Beyond Philosophy

MAY 5, 2015

Why do we do what we do? The simple answer is because of our emotions. I often use the analogy in my presentations that emotions are like little voices in our heads. These little voices are in your Customers’ heads, too, and they are telling your Customers how they feel about their experience–and whether they are going to come back! Emotions are fundamental to Customer behavior in your experience, too, whether you are in business-to-consumer or business-to-business.

Customer emotions 284

Customer emotions Customer Experience Call Center Customer centricity 284

Win the Customer

MAY 3, 2015

Is the customer always right? Does that ultimately really matter? Every business owner or company manager needs to properly understand the needs of the customer because future business depends on it. Isn’t meeting customer needs really the main factor when it comes to the success of the business? If you can’t give what customers want, why […].

Management 145

Management Call Center Customer Service Customer Experience 145

Fonolo

MAY 7, 2015

UPDATED FEBRUARY 2020: The call center is an extremely stressful work environment. Simply knowing how to run a call center isn’t enough for success. Not for the weak at heart, only some call center managers have the grace, tenacity, and skills to handle the extreme pressures of the contact center manager’s job. Those with this special ability often create an experience that pleases customers and agents, without exceeding their budgets; a truly remarkable feat.

Call Center 126

Call Center Management Contact Center Coaching 126

Contact Center Pipeline

MAY 8, 2015

New technology, emerging channels, social media and rising customer expectations are all transforming the customer care environment. In our recent Contact Center Training poll, 61% of organizations provided ongoing training for supervisors, and just over half (52%) did so for managers. Most that did said that they only offered 50 hours or less of ongoing […].

Management 100

Management Contact Center Customer Care Technology 100

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ijgolding

MAY 7, 2015

I get to experience many wonderful things plying my trade around the world. I often have to pinch myself as a reminder that the things I am seeing, touching, hearing, and smelling are real and that they are actually happening to me! Since I became an independent Customer Experience Practitioner in 2012, I have rigorously ensured that I am described as a specialist in my role – not an expert – a specialist.

Customer Experience 114

Customer Experience Customer centricity Personalization Employee engagement 114

PeopleMetrics

MAY 7, 2015

When I was a kid, sometimes at parties or other events, we’d line up for an egg toss. If you’ve never seen one, partners stand a few feet apart and then toss an egg to each other. Partners with intact eggs then take a step back and throw again. George. Why are you writing about egg toss? Well, because I was thinking: If your customer were an egg, what are the odds they’d make it through your customer experience intact?

Customer Experience 94

Customer Experience B2B Sales Telecommunications 94

Contact Center Pipeline

MAY 7, 2015

According to a study from Customer Experience Management, 71% of agents do not have the authority to satisfy a customer. OUCH! With high attrition comes the need to limit the authority of agents—whereas experience generates knowledge and judgment as well as an understanding of what is best for the customer and organization. If allowed the […].

Management 100

Management Agent Empowerment Customer Experience Scripts 100

CX Journey

MAY 7, 2015

I'm blogging again today (note: I wrote this yesterday but didn't get a chance to publish it) from the Customer Experience Professionals Insight Exchange in beautiful San Diego, CA. The event takes place at the Hotel del Coronado , and if you've never been, it's a wonderful venue. Before you arrive at the hotel, you'll fall in love with the amazing view as you cross the bridge to get onto Coronado Island!

Customer Experience 73

Customer Experience Surveys 73

Win the Customer

MAY 5, 2015

Anticipating needs, learning about the customer and listening to your employees are all keys to customer service success. Are you ready to take your customer service from reactive to proactive? Providing exceptional customer service goes beyond reducing call center wait times or diffusing conflicts with angry customers. If you’re ready to improve your customer service, […].

Customer Service 141

Customer Service Wait times Call Center Technology 141

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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

Sikorski's Think Abouts

MAY 3, 2015

Throughout my career I have designed the physical interior layout of call centers from 5 to 500 agent seats across the globe. This next blog series will step you through the basic process of designing your center for efficiency and productivity. What Makes a Center Well Designed? The least dollars for the most space. The most bodies in the least amount of space.

Call Center 53

Call Center Morale Engineering Consulting 53

Contact Center Pipeline

MAY 6, 2015

I am a workforce manager, which means I need to count days for many reasons: payroll days for my staffing models; working days, so that I don’t apply shrinkage to people on vacation or FMLA; and index days, so I don’t treat a month with 10 weekend days the same way I would treat a […].

Management 100

Management Call Center Contact Center 100

CX Journey

MAY 5, 2015

I'm blogging today from the Customer Experience Professional Association's (CXPA) Insight Exchange in San Diego. In addition to the local networking events that local CXPA teams host around the country, this event is the annual membership gathering with an agenda filled with great speakers, awesome member-to-member exchanges of tools and ideas, awards, networking, and more.

Journey mapping 68

Journey mapping Customer Experience Government Engineering 68

Kunnect

MAY 5, 2015

On the heels of our Salesforce.com CRM integration, Kunnect is pleased to announce that our seamless, cloud-based call center software can now be integrated with Zoho.com CRM and apps. Zoho.com provides a suite of affordable, web-based apps to small and medium-size businesses. They offer sales and marketing tools such as customer relationship management (CRM), social media monitoring and insights, campaign management and more.

CRM 48

CRM call center software APIs Call Center 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

Talkdesk

MAY 7, 2015

More and more American workers are taking their jobs on the road. Whether sitting at the airport, on the train or in traffic, the workforce is everywhere and, as such, the need to be connected and productive has never been greater. Call centers are not immune to this trend and, as such, equipping agents to adapt to this change is key. What’s more, the number of workers telecommuting several days a week has increased by almost 80 percent between 2005 and 2012, according to Global Workplace Analy

Call Center 40

Call Center Interactive Voice Response call center software Analytics 40

Contact Center Pipeline

MAY 4, 2015

What defines best-in-class performance? ICMI recently announced the finalists for its Global Contact Center Awards Program. The winners in each of the 12 categories will be announced on May 5th at ICMI’s Contact Center Expo & Conference in Orlando, Fla. We had a chance to speak with the two finalists in the Best Contact Center […].

Management 100

Management Contact Center Call Center 100

TMP Direct

MAY 7, 2015

Cut costly seconds off calls. What is TMP Insight. Now TMP Direct can know up to 100 data points about your callers before we pick up the phone. In less time than it takes for the phone to ring once, we can use the caller’s phone number to tap into a database of over 215 million land line-based records and 60 million cell phone-based records. The database provides a wide variety of demographic and lifestyle data that are instantly available to our Customer Service Representatives (CSRs), includi

Scripts 40

Scripts Education Call Center Sales 40

ForeSee

MAY 5, 2015

For over 20 years—starting with the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA) to the recent customer service cross-agency priority goals—federal agencies have been grappling with tactics and strategies to improve their performance in delivering customer service to citizens. In the latest ForeSee E-Government Satisfaction Index, we pay special attention to the concept of performance measurement as it relates to digital government channels.

Government 40

Government Feedback Customer Experience Customer Service 40

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

Talkdesk

MAY 6, 2015

No matter your industry—or business size—keeping your customers happy is paramount. After all, even the small mom-and-pop shop needs to take that first-time customer and nurture him or her into a brand proponent who can evangelize on behalf of their small business. Similarly, enterprises across all verticals need to keep customer satisfaction at an all-time high to make sure consumer sentiment across the internet remains positive—as word of mouth is everything.

call center software 40

call center software Airlines Call Center Interactive Voice Response 40

Brad Cleveland Blog

MAY 8, 2015

How many organizations are using various contact channels? Recent research (Understanding the Customer Journey, a study conducted by ICMI and LiveOps, 2015) explored channel usage in service settings. The questions included both channels supported and the percentage of total contact volume.

Multichannel 20

Multichannel Contact Center Multi-channel support Self service 20

AskNicely

MAY 2, 2015

Intercom.io is a fantastic tool for managing customer communications in super clever ways – we love using it for AskNicely. Now, with the AskNicely Intercom integration for NPS, you can extend automate a real time Net Promoter Score process: Automatically trigger AskNicely NPS surveys to your customers based on Intercom events. We can send surveys to all your Intercom contacts or a single Intercom “segment” This is useful if you want to trigger a survey off a specific event. (

APIs 60

APIs Surveys Feedback Marketing 60

Amity

MAY 8, 2015

Many brands simply have no idea what their customers think of them. There is a huge customer gap that needs to be acknowledged. eConsultancy did some research and you may well be shocked at the outcomes. The very first issue to address in customer success is: what is going on right now with every single customer? Having real-time access to that data alone transforms your strategies for customer adoption.

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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

Talkdesk

MAY 5, 2015

The last time you took a good, hard look at your call queue, agent and team metrics, what did you learn about your call center? Did you come to the conclusion that: Some of your most important customers became lost in a call queue vortex due to excessive wait times? Your most skilled agents served your first-time brand suspects instead of high-value customers?

call center software 40

call center software Call Center Interactive Voice Response Upselling 40

Brad Cleveland Blog

MAY 4, 2015

According to Forrester’s Customer Experience Index, in 2014, 11% of brands were rated at “excellent” compared to 0% in 2007. Conversely, the number of brands rated at “poor” or “very poor” dropped from 35% in 2007 to 11% in 2014. Clearly, there’s been a shift in how we interact with our customers.

Customer Experience 20

Customer Experience Surveys Contact Center Call Center 20

Win the Customer

MAY 2, 2015

It’s inevitable that customer service experiences will sometimes fail. No organization is immune from bad customer service happening at point in time. Fact of the matter is that customer service is an intensely human experience subject to humanity’s faults and shortcomings. The challenge organizations face today is to create the type of environment where they […].

Customer Service 145

Customer Service Call Center Customer Experience 145

Brad Cleveland Blog

MAY 8, 2015

How many organizations are using various contact channels? Recent research (Understanding the Customer Journey, a study conducted by ICMI and LiveOps, 2015) explored channel usage in service settings. The questions included both channels supported and the percentage of total contact volume.

Multichannel 20

Multichannel Contact Center Multi-channel support Self service 20

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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

Brad Cleveland Blog

MAY 4, 2015

According to Forrester’s Customer Experience Index, in 2014, 11% of brands were rated at “excellent” compared to 0% in 2007. Conversely, the number of brands rated at “poor” or “very poor” dropped from 35% in 2007 to 11% in 2014. Clearly, there’s been a shift in how we interact with our customers.

Customer Experience 20

Customer Experience Surveys Contact Center Call Center 20