Beyond Philosophy

MAY 14, 2015

People like the convenience of self-service. More and more of your Customers believe access to self-service options is essential to their relationship with your business. Knowing this, it is critical that you plan your self-service options well. Parature is a research and advisory firm specializing in communicating service-centric best practices. Their Customer Service Success Blog reported some interesting stats to consider about Customer’s self-service options, including: By 2017, Only 1/3 of

Self service 402

Self service Best practices Customer Experience Call Center 402

Contact Center Pipeline

MAY 11, 2015

We love to conduct technology strategy projects and have shared how important we think those are for contact centers. We emphasize alignment of technology strategy with operations and business goals. But how do you build a strategic plan when each day brings a new direction from leadership, a new challenge from external forces, or internally-driven […].

Contact Center 162

Contact Center Technology Call Center Management 162

Customers That Stick

MAY 13, 2015

In the Temkin Group’s 2015 Experience Ratings Industry Snapshots, Internet Service Providers were ranked last out of 20 different industries. It’s no surprise; few people love their cable or phone provider, and among the least beloved is Comcast. Comcast announced recently that it will be putting a massive effort behind changing its customer service.

Customer Service 146

Customer Service Wireless Customer centricity Banking 146

Joe Rawlinson

MAY 13, 2015

Managing a brand on social media, marketers should remember that every criticism offers an opportunity for growth and improvement. Remember the famous story of the pizza chain Domino’s, which enjoyed one of the largest quarterly store sale jumps ever by actively responding to customer negative feedback? Running profiles on social media, it’s inevitable that you’ll receive public and private messages from irritated or annoyed customers, so it’s in your best interest to lea

Feedback 143

Feedback Marketing Sales Personalization 143

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Win the Customer

MAY 11, 2015

Whether it’s on social media, website content, or on a forum, make sure that anything that comes from your brand is expressive, personable and consistent with your established beliefs. From love to business, trust and gaining one’s loyalty matters. Although there’s no magic formula to building a trusting relationship online, there are a couple of […].

Personalization 141

Personalization Technology Customer Experience 141

Up Your Service

MAY 13, 2015

When you cannot deliver the service you promised to your customer, what do you do? Let’s face it. We all have days when we disappoint customers for various reasons. It could be a team member calling in sick, the internet goes down, bad weather strikes, an unexpected traffic delay occurs, and so on. We may not always prevent such situations, but we can always do something about them!

Personalization 111

Personalization Management 111

Joe Rawlinson

MAY 13, 2015

Managing a brand on social media, marketers should remember that every criticism offers an opportunity for growth and improvement. Remember the famous story of the pizza chain Domino’s, which enjoyed one of the largest quarterly store sale jumps ever by actively responding to customer negative feedback? Running profiles on social media, it’s inevitable that you’ll receive public and private messages from irritated or annoyed customers, so it’s in your best interest to lea

Feedback 128

Feedback Marketing Sales Personalization 128

Win the Customer

MAY 13, 2015

The customer service industry is complicated. Serving customers is an intensely personal, human interaction. Doing it effectively will test any organization’s ability to manage its most valuable resources, the very people who serve customers. Everything we do (more or less) is bespoke. All our customers are different, and because all of our customers are different […].

Management 138

Management Personalization Customer Service Call Center 138

Contact Center Pipeline

MAY 14, 2015

While the advantages of home-agent programs are undeniable, if your model is not well-defined, you’ll likely find yourself running into a few stumbling blocks that can make deep cuts in your potential savings or doom it to failure. Following are four common mistakes that contact centers make when rolling out a home-agent program. Failing to […].

Contact Center 100

Contact Center Call Center 100

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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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PeopleMetrics

MAY 12, 2015

Customer experience darling Zappos recently reported 210 of its employees have resigned. That’s about 14% of their workforce. The exodus stems from an ultimatum issued by CEO Tony Hsieh early this past April. That number might seem shocking at first glance, but in terms of employee engagement strategy , it’s not so bad. A Call to Arms. Let’s back up a bit, and talk a little more about that ultimatum.

Employee engagement 107

Employee engagement Customer centricity Engineering Customer Experience 107

Provide Support

MAY 12, 2015

Today’s customer service involves more than a conversation face-to-face or on the phone. Email, live chat and social media have become important channels for consumers to engage with brands and seek for customer support. No matter how customer service is given to consumers, soft skills are essential for a successful customer service interaction. In fact, soft skills are even more significant than technical skills as at the end of the day what your customers will remember is how they felt about y

Customer Service 108

Customer Service Customer Support Best practices 108

ijgolding

MAY 14, 2015

I am going to start this post with a question you might find a little obvious – ‘do you know what the PURPOSE of your business is?’ Whilst it may be an obvious question, it is a remarkably important one. It is also a question that, from experience, I know many people find difficult to answer. Being very conscious of the continued risk of stating the obvious, it is extremely important for any organisation to have a real sense of clarity and understanding of the reason why they

Customer Experience 102

Customer Experience Customer centricity Metrics Technology 102

Contact Center Pipeline

MAY 12, 2015

In their eagerness to attract the best talent, companies often oversell the frontline contact center agent’s job during the recruiting process, which only increases early defections. Providing a clear, honest preview of the position will help to weed out those who are likely to leave—before making a significant investment in the candidate’s training.

Contact Center 100

Contact Center Call Center 100

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

PeopleMetrics

MAY 15, 2015

One of the interesting things about customer opinion is you’ll never hear all of it. Even with the best customer feedback management in place, you’ll only hear from the customers who choose to provide feedback. But rest assured, customers are forming opinions about your business in every interaction. And when they share those opinions, whether or not they share them with you, you’ll feel the impact.

Customer Experience 104

Customer Experience Customer advocacy Employee engagement Feedback 104

Kristina Evey

MAY 12, 2015

The emotions of your customers drive your profitability and customer loyalty. We may be hesitant to acknowledge because we all know that relationships (even business relationships) are based on emotions and communication and can get us into trouble if we are not in tune with our partner. Does the phrase “Can we talk?” sound familiar and scary?

Customer emotions 98

Customer emotions Banking Finance Customer retention 98

Up Your Service

MAY 10, 2015

Steris is a global leader in infection prevention and surgical technologies based in the US and serving clients around the world. Leaders of the North American Service organization wanted to create buzz and momentum for their implementation of UP! Your Service (UYS) education. On the second floor at corporate headquarters, over 400 staff from the internal service support groups sit in a large, wide-open space.

Education 96

Education Technology 96

Ian Jacobs

MAY 12, 2015

This is a guest post by Danielle Geoffroy, Research Associate on the AD&D team who helps with our customer service and unified communications research. Do you hear that swooshing sound of a tweet being sent in the middle of a Google Hangout? It's faint, but strong, and it means they're coming. Generation Y--a generation raised entirely in a technology-driven world.

Social media contact 89

Social media contact Customer Service Government Analytics 89

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

Nimble

MAY 13, 2015

The First CRM That Works For You, Everywhere You Work We have released a revolutionary update to our Nimble Smart Contacts App, an exciting new tool that automatically builds live contact and company profiles on anyone, anywhere. Nimble is the first CRM that builds itself, automatically keeps details up-to-date and lets you take your network [.].

CRM 89

CRM Sales Marketing 89

ForeSee

MAY 13, 2015

The 2015 Answers Summit is currently underway at the Westin Kierland in Scottsdale, Arizona! Follow along in the comments as ForeSee's Jason Eddins, Mike Redmond and Krystel Harvey provide live updates from the event. The post Live from the Answers Summit: Wednesday, May 13 appeared first on ForeSee.

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Up Your Service

MAY 11, 2015

Steris provides sterilizers, sterile processing equipment, operating room surgical equipment, emergency room equipment and other medical device sterilization equipment. As a manufacturer with technicians working onsite in health care facilities, safety is a critical factor for Steris’ success. Many years ago, Steris implemented the idea of a “Safety Contact” as a requirement to open every meeting: a safety tip, process, example or occurrence.

Education 82

Education Feedback Surveys Management 82

360Connext

MAY 14, 2015

Running a business can stink. You have way too many things to worry about! If you don’t pay the bills, nobody does. If you’re not making money, there’s no way to pay those bills. Prioritizing tasks can seem nearly impossible when they’re piling up on you. And when we feel overwhelmed, many of us tend to leave these priorities up to the crisis du jour.

Customer Service 56

Customer Service Customer Experience 56

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

Nimble

MAY 12, 2015

Podcasts are an amazing way to enjoy great content from around the world. One of the many benefits of listening to content is that it feels personal and it’s a much more intimate experience than reading the information in a blog post. How to listen: Apple has a built-in Podcasts App which covers all the [.].

Marketing 78

Marketing Personalization 78

CX Journey

MAY 12, 2015

Image courtesy of dkuropatwa I originally wrote today's post for Intradiem. It appeared on their blog on November 20, 2014. What is storytelling, and why is it an important tool to have in your CX Toolbox? In a post I wrote several months ago, I outlined the 5 Rules for Turning Data into Action for a Better Customer Experience : Centralize, Analyze, Socialize, Strategize, and Operationalize.

Metrics 66

Metrics Customer Experience Personalization Management 66

Influitive

MAY 15, 2015

If you were to ask a group of community managers what keeps them up at night, you’d likely hear the same two or three concerns at the top the list: engagement , lack of resources and, of course, ROI. Proving ROI and understanding how to measure the success of your online community are not only important in order to satisfy the C-suite, but also critical to the long-term viability of your program.

B2B 61

B2B Metrics Benchmark Feedback 61

360Connext

MAY 13, 2015

How do you know if your customer experience is working? REALLY working? Analytics and data tell you part of the story. If the numbers go up, then you can believe things are working, right? And if the numbers tell you a different story, then you better shape up your experience. But the world is changing very, very quickly. We are adapting to new ways of working and serving customers.

Journey mapping 56

Journey mapping Analytics Customer Experience B2B 56

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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

Nimble

MAY 14, 2015

Here at Nimble, we are constantly brainstorming new ideas to improve our customer’s experience with us. We understand that today’s customer needs instant gratification. They need their concerns addressed quickly and skillfully. Who’s to blame them? Users rely on us to deliver a strong service with very little room for error, and of course we [.].

Customer Care 66

Customer Care Customer Support Marketing Customer Service 66

CX Journey

MAY 15, 2015

Image courtesy of chrisinphilly5448 Have you ever had an idea that needs a little boost to get to fruition? Every once in a while, I get some random thoughts and ideas or some things that I question or ponder - and may not necessarily have enough content to write a full post or enough time to develop the concept. I've jotted down a bunch of these thoughts and haven't done anything with them.

Advertising 62

Advertising Management Customer Service Customer Experience 62

Sikorski's Think Abouts

MAY 10, 2015

Here is #2 of my Call Center design series. Interior Design Should. Accommodate Change. Encourage Growth. Give your staff the ability to control the use of their own environment. Design Should Incorporate. Traditional Offices. Building Functions. Center Functions. Agent Area as the CORE of the Design Process. Design Development. Select the Architect.

Call Center 58

Call Center Consulting Consulting Contact Center 58