Beyond Philosophy

DECEMBER 12, 2016

There are three critical elements every online holiday shopper expects this year. If you don’t meet them, they likely won’t buy with you, not now in the holiday season, or in the new year either. Chances are if you are shopping for the holidays, you are buying at least in part online. Per USA Today , this year’s Cyber Monday booked $3.45 billion in sales, representing 12% growth for Cyber Monday sales in 2015.

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Consulting Consulting Sales Customer Experience 392

ShepHyken

DECEMBER 12, 2016

Each week I read a number of customer service articles from various online 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. Is Your Digital Marketing Strategy Ready for an AI Intervention? by Tara Thomas. (Boomtrain) Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and big data analytics have been around for a while in the B2B world.

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Customer Service Chatbots Metrics Contact Center 257

Steve DiGioia

DECEMBER 12, 2016

This original article was written by Steve DiGioia. The dreaded job interview, everyone hates them. But here’s the key to having a great interview – you must show how, based on your past proven experience, you (over anyone else) can bring value to the company. Here’s some information your next boss will want to know: Is this someone we want to work with for years to come?

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CustomerGauge

DECEMBER 13, 2016

2017 is already knocking on the door, so we thought it would be useful for our readers out there to know who are some of the top customer experience influencers they can follow in the upcoming year. Through our work we have a daily exposure to these thought leaders and always enjoy learning about best […]. The post 20 Customer Experience Influencers to Follow in 2017 appeared first on CustomerGauge.

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Customer Experience 0

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Beyond Philosophy

DECEMBER 14, 2016

Having been with the Customer Experience movement since the beginning, I have seen companies embrace the idea of putting Customers at the center of everything they do and reap the rewards in increasing Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and revenues. Now, some of these companies are experiencing a plateau in their NPS score. They no longer see it climb the way it once did.

Consulting 360

Consulting Consulting Customer Experience Management 360

Contact Center Pipeline

DECEMBER 15, 2016

If you manage a contact center, you know the drill. Agents struggle to achieve proficiency and meet performance goals. Supervisors don’t do enough—or the right kind of—coaching to develop them into great, content, and loyal employees. Lots of reports get produced but don’t seem to lead to targeted improvements. And all these challenges have big […].

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Peter Lavers

DECEMBER 10, 2016

CustomerGauge has listed Peter Lavers on the The Top Customer Experience Influencers to to follow in 2017! View the list on CustomerGauge.com . Tweet to @PeterLavers. The post Peter Lavers makes the Top 20 Customer Experience Influencers to follow in 2017 appeared first on Think CX.

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Customer Experience 100

CustomerGauge

DECEMBER 12, 2016

Has anyone else ever heard the term “digital transformation” and let loose one of the longest eye rolls of their life? Don’t worry, I was in your shoes once. Before I worked in marketing, I was a development editor at a technical publication for software books (I know, I know, I’ve gone to the dark […]. The post NPS and the Digital Transformation of CX appeared first on CustomerGauge.

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Marketing Customer Experience 119

ShepHyken

DECEMBER 13, 2016

Mat Patterson on How to Scale and. Grow Your Customer Service. Shep Hyken speaks with Customer Evangelist of Help Scout, Mat Patterson , about the difficulties of maintaining great customer service while your company grows. While the focus is on growing companies, Mat shares some amazing tips for creating and maintaining great customer service that can be applied to any company.

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Customer Service Marketing 228

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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

DECEMBER 14, 2016

In recent years, a growing number of organizations have demonstrated progress toward becoming more customer-centric. For some, the transformation that began as conversations in the executive suite is now beginning to take root in the company culture and day-to-day practices on the front lines. Yet, many more are still in the early stages of discovering […].

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Customer centricity Contact Center Call Center Customer Experience 100

Kayako

DECEMBER 15, 2016

This is a guest post from our friends over at Recruiterbox. Sarah Caminiti will share why tone of voice in your communication with customers is important, and how it can be used as a unique hiring tool. How do you come across to your customers? Are you received as being professional and reassuring? One of the most vital pieces of building a support team is setting the right tone for your customers.

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Amity

DECEMBER 16, 2016

I was recently asked “ What do customers actually need to know? ” I paused before answering because I’m sure if you asked 20 of my company’s current customers, they would give you 20 different answers. I finally said, “You should ask them.” Start by Asking & Then Listen. One of the keys to effective communication, regardless of audience, is listening.

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Self service Best practices Personalization Surveys 92

ShepHyken

DECEMBER 16, 2016

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post my colleague, Jeff Dahms, writes about one of the most important parts of the customer relationship, authenticity. Being authentic is required by all of us in order to deliver an Amazing customer experience. – Shep Hyken. You’re doing all the right things. You have a program in place to track Voice of the Customer data.

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Customer Service Scripts Feedback Personalization 198

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

Contact Center Pipeline

DECEMBER 13, 2016

This simple phrase was on a plaque in my home when I was growing up. For the longest time, I just couldn’t make sense of it. Decades later, the phrase has become abundantly clear, repeatedly demonstrated, and consistently true… especially lately. When we take on assignments, tasks, roles and responsibilities, they all come with a […].

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Time management Quality management Contact Center Call Center 100

ijgolding

DECEMBER 14, 2016

Do your people ‘make’ your company? Do your people ‘make’ your Customer Experience’? Two very simple, yet interesting questions that have been very publically brought to the fore by British airline, Monarch. Their new advertising campaign caught my attention a couple of weeks ago – it did so because I found it extremely unusual.

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Customer Experience Advertising Airlines Customer Care 84

Amity

DECEMBER 12, 2016

Picture this: Company X is trying to promote a software to other businesses via social media by sharing organic articles aimed at educating their audience about their product. Now imagine the same content being shared by one of your Facebook friends, who happens to be working for that company. Which message are you more likely to acknowledge or click?

Upselling 84

Upselling Entertainment Personalization Education 84

Teresa Allen

DECEMBER 15, 2016

A Year End Customer Service Inventory: 5 Questions to Ponder 1. Are we becoming more or less connected to individual customers? 2. Have we automated routine customer service tasks? 3. Are we working to minimize point of dissatisfaction on the customer journey? 4. Are competitors out-serving us? 5. Does every customer feel appreciated? As we approach the end of the year and look forward to the next year of serving our customers and building profits, the following self inventory will build our suc

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Customer Service Feedback Surveys Consulting 83

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

Mindtouch

DECEMBER 14, 2016

The analysts preach it, hundreds of webinars break it down, and your own purchasing process relies on it: a company’s post-sale experience. It is vital to your buyers’ pre-sale decision making, but the same can be said for understanding your current customers’ needs so that you can effectively sell to your future buyers. It is the proverbial chicken-or-the-egg scenario.

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Enterprise Sales Self service Education 83

aircall

DECEMBER 16, 2016

Call center monitoring is the continuous process of data collection, analysis, and feedback. First, you gather data pertaining to your call centre’s performance (employee efficiency, customer attrition, speediness of execution, etc.), then gain insight from it, and then implement change relative to that insight. Finally, you start over from the top.

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Call Center call center software Abandon rate Metrics 82

Amity

DECEMBER 14, 2016

In the always-on world of SaaS, the role of customer success varies across companies and industries. Some teams are responsible for onboarding and training. Others manage subscriptions, software usage, renewals, upsells and other parts of the sales process. There are even more functions beyond those, but the point is: customer success is still being defined.

Management 84

Management Finance Enterprise Accountability 84

NICE inContact

DECEMBER 12, 2016

We all want our agents to provide “great” service. When I think about “great” service, I envision a customer interaction that required little customer effort, that was resolved on the first contact, by the first agent, and in which the agent served as a positive ambassador for the brand. But, does hiring great contact center agents equate to great service?

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Contact Center Agent Empowerment Customer Service Finance 74

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

Vonage

DECEMBER 13, 2016

“Often the psychology of queuing is more important than the statistics of the wait itself” – Dr Richard Larson , Mitsui Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT, considered to be the world’s foremost expert on lines. . People overestimate how long they’ve waited in a queue by roughly 36 percent – Jacob Hornik, researcher on subjective vs objective time measures.

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Wait times Self service Engineering Surveys 0

ClearAction

DECEMBER 11, 2016

An out-of-tune piano or violin may be one of your most vibrant memories of a poor user experience. Every one of the strings and keys must be in-sync, no exceptions. And so it is with every one of the groups in your company that is managing part of the end-to-end customer experience. CRM, VoC, UX, FCR, NPS, DX, and so on — it’s more than alphabet soup. 1 They’re all parts of a whole.

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Customer Experience Best practices Surveys CRM 73

Andrew Mcfarland

DECEMBER 13, 2016

A recent call from a friend helped me realize that customer surveys are still often ill-conceived and poorly executed. Common practices often neglect common sense and are rife with common mistakes. Here are some things to consider to improve customer.

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Surveys Best practices 67

Olympia Consulting

DECEMBER 12, 2016

Recently, l had an interesting experience with an organization and their “customer policy”. This company had made the decision to publicly post all the rules and regulations on how its valued customers were to conduct business with it. It actually went past the normal language of most legal agreements and spelled out the do’s and … The post Customer Policies??

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Consulting Consulting Customer Experience 60

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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

LiveChat

DECEMBER 12, 2016

When I was working in customer service, my greatest problem were emotions. When I was having a bad day (you know, one of those days with high percentage of grumpy, upset or rude customers), I wasn’t able to cope with anger and frustration. My biggest dream was to have the ability to turn off my emotions for a couple of hours. Because I felt that negative emotions were too difficult for me to handle, I was dreaming about becoming a robot.

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Customer Service Personalization Call Center Customer Experience 73

Provide Support

DECEMBER 13, 2016

Stay Connected with your Customers. According to a Walker study , by the year 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. That is why it is important to stay connected with your customers and keep them informed about your company innovations and events. You may attract new customers with help of great content.

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B2C B2B Customer Experience Customer Service 67

Interaction Metrics

DECEMBER 14, 2016

What’s the point of doing a customer satisfaction survey? Well, rather obviously, to gauge how customers perceive you, and where their expectations are being—and not being—met. This requires walking in the customer’s shoes and designing your survey from the customer’s perspective. Sound simple? It is…sort of.

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Surveys 59