Beyond Philosophy

AUGUST 5, 2021

All businesses must decide how to price their product. For most companies, the pricing process involves determining your costs and marking them up to make enough profit to keep the lights on. However, is there a difference between pricing for service and pricing for a product? . Unfortunately, the answer is an unsatisfying “it depends.” Before I take a deeper dive into this answer, perhaps I should first define the difference between a product or service.

B2B 195

B2B Consulting Consulting Benchmark 195

Nicereply

AUGUST 5, 2021

In this post, we explore one of the best features we introduced last week in our Rating Feed BETA release – Rating Tags. We probably don’t need to explain how the tags work in social media or other digital platforms. The good news is that it is not that different in our app. Let’s have a closer look at Nicereply rating tags feature. Are tags really so useful to me?

Feedback 98

Feedback Surveys Accountability Management 98

Callminer

AUGUST 2, 2021

Deeply understanding customers is key to success. By leveraging customer journey maps, your company can keep up with its customers' evolving needs and expectations.

Journey mapping 182

Journey mapping 182

Contact Center Pipeline

AUGUST 6, 2021

Workplace trends come and go. From the hierarchical corner office setups and cubicle rows that dominated most of the 1900s to open-plan campuses with free lunch and foosball that came with the internet boom of the mid-1990s and early 2000s. From “we need to concentrate more” to “we need to collaborate more.” From IBM calling […].

Contact Center 314

Contact Center Call Center Customer Experience 314

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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.

ShepHyken

AUGUST 3, 2021

Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Surviving and Thriving in a World of Digital Giants. Shep Hyken interviews Ray Wang, Principal Analyst, Founder, and Chairman of Silicon Valley, based Constellation Research, Inc. They discuss Ray’s book, Everybody Wants to Rule the World: Surviving and Thriving in a World of Digital Giants , a groundbreaking guide that reveals which companies will thrive and get crushed by the powerful forces now at work.

Customer centricity 296

Customer centricity CRM Enterprise Personalization 296

CCNG

AUGUST 5, 2021

I am an old school contact center person. I am not ashamed of that fact, but the one phrase that I have said over and over is "If I had access to the technology of today back then, I would have been dangerous.” I would like to take a moment to explore why that is. I would love to say that "back in the day,” I had meetings with every other department in my contact center to discuss strategies, upcoming events, and issues that needed to be ironed out, but the fact is, I didn't.

Enterprise 195

Enterprise Contact Center CCNG Call Center 195

Beyond Philosophy

JULY 31, 2021

When it comes to your bottom line, pricing your products and services is essential. Price it too low and you can’t keep the lights on. Price it to high and nobody will buy it—and you still can’t keep the lights on. So how do you increase your margin (and keep the lights on)? Make sure your pricing is correct! However, pricing correctly is more challenging than it may seem at first.

Consulting 195

Consulting Consulting Surveys Customer Experience 195

ShepHyken

AUGUST 2, 2021

Each week I read many customer service and customer experience articles from various resources. Here are my top five picks from last week. I have added my comment about each article and would like to hear what you think too. Customer Experience Strategies to Annoy or Delight Your Customers by Phil Britt. (CMSWire) Let’s be frank: no company goes out of its way to produce miserable customer experiences.

Customer Service 232

Customer Service Multichannel Customer Experience Technology 232

Callminer

AUGUST 4, 2021

The goal of Project Ice Cream was to use our own solution to gain a better understanding of the aspects of business and data that inform our use cases.

Analytics 182

Analytics Sales 182

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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

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Myra Golden Media

AUGUST 6, 2021

Participating in assignments is the number one way we customize my online courses to your specific situations. One of my students typed out the following scenario in an exercise: Situation: The delivery company and the customer feels scammed; they want their money back immediately. My Action: I will recognize the customer’s concern by saying: “I see how frustrating this is for you and how important it is to receive your funds back as quickly as possible.

Customer Service 156

Customer Service Customer Experience 156

Contact Center Pipeline

AUGUST 5, 2021

The Times They Are a-Changin’” is a song written by Minnesota’s own Robert Allen Zimmerman, and was released in 1964 as the title track on an album by the same name. Robert Zimmerman is, of course, the real name of Bob Dylan and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” became his anthem of change for the […].

Contact Center 147

Contact Center Call Center Management 147

ShepHyken

AUGUST 4, 2021

Here is a stat that’s hard to believe: . Forty-eight percent of Americans would rather go to the dentist than call customer support. . OUCH! It seems that going to the dentist to get a filling or a root canal is preferred over having to call customer support. This statistic comes straight from the 2021 Achieving Customer Amazement Study we conducted this year.

Customer Support 217

Customer Support Surveys Customer Service Personalization 217

Fonolo

AUGUST 5, 2021

Regardless of your industry, providing ongoing training opportunities can mean the difference between finding lasting employees and experiencing high turnover rates. The 2019 LinkedIn Workforce Learning Report states that 94% of employees polled would remain with an organization longer if there were learning opportunities available. The proof is in the statistics — a proper training strategy leads to more engaged employees.

Best practices 159

Best practices Call Center virtual call center Agent burnout 159

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

SharpenCX

AUGUST 4, 2021

When businesses focus on improving their customer experience and service strategy, they can see up to an 80% increase in revenue. . As a customer service manager, you know how critical it is to deliver the best customer experience. But, over time, your once-polished customer service strategy grows stale. With each new hire, onboarding practices languish and internal processes shift around.

Customer Service 128

Customer Service Coaching Contact Center Interactive Voice Response 128

Contact Center Pipeline

AUGUST 4, 2021

Just as we started feeling a bid of a reprieve from Covid, here comes Delta. Will it have the same impact on staffing and operations? Surely it will cause us to continue our flexibility with remote work and hybrid models a little longer, as there is talk of masks and travel restrictions again. Please check […].

Contact Center 147

Contact Center Call Center 147

ShepHyken

AUGUST 6, 2021

This week we feature an article by Charlotte Blackmore, an SEO Executive and content creator based in Essex. She writes about how using an outsourced call center can be a successful strategy for keeping customers happy. One of the most effective ways of growing a business is through streamlining your customer communications. Providing a quality experience for your customers has a positive impact on generating increased sales and improving overall brand reputation.

outsourcing 211

outsourcing Call Center Sales Customer Care 211

Fonolo

AUGUST 3, 2021

You know that customer service is the backbone of your organization. Knowing where you stand with your customers and proving that value to stakeholders requires carefully crafted call center reporting that directly aligns with your organization’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Excel Spreadsheets won’t cut it anymore. Your executive team and call center agents need easy-to-digest, visual data that can help to inform their decisions and actions.

Call Center 142

Call Center Abandon rate Contact Center Metrics 142

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

Help Scout

AUGUST 5, 2021

“I was working longer and longer hours just to keep up.” “The tiniest thing would set me off.” “I felt trapped and helpless.” “I had a sense of tunnel vision.” “I told my manager, and all they said was, ‘You’re doing a good job, don’t worry about it.’” “I get to the point where I just don’t want to do anything. A snowball of apathy.” “I came back from sabbatical, and the workload was the same but my perspective was so different.”.

Customer Service 135

Customer Service Management Customer centricity Customer emotions 135

Totango

AUGUST 3, 2021

A freemium strategy is one of the best ways to sell a SaaS product. However, common freemium SaaS mistakes can thwart this otherwise effective approach. Here we’ll help you steer clear of the most frequent pitfalls SaaS companies encounter when deploying a freemium sales model. First, we’ll consider why a freemium approach works so effectively when it’s executed correctly.

SaaS 118

SaaS Best practices Sales Marketing 118

ShepHyken

AUGUST 4, 2021

Here is a stat that’s hard to believe: . Forty-eight percent of Americans would rather go to the dentist than call customer support. . OUCH! It seems that going to the dentist to get a filling or a root canal is preferred over having to call customer support. This statistic comes straight from the 2021 Achieving Customer Amazement Study we conducted this year.

Customer Support 194

Customer Support Surveys Customer Service Personalization 194

Guru

AUGUST 4, 2021

One of our core values at Guru is to seek and share knowledge. This rings true for everything we do—and build—at Guru, and it rings true for Guru admins and authors who work to build out a central knowledge source at their companies. As our user base grew and more and more customers asked us to connect with each other, talk through strategic approaches, and share Card examples, we realized it was time for a new era of Guru knowledge sharing: the Guru Community.

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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

Tethr

AUGUST 2, 2021

A solid quality assurance process is one of those needs that transcends industry. Whether you work in technology or marketing, sell a product or service, have a hundred-person customer support call center or it’s just you and a few others answering emails—good quality assurance practices are just, well, essential. But these days, you may be starting to think it’s time for a change in those tried-and-true practices, what with the technology at hand and innovations accelerated by the recent pandem

Metrics 109

Metrics Surveys Call Center Technology 109

Totango

AUGUST 5, 2021

Strategies for communicating with upset customers can help you retain clients and transform escalations into opportunities. In this blog, we’ll look at some common causes of customer communication problems before presenting four effective strategies for managing difficult conversations. We’ll consider a variety of issues that can cause communication difficulties, ranging from misunderstandings to money to technical barriers.

Chatbots 118

Chatbots Best practices Interactive Voice Response Technology 118

aircall

AUGUST 4, 2021

A recent survey conducted by global consulting firm PwC found that most executives and employees expect the hybrid workforce to become more widespread in the second quarter of 2021. Experts claim that while this will depend on the pandemic and vaccine distribution, companies will likely start making flexible work schedules permanent. Companies planning to embrace the hybrid workforce will have to consider more than just office space and the employee experience.

Employee engagement 108

Employee engagement Consulting Consulting Morale 108

Uniphore

AUGUST 6, 2021

Demanding callers. Complex processes. Impossible expectations. These are some of top contact center pain points driving employee disengagement today. In our webinar, What Your Call Center Agents Rant About on Social Media , we went beyond the annual Voice of the Employee survey to explore how agents really view the contact centers they work in—and why they’re leaving at an alarming rate.

Contact Center 98

Contact Center Self service Call Center Analytics 98

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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

ChurnZero

AUGUST 6, 2021

Ranked as one of the top emerging jobs by LinkedIn , you’ll find no shortage of Customer Success careers across SaaS and other markets. Demand for this role only continues to climb as Customer Success becomes an indispensable part of how organizations retain and expand recurring revenue. . As a Customer Success provider with our own fast-growing Customer Success team, we rounded up the best pieces of career advice from our Customer Success team members who know firsthand what it takes to hit the

SaaS 98

SaaS Personalization Accountability Education 98

Expivia

AUGUST 4, 2021

Optimizing the customer service experience is a crucial task in a call center environment. The success of your contact center depends on it. Simply being polite isn’t enough anymore. Your call center needs to focus on being unique. Providing an exciting, engaging, and one-of-a-kind customer service experience is what your call center needs to stay ahead of the game.

Interactive Voice Response 98

Interactive Voice Response Customer Service Call Center call center workforce 98

Working Solutions

AUGUST 5, 2021

We know that customer service is key to long-term business success, but how exactly do we achieve exceptional assistance to our valued clients and their consumers? Representatives should be helpful, proactive, reliable, empathetic, easy-to-reach, and aligned with your brand. But remember- customer service is so much more than a friendly phone conversation.

Customer Service 98

Customer Service Customer Experience 98