (CSMs) are well-versed in the day-to-day activation and implementation conversations with customers, introducing them to additional services, turning them into advocates, and having upsell conversations, their customer marketing strategies and results can often fall shor

Marketing 56

Marketing Upselling SaaS Customer retention 56

NICE inContact

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

Twenty years ago began a shift to contact center outsourcing to offshore locations, especially the Philippines and India, and away from the local market where customers on the other end of the phone were located. Brands had a very clear business case to cut contact center labor costs by outsourcing to lower-cost offshore locations. First generation ACDs (Automatic Call Distributors) plus significant global telephony and Internet build-outs of the dot-com age made this technically feasible.

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outsourcing Contact Center Cloud contact Contact center software 48

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.

Customer Experience

VocalCom

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

First contact resolution, average handling time…many brands consider these KPIs critical for measuring their customer service success. But what do these numbers really say about loyalty? The truth is, not much. While resolving an issue quickly may restore faith in a customer, minimizing his effort to begin with is the greatest way to earn his trust.

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Customer effort Average Handle Time Contact center software Contact Center 48

Jon Arnold

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

I don’t expect you’re keeping tabs on me, but tomorrow is my last trip for November, and for now, last one til 2019. This time it’s for Vonage Business , and will be their first event just for analysts. We’ll be a small group, but keenly interested in their roadmap, especially following their latest acquistiion, NewVoiceMedia. My history with Vonage goes back to their earliest days as a very, very disruptive consumer VoIP play, and a lot sure has happened since.

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voip Contact Center 45

Insite Managed Solutions

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

Setting your new technology up for success In our modern-day business environment, consumers expect fast-paced service and workers expect easy-to-use technology that allows them to excel in their work. Technology is always evolving, so businesses oftentimes must choose between upgrading current systems or investing in completely new systems. While it is a great enabler, technology must align with your complete vision before you make a purchase.

Technology 40

Technology Interactive Voice Response 40

Help Scout

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

For customers, live chat is easy, effortless, and often their preferred mode of interaction with businesses. But for customer support managers responsible for scheduling their teams, live chat can be anything but easy and effortless. Coordinating a team for live chat coverage is a lot more difficult than scheduling for email support. Rather than just letting everyone run wild in the email inbox, agents need to be scheduled for coordinated shifts because chat needs to be kept online.

Customer Support 40

Customer Support Wait times Best practices Management 40

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Over the next 12 months, what do you think will have the biggest impact on your CX automation efforts? When asked the same question, only 10% of CX leaders surveyed by Verint chose telephony. It’s no longer the engagement channel leading CCaaS conversations. The customer engagement challenges facing organizations have changed – so a new approach is needed.

Self service

CSM Magazine

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

No matter what the industry, consumers trust organizations to look after their data. No more so when dealing with agents and customer service representatives who have access to vast amounts of sensitive data. This trusted access for employees to cardholder data, personal details or medical records helps ensure the best customer experience. It also however, makes the call center a prime target for a security breach.

Call Center 40

Call Center Accountability Management Customer Service 40

Call Center Pros

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

You have already built a brand or established a service. You have managed to create your client portfolio and you have even managed to generate a great interest in social networks. But in a landscape full of new companies of all tendencies and where competition is fierce, it is necessary to maintain a constant connection with your customers to differentiate yourself from the crowd.

Advertising 40

Advertising Best practices Feedback Customer retention 40

Salmat

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

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Hero Digital

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

Artificial intelligence (AI) in pop culture often imagines a futuristic world in which every car is self-driving and every home has a robot butler. The advertising industry has been applying machine learning (ML) in a more practical way. We’ve become fairly sophisticated with ML-driven programmatic digital ad buying and chatbots now guide customers to their goals from conversations.

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Multichannel Analytics Marketing Advertising 46

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!

Feedback

Customer Experience Matters

NOVEMBER 26, 2018

You might have heard Qualtrics discussing X-data (experience data) and O-data (operational data), and wondered, should we care? The answer is yes, and here’s why. Let’s start with a basic premise that no individual experience exists in a vacuum. People form their opinions about any experience based on a collection of different factors. The more we can understand those factors, the better we can extrapolate the insights about a single personal experience to form a deeper understanding

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Customer Experience Personalization Employee engagement 88