Beyond Philosophy

OCTOBER 30, 2017

Would you like to learn golf from a hall of famer? How about baking some French macarons at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris? Hotel chains, worried about competition from Airbnb , are rolling out these and other special experiences for their best rewards customers. Marriott’s master class program currently offers a chance to skipper an America’s Cup yacht in San Diego, and past offerings have included a clinic with an NBA star and golf lessons with a hall of famer.

Consulting 319

Consulting Consulting Customer Experience Marketing 319

Call Center Weekly

OCTOBER 30, 2017

By Sean Hawkins Two of the common reasons I hear regarding a lack of agent training, are no money and no time. This answer is unacceptable simply because there are many alternative methods of training and development available. As I work in a small sized contact center, I am dealing with a smaller budget and fewer resources. As a result, creativity is my best friends.

Government 240

Government Contact Center Consulting Consulting 240

ShepHyken

OCTOBER 31, 2017

Josh Liebman Encourages Running Toward Complaints, Not Away From Them. When it comes to receiving complaints, there are many people who would view this as a negative occurrence. However, Josh Liebman encourages companies to seek out complaints, saying that there are likely many other people who feel the same way, but will never say anything. Without complaints, you never know what needs improving.

Entertainment 261

Entertainment Construction Consulting Consulting 261

Callminer

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

Both UK energy and water companies offer services specifically designed to support customers in vulnerable positions due to situations such as medical and mental health issues, disability, etc.

Analytics 182

Analytics 182

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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.

Beyond Philosophy

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

Big banks have proven yet again that they cannot be trusted to do what is best for the consumer. And this time, the U.S. Senate agrees that they don’t have to! Last week, the Senate voted to repeal a rule that banned most mandatory arbitration clauses in credit card agreements, checking account agreements, car loans, and many other types of consumer banking transactions.

Banking 276

Banking Consulting Consulting Accountability 276

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 245

Customer Service Airlines Sales Management 245

Callminer

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

Definition of QA Metrics Quality assurance, or QA, metrics refer to the data and facts your company uses to measure performance. Interestingly, QA metrics can vary significantly by industry, since they reflect performance as defined by that industry. For example, QA metrics for software development could measure production cycles and average costs, while QA metrics […].

Metrics 186

Metrics Best practices Call Center Analytics 186

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

Contact Center Pipeline

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

I’ve always maintained that the frontline supervisor is the most critical role in a contact center. They have a tremendous impact on agent satisfaction and engagement, and are close enough to the customers that they have a great feel for their perspectives. We rely on them to feed communication up to the executive ranks, and […].

Surveys 140

Surveys Contact Center Coaching Call Center 140

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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

ShepHyken

NOVEMBER 2, 2017

This week we feature an article by Gemma Baker that shares three areas that your organization should examine during your regular competitor analysis. One key is to always deliver value to your customers to keep them coming back. – Shep Hyken. Does it seem like your competitors have an advantage over you when it comes to attracting new customers? Or that too many customers are dissatisfied with your service?

Customer Service 192

Customer Service Advertising Scripts Feedback 192

Provide Support

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

5 Reasons Unhappy Customers Don’t Complain. The times when customer complaints were seen as a distraction that should be eliminated are over. Most businesses today understand that complaints are a valuable source of information. In fact, there might be no better way to collect direct feedback from your customers. A complaint not only shows what and where went wrong, whether it’s a problem with your product, service, customer support or internal processes.

Feedback 148

Feedback Customer Support Customer Experience 148

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

Contact Center Pipeline

NOVEMBER 2, 2017

It’s November. We are celebrating Thanksgiving in the U.S., so it’s a great time to talk about gratitude. Our gratitude for our families, our communities and in our contact centers. That’s right… there is much to be thankful for in our centers. The advancement in technology and software makes it easier to communicate in multiple […].

Contact Center 138

Contact Center Technology Call Center 138

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

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

Customer Experience Matters

OCTOBER 30, 2017

CVS made an offer to buy Aetna for more than $66 billion. While there may be a lot of value in a combined company’s increase in power in drug distribution, what might this healthcare vertical integration mean for customer experience? My take: CVS and Aetna have totally different relationships with consumers. One lures in consumers for individual retail transactions and an intermittent set of pharmacy interactions, while the other has an annual contractual relationship that often deals with

Healthcare 100

Healthcare Customer Experience 100

Branch Mesenger

NOVEMBER 2, 2017

Today, the narrative of our professional arcs has been blurred. Career tracts are not the straight line of our parental professional predecessors. Instead, it’s a series of ups and downs, left and right turns, marked by pit-stops at multiple jobs, post-educational training, internships, volunteer stints, freelance hustling, and hourly jobs. Increasingly, more and more Americans classify themselves as hourly employees.

Education 110

Education Healthcare Banking Engineering 110

Contact Center Pipeline

OCTOBER 31, 2017

This month, thoughts of the graveyard were on the minds of workforce management professionals—graveyard shifts, that is. Our most popular post in October, by Human Numbers’ Tiffany LaReau, offers scheduling advice for overnight shifts in the contact center. Other top-read topics looked at how to use employee and customer communities to drive innovation; how to […].

Contact Center 100

Contact Center Management Chatbots Call Center 100

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

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 93

Metrics 93

Comm100

OCTOBER 30, 2017

Christmas is coming, and in the spirit of the season of giving, it’s a great time to show your customers how much you care about them with a gift or token of your appreciation. While it’s a wonderful thing to try to show you care, too many businesses miss the mark by buying gifts for customers that are boring, bland or thoughtless – think corporate personalized pens, coffee mugs or gift cards.

Morale 83

Morale Personalization Customer Service Accountability 83

Kayako

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

A few weeks ago, my cable bill came and it was more than I expected. I tried to figure out why, but eventually I needed to chat with the service team of a certain notorious cable company. I thought live chat would be the easiest way to get information on the extra charges. It wasn’t. Impersonal, inattentive, and inefficient – a study in all the things that customer service shouldn’t be.

Personalization 85

Personalization Scripts Chatbots Feedback 85

aircall

NOVEMBER 2, 2017

Do you have abandonment issues? Wait. Sorry. I should probably specify what I’m asking here. Do customers abandon your phone support lines more frequently than you’d like? Okay. Good. Now that we all know we’re in the right place, let’s talk solutions. Because unlike some metrics, call abandonment rate is one number managers can influence immediately.

Abandon rate 85

Abandon rate Abandon Call Entertainment Wait times 85

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.

Contact Center

Andrew Mcfarland

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

I’m guessing here, but I bet outsourcing is the reason Google’s CEO is now personally involved to address a “debate” about the hamburger emoji. Outsourcing works when the work product is well-defined and understood across cultural boundaries. For example, making.

outsourcing 84

outsourcing Personalization 84

Taylor Reach Group

OCTOBER 31, 2017

By: Colin Taylor . Recently I was asked to participate in an expert round-up on How Fortune 500 companies Manage Their Contact Center(s). More specifically, I was asked to provide insight on the importance of consistency among different channels within a Contact Center. There is a wide range of channels available in the Contact Center industry. Traditional calling is no longer the sole standard and thus the Call Center has evolved to the Contact Center, offering multiple channels such as email,

Contact Center 84

Contact Center Advertising Call Center Consulting 84

Aspect

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

Many of the latest contact center management tools on the market today are designed to bridge the gap between consumer preference and businesses objectives. By using tools like automation and business intelligence together, contact centers can not only reach larger, more targeted prospects that will help them fill opportunity pipelines, but they can also create customized and personalized campaigns which will be better received by the consumer recipients.

Contact Center 81

Contact Center contact center solutions Coaching Chatbots 81

aircall

NOVEMBER 2, 2017

Do you have abandonment issues? Wait. Sorry. I should probably specify what I’m asking here. Do customers abandon your phone support lines more frequently than you’d like? Okay. Good. Now that we all know we’re in the right place, let’s talk solutions. Because unlike some metrics, call abandonment rate is one number managers can influence immediately.

Abandon rate 81

Abandon rate Abandon Call Entertainment Wait times 81

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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

Aria Solutions

NOVEMBER 2, 2017

There are more and more start-ups in the tech industry every year. They have become an integral part of our business landscape, driving innovation and entrepreneurship. All of these start-ups begin with a vision and a few individuals who want to bring it to life. Over time, they will find investors to back them up and the people to transform it into a product.

CRM 79

CRM APIs Marketing Analytics 79

Influitive

NOVEMBER 2, 2017

No one likes to think they’re being influenced by others when they buy something or make a career choice. We’re all individuals with independent thoughts, right? The truth is that you are swayed by your environment (the things you see and hear), and the people in your life (friends, family, peers—even strangers on the subway).

Sales 81

Sales Marketing B2B 81

Ansafone

NOVEMBER 3, 2017

Ten essential items should be part of every contact center’s contingency strategy. Executives should have a plan to deal with critical emergency situations. It’s simply smart management. Though we hope to never encounter a business-threatening disaster, if it does occur, will you be ready? More importantly, when you outsource services to a contact center, will they be ready?

Contact Center 72

Contact Center outsourcing Business Process Outsourcing SaaS 72