ShepHyken

NOVEMBER 8, 2017

It’s almost a given that every company has some form of a customer service department. Even the smallest companies – with just one solo entrepreneur – will act as if they have a customer service department. Why do people reach out to the customer service department? Because they need help, have a question, or want to make a complaint. So, understanding that, why would a company choose to deliver an amazing customer service experience to just some of their customers and not to every customer?

Customer Service 476

Customer Service Feedback Wait times Customer Support 476

Steve DiGioia

NOVEMBER 13, 2017

…here’s 7 ways to get you started This original article was written by Steve DiGioia. You still haven’t learned how to speak up, huh? Maybe you’re just afraid of confrontation? I know, you don’t want to offend anyone, right? Don’t want to come across as too assertive or even aggressive; what’s the difference anyway? The service you provide has always lacked because of your fear of “taking charge” and not wanting to offend your customers.

Customer Service 387

Customer Service Customer Experience Personalization 387

Myra Golden Media

NOVEMBER 27, 2017

Questions are a double-edged sword for customer service professionals. You have to ask questions to get to the root of the problem, log issues, and in general, to help customers. But, often a series of questions can sound like an interview. If we aren’t careful, back to back questions can come across as an interrogation. Years ago, when I managed a small call center, I realized that my team had to ask our customers seven questions.

Call Center 360

Call Center Customer Service Customer Experience Management 360

Contact Center Pipeline

NOVEMBER 28, 2017

Contact center leaders often express dissatisfaction with their current technology. They think that if they’d just implement some new technology, they’d be primed to achieve their business goals. Yet many centers have substantial opportunities to optimize efficiency and improve the customer experience by getting more out of what they already have. One of the most […].

Contact Center 357

Contact Center Technology Customer Experience Call Center 357

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Aspect

NOVEMBER 8, 2017

Don’t you hate it when you have an urgent customer service matter that requires live assistance? An SMS conversation with a live agent or chat bot won’t cut it, web chat will require too much back and forth typing; and email—well, really?! Over the last two weeks I had to resolve an issue with one of the biggest financial giants in the world. I won’t disclose their name, so let’s refer to them as F1.

Technology 160

Technology Interactive Voice Response Customer Service Accountability 160

ijgolding

NOVEMBER 22, 2017

I am very lucky to live in a beautiful city in the North West of England. Yes… I am not actually there as often as I would like, but when I am, I do not take for granted that my children are being raised in a lovely environment. Founded as a Roman Fort in 79 AD, Chester is one of the best preserved walled cities in Great Britain. With museums, a theatre, a Roman amphitheatre, a river, a canal and mediaeval building a plenty, Chester is a not just a great place to live, but a fantastic city to vi

Banking 151

Banking Customer Experience Management Customer retention 151

CafeX

NOVEMBER 10, 2017

Working remotely can present team collaboration challenges - especially when software or workspaces aren't right. In fact, the term “workspaces” has traditionally been used to refer to concepts and furnishings for designing office space. However, in the last few years, “workspaces” has increasingly been used to describe a wide variety of team collaboration software.

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Myra Golden Media

NOVEMBER 13, 2017

I recorded this video last week for a client. It’s part of a full 16-module customer service training. As a special treat for you, I’m sharing one module from my client’s course. This video is about giving customers an experience that makes them feel good and maintains their esteem. Viewers learn 3 Keys for a Friendly Customer Experience: Never Correct a Customer, Pacing a Customer’s Sense of Urgency and Acknowledging Concern.

Customer Experience 273

Customer Experience Customer Service 273

Contact Center Pipeline

NOVEMBER 9, 2017

Remember Oscar the Grouch on “Sesame Street”? For some reason, he was our son Brendan’s favorite character. He even had an Oscar the Grouch Halloween costume! During that period, I would sometimes borrow the mask to alert the family to an emerging “grouchy” condition. The funny thing was that, once I actually put on the […].

Contact Center 357

Contact Center Management Call Center 357

Speaker: Brendan Sweeney, VP of Global Sales and David Phelan, Account Executive

In a world where buyers are more informed and objections are more nuanced, confidence isn't optional—it’s a competitive advantage. In high-stakes conversations, knowing how to handle pushback can make or break the deal. Join industry experts Brendan Sweeney and David Phelan for a behind-the-scenes look at how teams are transforming sales coaching with real-time feedback, objection-handling role plays, and pre-call preparation that actually sticks.

Coaching

Fonolo

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

The 2017 edition of the Magic Quadrant report for cloud-based contact centers was released by Gartner last week. That’s a good reason to revisit a long running theme on the Fonolo blog: the cloudification of the call center. Compared to other enterprise software, the transition to cloud has been a difficult road for the call center. There were some good reasons for this: the lack of sufficient or reliable bandwidth for voice, the real-time demands of call handling, the mission-critical nature of

Call Center 138

Call Center Abandon rate Contact Center Enterprise 138

The Center for Client Retention

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

Today we are excited to share with you a guest post from Jana Sedivy. When I was 14 years old, I blew up our kitchen. I don’t mean a small kitchen fire, I mean there was an enormous “BOOM,” and then flames everywhere. To be clear, I’m not a pyromaniac. It was an accident. I was heating up a big pot of oil to make deep fried chicken (don’t all teenagers do that?

Telecommunications 127

Telecommunications Airlines Finance Enterprise 127

Customer Experience Matters

NOVEMBER 6, 2017

We published a Temkin Group report, Five Steps For Building A Strong CX Metrics Program. A robust customer experience (CX) metrics program allows an organization to systematically measure the quality of the experience it delivers to customers and provides insights that help companies spot improvement opportunities, prioritize investments, track CX progress, and unify the organization around a common goal.

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Metrics Customer Experience Best practices 122

ClearAction

NOVEMBER 3, 2017

Is Operations Involved in Customer Experience? Lynn Hunsaker. How would you like to reduce customer churn by 27%, increase Net Promoter Score TM by 65%, and outperform competitors by 20% in sales, purchasing, ordering, installation, billing, service inquiry, maintenance and account management processes? This progress was achieved by engaging employees company-wide in coordinating customer-focused improvements across Operations, Marketing, Service and other functional areas.

Customer Experience 119

Customer Experience B2B Advertising Coaching 119

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Marketing

Provide Support

NOVEMBER 16, 2017

Customer service and marketing can intensify and strengthen each other. Customer service and marketing are often seen as completely different processes by most companies. Strategies for each of the process are planned independently; employees of these departments take separate trainings and sometimes work in different buildings or even countries. Indeed, differences are obvious – marketing is about getting new clients while customer service is about making them happy.

Marketing 109

Marketing Customer Service 109

CX Journey

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

Image courtesy of Pixabay Culture is best defined as "values plus behavior" and is often described as "how employees act when no one is looking." Culture is such an important part of your business. It's really the foundation of the organization. I've previously defined culture as the set of values and norms that guides how the business operates; culture happens when we operationalize the values.

Metrics 106

Metrics 106

Fonolo

NOVEMBER 21, 2017

It’s been a very busy year for acquisitions in the contact center space. The ongoing “cloud-ification” was one of the main driving forces. (We covered that topic here and here.) But other forces were in play as well. When the news of an acquisition breaks, we focus on it for a few days — think about what was motivating the buyer and seller — and then move on.

Contact Center 129

Contact Center Abandon rate Call Center Technology 129

Kristina Evey

NOVEMBER 20, 2017

Crew Takes Teamwork – Just Like CEX. Customer Experience Requires Teamwork. Teamwork was the focus of my weekend recently. Two of my kids just finished their last crew regatta of the fall season. We were up in the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan and the scenery couldn’t have been better. We caught the last part of the colors and the temperatures were crisp and best of all… NO RAIN.

Customer Experience 98

Customer Experience Management 98

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What does customer service excellence look like in 2024? According to our report with insights from CX expert Shep Hyken, customer expectations are at an all-time high, and there’s a bigger shift toward self-service and leveraging AI capabilities.

Cloud contact

Customer Experience Matters

NOVEMBER 24, 2017

Whenever we discuss Net Promoter® Score, we get a bifurcated set of reactions. Some people love NPS® and others hate it. So we decided to more quantitatively gauge the sentiment. In a recent study, Temkin Group asked more than 300 CX professionals to share their thoughts about NPS. As you can see below: Most aren’t impressed. Over half of respondents say that NPS is either just like or worse than other metrics.

Metrics 108

Metrics Customer Experience 108

ClearAction

NOVEMBER 7, 2017

B2B Voice-of-the-Customer: Integrating Decision Influencers’ Views Lynn Hunsaker. Picture this: in deciding whether to rebuy from your company, the customer’s general manager and purchasing agent are neutral, the end-users are supportive, the safety department gives their approval, but the facilities manager rejects it. Your company loses the sale. Because your team was focused on the end-users and general manager, everything looked like it was on-track for renewal, yet one influencer of the buy

B2B 109

B2B Journey mapping Accountability Best practices 109

Beyond Philosophy

NOVEMBER 27, 2017

Many companies seeking to improve their Customer Experience (CX) understand the importance of putting the customer at the center of everything they do. Doing it, however, flummoxes them. Not all companies have this problem though. Those that have excellent experiences, the kind that makes their brand name a household one, demonstrate actual customer-centricity in their CX.

Customer centricity 400

Customer centricity Consulting Consulting Customer Experience 400

ShepHyken

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

It happens all the time. As a customer, you interact with good people who don’t seem to deliver great customer service. They are nice, even knowledgeable, but they don’t seem to be what I call customer focused. So, I took a few minutes to talk to several people about how they were trained. I talked to a retail salesperson, a flight attendant, and a server at a restaurant.

Customer Service 261

Customer Service Airlines Sales Management 261

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Contact Center

Myra Golden Media

NOVEMBER 6, 2017

Was This Helpful? I’m asking you because my newsletter offers ideas like this all the time. If you’re not yet subscribed, sign up here.

Contact Center 256

Contact Center Customer Experience 256

Callminer

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

Net Promoter Scores are touted as valuable tools for customer satisfaction and improving experience. But relying on this data alone fails to paint the full picture that today’s contact centers need.

Surveys 254

Surveys Contact Center 254

Peter Lavers

NOVEMBER 16, 2017

Remember when we used to talk about “channels and media”? Life was simple. Channel meant physical route to market e.g. retail, wholesale, intermediated, direct, etc. Media meant one- or two-way communications devices e.g. TV, radio, telephone, website, email, webchat, face-to-face, etc. These terms have effectively amalgamated since we started to become “multi channel”. eCommerce kicked this off on a massive scale, although the catalog and home shopping industry would say it’s been going for a l

Customer centricity 183

Customer centricity Automotive Finance Sales 183

Contact Center Pipeline

NOVEMBER 29, 2017

Skills-based Routing (SBR) is a feature found on any ACD today, and it’s been around for over 30 years. It is so common, in fact, that it’s become an afterthought when purchasing a contact center phone system: Auto attendant? Check. On-hold messaging? Check. Skills-based routing? Check. Hold on a second. That checkmark next to SBR […].

Contact Center 178

Contact Center Call flow Service level Call Center 178

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Harness the True Power of your Contact Center In today’s fast-paced business environment, selecting the right contact center solution is critical for enhancing customer experience, improving operational efficiency, and optimizing costs. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the essential factors to consider when choosing a contact center software that aligns with your business needs.

Contact Center

Beyond Philosophy

NOVEMBER 8, 2017

We all have habits, good and bad. Few of us remember how they formed. Few of us know how to change them—especially those bad ones. However, understanding how habits develop and their influence on our behavior can be a powerful tool for tuning up our Customer Experience. The scientific definition of a habit is anytime your mind prepares you to respond in a certain way based on some environmental cues or stimuli.

Government 345

Government Consulting Consulting Customer Experience 345

ShepHyken

NOVEMBER 29, 2017

“It’s Showtime!” Those are typically the words you hear right before hitting the stage or when the cameras start to roll in the studio. However, for John Lewis , a high-end retail department store in the UK, the retail floor is the stage and the employees are the actors. John Lewis is providing 322 employees , whom they refer to as “partners,” acting lessons at The Oxford Playhouse to help “teach them the art of outstanding service.

Scripts 260

Scripts Personalization Customer Service Customer Experience 260

Myra Golden Media

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

Now and then someone comes along with an idea, 
and specific ways to implement that plan, that can truly
 make a difference for everyone who uses it. And that’s precisely what I’ve done with this new program: My All-New Telephone Skills Training eLearning Course

. In this online training, I teach your employees absolutely everything they need to know to deliver a warm and friendly customer experience, to control calls and pre-empt escalations.

Customer Experience 184

Customer Experience 184