Beyond Philosophy

JANUARY 18, 2016

Ever blown it with a Customer? Sure. We all have. Mistakes are part of being human, after all. But hopefully, you learned from it, made your sincere apology, and carried on. Here are 8 big mistakes with Customer Experience that we hope brands learned from: “It’s not the pants, it’s your body type” excuse from Lululemon. Remember when the CEO of Lululemon Chip Wilson said the reason that their pants weren’t wearing well was because the pants weren’t made for all women’s bodies—particularly those

Airlines 274

Airlines Entertainment Banking Consulting 274

Steve DiGioia

JANUARY 18, 2016

because you may not like the answers This original article was written by Steve DiGioia. Rose-colored glasses. Yes, that what they’re called. I had mine on…bet you did too. I knew I was a still just a junior manager but I walked around like the king. I was the newest big shot. Got things done, yes, that was me! Boss needed a project completed, I was the man.

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Contact Center Pipeline

JANUARY 21, 2016

In a business sense, culture is defined (by Merriam-Webster) as “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterizes an institution or organization.” But the key to the culture is not simply having a set of core values—it’s the expected behaviors that are attached to those values, says Tim Kuppler, director of culture […].

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Win the Customer

JANUARY 19, 2016

Gartner research shows that by 2018, 70 percent of business-to-business ecommerce sites will offer customers personalized features, and sites effectively using personalization will outsell competitors by 30 percent. Seventy percent of companies agree that retaining customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones, an Econsultancy report on cross-channel marketing found.

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Customer retention B2B Surveys Feedback 81

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Beyond Philosophy

JANUARY 20, 2016

Customer Loyalty is a gold standard for most businesses. There are numerous ways that you earn (and lose) Customer Loyalty. But one way that anyone can do is one of the most effective ways to create a Customer Experience that keeps them coming back for more. Pivoting is a technique well-known by the Public Relations industry. It means changing the direction of the conversation to get back to your core message.

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Contact Center Pipeline

JANUARY 20, 2016

Our coaches occupy the most critical blocks on our organizational charts. Wedged between those who set the policies for handling customers and those who carry out those policies, it is our coaches—supervisors mostly, but also trainers, QA staff and others—who translate objectives to behaviors. This interpretation happens hundreds or possibly thousands of times a day […].

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airespring

JANUARY 20, 2016

There are important facts that should be taken into account before purchasing a business phone system. For all of the technological changes in our lives, the 2015 Global State of Multichannel Customer Service report by Parature found that the vast majority of people—over 80%—still prefer to use mobile or landline phones when communicating with businesses.

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Multichannel Telecommunications Accountability Technology 74

Vonage

JANUARY 20, 2016

If you’ve invested in a CRM system like Salesforce or Desk.com you’ve probably already started to realize the benefits of having all of your customer data stored in one place. But, did you know that by using a CTI adapter to integrate inbound and outbound phone calls with your CRM , you can extend your investment, while driving dramatic improvements in sales and service productivity.

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360Connext

JANUARY 20, 2016

It’s important to have rules. There is no doubt about that. In any organization, we need processes and rules to help establish what the expectations are. But having a list of rules without connecting them to a WHY is a recipe for disaster. Give your people a mission with meaning. Companies need a mission, but not a mission that hangs in a frame in the corporate headquarters and has 18 bullet points.

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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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Contact Center Pipeline

JANUARY 19, 2016

Three management factors play a key role in technology implementation success: Project, Change and Vendor Management. Most organizations focus on project management (PM)—the discipline of planning, executing, and completing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet business objectives. Many have a Program/Project Management Office (PMO) to ensure project governance, with leadership […].

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ijgolding

JANUARY 19, 2016

I think it is fair to say that the US is first to adopt and introduce many ‘things’ to the world. Whilst it is obviously not the only nation to invent and create; many innovations – especially those related to business and management principles – are very much led by US based organisations first. This is not to say that all ‘things’ founded in the US are appropriate to all of us, but in most cases, they are.

Airlines 56

Airlines Customer Experience Customer centricity Self service 56

Natalie Petouhof

JANUARY 19, 2016

Tweet I’m here with my colleagues, Holger Mueller @holgermu and Doug Henschen @ DHenschen , covering the #OracleCloud Summit 2016 in NYC at the Waldorf Astoria @ WaldorfNYC. (BTW the Waldorf Astoria has great customer service!!!). MY POV: My overall take away is that Oracle has built / are building the most comprehensive cloud offering – Data as a Service (DaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas).

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B2B SaaS B2C Advertising 60

Provide Support

JANUARY 18, 2016

The 10 Commandments of customer service. Today, when customer service is becoming a major differentiator for businesses, it is probably not a blasphemy to call it a new religion – religion for business. If we take on this term, the next step is to adopt some kind of a scripture, a code to live by. Few weeks after Christmas, I was sitting in my chair and thinking that it would be good to remind myself what is really important.

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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

Topdown

JANUARY 22, 2016

For the past couple of decades, the most common way for enterprise software to be developed and sold was as monolithic packaged applications and even larger platforms – all fully built and integrated in a big chunk. More recently, due in large part to the growth of cloud computing, agile development processes, and the need for lightweight, virtualized applications and enterprise architecture flexibility, the movement has been toward microservices and containerization.

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Enterprise Customer Experience 54

ClearAction

JANUARY 16, 2016

New Wisdom for Voice of the Customer. Voice-of-the-Customer is central to most customer experience strategies. Find out what the customer thinks and increase the number of voices in favor of your brand. The excitement of hearing from the customer is usually high, at least the first couple of rounds. Then trends are established and one of three things usually happens: (a) the trend is in the “safe” zone, so everyone breathes a sigh of relief and goes about their business as usual, (b) the trend i

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Journey mapping Customer centricity Surveys Feedback 54

CX Journey

JANUARY 22, 2016

Image courtesy of Thomas Hawk I originally wrote today's post for Intradiem. It was published on their blog on August 20, 2015. How do you drive innovation within your organization? Do you think outside of the box to think outside of the box? When you're designing or redesigning your customer experience, it's critical to listen to - and understand - your customers, what they are trying to do, and how well it's going.

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Metrics Marketing Feedback Customer Experience 59

Kayako

JANUARY 21, 2016

How often does your support team respond to the same questions with the same response? Do still you see a repeat of the same enquiries no matter how well you’ve optimized your FAQ page to help your customers find the information they need on their own? Here’s when you should be measuring first contact resolution (FCR). What is first contact resolution?

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Metrics Customer Support Customer effort Feedback 50

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!

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Eptica

JANUARY 22, 2016

Date: Friday, January 22, 2016 So how did customer service perform in 2015? Published on: January 22, 2016. Author: Pauline Ashenden We’ve already covered the trends that have developed in customer service last year , and now is a good time to take stock and review the statistics on how customer service fared in 2015 – what went well, what went badly – and why.

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Customer Service Multichannel Benchmark Contact Center 49

NICE inContact

JANUARY 19, 2016

Guest blog post from our friends at HireIQ. While contact center technology has evolved significantly over the last thirty years or so, the practice of Workforce Optimization (WFO) has been around almost as long as contact centers have. However, as a holistic, integrated technology, it is a fairly recent innovation and it continues to evolve. Despite the technological advances, one element is constant: it often takes a human agent to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

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Entertainment Contact Center Coaching Employee engagement 48

Andrew Mcfarland

JANUARY 19, 2016

The folks at Enghouseinteractive asked me via Twitter how important an omni-channel experience is to my customers. Despite a very short answer (it depends) and Twitter’s new 10,000 character service, here’s a more complete response. An omni-channel experience is more.

Customer Experience 48

Customer Experience B2C Best practices B2B 48

LiveChat

JANUARY 18, 2016

Imagine for a moment that you’re looking for a job. You’re searching for it for quite some time and it looks like the only place to welcome you with arms wide open is the infamous McDonalds. You are informed that they are looking for a staff member, who would be responsible for “greeting customers with a smile, taking accurate food orders, preparing McDonald’s food and restaurant cleanliness”.

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Education Personalization Customer Service Marketing 53

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

Eptica

JANUARY 20, 2016

Date: Wednesday, January 20, 2016 Looking into the customer service crystal ball. Published on: January 20, 2016. Author: Robin Tandon Having recently looked back on customer experience in 2015 , what is predicted for the coming year? As always, leading analysts have provided their own thoughts, and in this blog I’d like to look at trends highlighted by Forrester and Gartner.

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Customer Service Self service CRM Analytics 49

TMP Direct

JANUARY 21, 2016

TMP Direct will be attending the 2016 SOCAP Symposium in Nashville, TN from April 10-13, 2016. This years Symposium is a series of professional development workshops designed to immerse you in specialized content and provide you withcompetencies that you can immediately apply to your current work environment.

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COPC

JANUARY 21, 2016

New Survey Reveals Disconnect in Perception About Meeting Expectations. . A significant gap remains between the corporate perception in meeting expectations and what consumers actually think. In 2015, companies surveyed said that 79% of the time they generally met the needs and expectations of their customers. Only 33% of consumers answered the same.

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Insite Managed Solutions

JANUARY 18, 2016

Is Your Workforce Management Optimized? As you determine what makes your contact center successful around workforce optimization, do you measure Service Level, Staff Utilization, or a combination of both? When a contact center asks us to help, often Service Levels can be all over the board with highs and lows throughout the day. Sometimes they are not meeting them at all or results are in the middle.

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call center workforce Call Center Management Service level 40

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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

CX Journey

JANUARY 19, 2016

Image courtesy of Critical Todd The old acquisition vs. retention challenge is alive and well! The perils of focusing on customer acquisition and sales over the customer experience and retention can be summed up nicely with this: " As fast as you're bringing customers in the front door, they're running out the back door. " Some refer to it as the leaky bucket syndrome.

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Marketing Customer Experience Feedback Sales 42

TMP Direct

JANUARY 21, 2016

TMP Direct will be attending the Annual Argentum (Formerly ALFA) Conference in Denver, CO in May 2016 as part of the organization’s continual committment to providing Sales Support Solutions to Senior Living Industry Providers.

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Sales 40

LiveChat

JANUARY 21, 2016

When a chat doesn’t end up with a sale or a signup immediately, it doesn’t mean that you missed your chance. There are still options you can explore to turn that website visitor into a customer. Some visitors need a couple of visits on your website or contacts with your customer service before making a buying decision. If you don’t want to leave that up to chance, your best bet is to get the contact information of those visitors and follow them up after a chat.

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Scripts APIs Accountability Marketing 39