Sat.Sep 03, 2016 - Fri.Sep 09, 2016

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The Apple Store Will Be No More!

Beyond Philosophy

Apple is changing. They are paying loads more taxes in Ireland. The new iPhone doesn’t have a headphone jack (or nearly as much excitement as previous iPhone launches). Moreover, the Apple Store is no more! Wait, what? You read that right. In late August, Apple announced that the word “store” would be removed from the name of its retail locations. Quite frankly, this move is much bigger news for their Customer Experience than the release of the iPhone 7.

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Sometimes It’s Okay to Ask a Customer to Repeat the Story

ShepHyken

Customer Opportunity. Just last week I wrote an article about companies that ask customers to repeat their problems, account numbers and more. So consider this a follow-up to that article that approaches the subject from a completely different angle. For example, getting transferred from one customer service representative to the next and having to repeat the issue.

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The Ultimate Customer Service KPI?

Steve DiGioia

Guest post by Steve Curtin This original article was written by Steve DiGioia. One of the Top 30 customer service experts in the world, Steve Curtin provides today’s guest post. Thanks Steve! Earlier this year I was asked for my opinion about which key performance indicator (KPI) was the most important. I think if you ask five different people you may get five different answers.

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How to Treat Customers: With Respect

Customers That Stick

We've Moved! Update your Reader Now. This feed has moved to: [link] Update your reader now with this changed subscription address to get your latest updates from us.

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The 2023 Verint Experience Index: Retail

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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Be Rational About Your Irrationality!

Beyond Philosophy

You are irrational. Your friends are irrational. Your boss is irrational. Unless you happen to know a Vulcan, everyone you know is irrational. I am irrational, too. People are irrational by nature. Irrational behavior makes some business leaders nervous; it is so unpredictable and hard to track. However, hard to track or not, emotions and the psychological responses they trigger affect our buying decisions.

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Evaluate Frontline Job Candidates for Coachability

Contact Center Pipeline

Rapidly evolving technology and expanding product lines have contributed to an environment in which many frontline agents are finding it increasingly difficult to keep pace with constantly changing tools, processes and expectations. A new-hire’s “coachability” can be a key factor in whether or not he or she can grow and thrive with those changes. Mark […].

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Inside Customer Success: HubSpot

Amity

With 20,000 customers worldwide, HubSpot is the world’s leading inbound marketing and sales platform, transforming the way businesses attract, engage, and delight customers. We sat down with Stephen O’Keefe, Director of Customer Success, to discuss how Customer Success has evolved at HubSpot over the last 7 years. Can you give us a brief overview of Customer Success at HubSpot, and of your responsibilities?

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The Preoccupation With Pre-Customers

Beyond Philosophy

Michael Lowenstein, Ph.D., CMC Thought Leadership Principal, Beyond Philosophy. Many companies devote considerably more energy and resources to capturing customers than they do to keeping them. But, all customers are not created equal; some have more potential value than others. It’s extremely important for targeting the best customers that their array of value requirements are well understood and that the resources devoted to getting these customers be well-applied.

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Guest Blog: Is your Business Really Focused on Client Satisfaction? Is your Business Really Client-Centered?

ShepHyken

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post my colleague, Anne Bachrach, reminds us of the importance of running a client-centered business and how this will set you up for success. Sometimes, all it takes is giving someone a little extra time or giving a little extra effort. – Shep Hyken. There are many factors that go into building a successful business.

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Strategic CX: A Deep Dive into Voice of the Customer Insights for Clarity

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.

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Face the Music… Call Yourself!

Contact Center Pipeline

According to TheFreeDictionary.com, “face the music” means to “confront unpleasantness, especially the consequences of one’s errors.” The precise origin of this idiom has been lost. Most references believe it “refers to a theater’s pit orchestra which an actor must face when he faces what can be a hostile audience.” Well, the music I would like […].

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How many chat sessions can agents handle?

Customer Relationship Metrics

Ever since Chat became a customer service communication channel people have wondered how many Chat sessions can agents handle. You’ve experienced the Chat channel as a customer of some other company so you know the difference between a satisfying customer experience and one that left you frustrated. The Chat offer. Have you found yourself clicking through a website trying to find information about something, when, as if summoned by your frustration of not spotting the information immediately, a

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Establishing an Issue Escalation Process

Amity

Handling issues with customers is never easy. First of all, you have to determine the scale of issues that require escalation, asking yourself ‘does this affect the customer, for how long, and do they need to know about it?’ In most cases, the answer is yes, even if it’s a small issue, communicating to customers early on that there is a problem, that you’re looking into it, and that they will get an explanation, are three very important steps that go a long way to buildin

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5 Top Customer Service Articles For the Week of September 5, 2016

ShepHyken

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. Create Great Customer Experiences with These Three Principles by Opinurte Team. (Opinurate) Matt Watkinson has worked with some of the biggest businesses in the world on customer experience strategy, service design, websites and mobile apps.

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How to Stay Competitive in the Evolving State of Martech

Marketing technology is essential for B2B marketers to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape — and with 53% of marketers experiencing legacy technology issues and limitations, they’re researching innovations to expand and refine their technology stacks. To help practitioners keep up with the rapidly evolving martech landscape, this special report will discuss: How practitioners are integrating technologies and systems to encourage information-sharing between departments and pr

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Contact Center Pipeline Magazine: Inside Our September 2016 Issue

Contact Center Pipeline

Vacations are dwindling down. Schools are ramping up. We’re planning our agent celebrations for Customer Service Week next month. It is a busy time of year. Our September issue focuses on many agent issues; performance metrics, attendance, agent desktops, employee engagement, customer experience…and more. Our agents have tremendous impact on our customer satisfaction.

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Lead With Authenticity

Customer Centric Support

It used to be that leadership created an intentional barrier between themselves and their people. A manager would not risk compromising the clean simplicity of working relationships by dragging in the messiness of real life. For better or worse, these days are far behind us. In order lead your employees well, you’ve got to put yourself out there. Your people want to know you, the real you, and share meaningful life experiences in and out of the office.

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Look to Other Industries for Ideas to Improve Your Customer Experience

Topdown

What could the CMO of an insurance company learn about customer experience (CX) from a restaurateur? What might an online retailer learn about CX from a bank? What can a hospital learn about CX from a telecomms company? Quite a bit, as it turns out. CX leaders often look outside their own industries for new insights and transferable learnings about how other companies are solving problems and improving customer experiences.

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The 5 Telltale Signs You Are in a Customer Maturity Phase (or Why You Really Do Need Customer Success)

Amity

In the early stages of your SaaS business, the focus is rightly on building the product, developing the market, forming new partnerships, securing early adopters and converting trials into customers. All the energy, and then some, is placed in accomplishing these primary goals. But often, a business transitions from the new customer acquisition phase to the revenue (MRR) protection and revenue growth phase without realizing it.

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The Rise of the AI Coaching System: Powering the Empathic Enterprise

Contact center leaders understand that frontline agents need in-call guidance to manage complex calls and drive higher levels of employee and customer experience. Real-time agent assist technology is enabling leading contact centers to accomplish these goals.

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When Cheap is a Viable Option

Andrew Mcfarland

Seth Godin wrote a post not long ago with a gem of a sentence, “cheap is the last refuge for the marketer who can’t figure out how to be better.” Instead, I believe cheap is a viable option for certain customers/markets.

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The Cloud Hopper Series, Chapter 4: Salesforce Community Cloud

Mindtouch

Welcome to the fourth part of the Cloud Hopper Series, where we discuss how to maximize the value of your Salesforce Clouds. This chapter focuses on Salesforce Community Cloud in particular, a recent addition to the Cloud system that has its roots in the beginning of the Internet. A Community Is What You Make It. Communities (of the non-Salesforce variety) have a storied past in the history of the internet.

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CMSWiRE: Building Your MarTech, Digital Experience Technology Stack

Topdown

Recently, I was invited by CMSWiRE to join a group of industry experts for a Tweet Jam on the topic of building your MarTech and DX stack. We explored the dilemma businesses face when building out their digital marketing and digital customer experience capabilities: building today what you’ll need for tomorrow. It’s a tough challenge, given that today's mercurial consumers shift channels, loyalties, and expectations at the swipe of a finger, making it ever-more difficult to predict future DX tec

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How to Increase Customer Referrals Today

CSM Magazine

According to a new report from NewVoiceMedia, businesses lose $62 billion per year because of poor customer service. In addition, almost 50 percent of the surveyed respondents across the United States said they switched to a different business as a result of poor customer service. When it comes to treating clients well then, it’s easy to see that many ventures continue to drop the ball year after year.

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The Open CCaaS Advantage Report

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.

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The 5 Whys: Getting to the Root of the Matter

CX Journey

Have problems? How are you solving them so that they never happen again? How are you getting at the root cause of any issues you or your customers are having? What types of root cause analyses (RCA) are you conducting? Or are you even thinking about RCA? Conducting some sort of root cause analysis (and there are many different types) any time you experience an issue is critical, for the simple fact that you want to nip the issue in the bud and not have it occur again.

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Back-to-school shopping: Here’s what’s driving sales (Report)

ForeSee

The underlying observation from the data is how much research via digital channels helps drives sales to physical stores. The post Back-to-school shopping: Here’s what’s driving sales (Report) appeared first on ForeSee.

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Can you afford to lose half your customers?

Eptica

Date: Friday, September 9, 2016 Can you afford to lose half your customers? Published on: September 09, 2016. Author: Neil Cox Recent research highlighted by customer service guru Shep Hyken demonstrates the importance of delivering an experience that meets the needs of your customers. It found that businesses in the US are losing $62 billion every year, due to people switching following poor customer service.

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Omnipresent Contact Center Agents in the Age of Instant Gratification

NICE inContact

As cloud communications companies like RingCentral and inContact have matured, the contact center world has been seeing an increasingly rapid move to the cloud. At the same time, we see a trend away from traditional contact center metrics like average handle time, and towards newer, customer-focused metrics like customer satisfaction, or CSAT. Taken together, these two movements are bringing about real change in the contact center.

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Reimagining CX: How to Implement Effective AI-Driven Transformations

Speaker: Steve Pappas, Chief Strategist, Startup and Early Stage Growth Advisor, Keynote Speaker, CX Podcaster

As businesses strive for success in an increasingly digitized world, delivering an exceptional customer experience has become paramount. To meet this demand, enterprises are embracing innovative approaches that captivate customers and fuel their loyalty. 💥 Enter conversational AI - an absolute game-changer (if done right) in redefining CX norms.

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The Competitive Dynamics Of Workforce Optimization–A Critical Driver Of Customer Experience–Unpacked

Ian Jacobs

We’ve all heard the idea so much it is now approaching hackneyed cliché: technological-driven disruption can—or will—hit every industry. Uber and Lyft have monkeyed around with the fundamental order of the taxi and livery business. 3D printing threatens manufacturing. And so on and so on. The result of all this disruption: customer experience has become […].

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Securing the Everywhere Perimeter

Avaya

The world is on the verge of an unprecedented expansion in networked connectivity, driven by the combined forces of the Internet of Things and Smart infrastructures. These are posing significant threats to today’s network security model. No organization can afford to ignore the importance of protecting access to its network, applications, and information.

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Using Your Employees' Voices to Transform the Customer Experience

CX Journey

Image courtesy of elinor_dear I originally wrote today's post for TandemSeven. It appeared on their blog on January 7, 2016. Fact : Without your employees, you have no customer experience. The linkage between employee experience and customer experience has been proven. It's real, and your employees matter. What is the employee experience? It's the sum of all interactions that an employee has with his employer during the duration of his employment relationship.