Sat.Jan 16, 2021 - Fri.Jan 22, 2021

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3 Myths About Call Center Outsourcing Regions

Outsource Consultants

The call center outsourcing industry has always had to buck a few assumptions, whether it be the quality of service provided or the benefits it can deliver. But, the global success of call center outsourcing services, and the emerging economies it helps support, seems to be proof enough. However, there are still myths about outsourcing – despite evidence to the contrary – that we want to put to bed right now.

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The Role of a Confidence Score in Conversational AI

Interactions

This blog is written courtesy of Interactions R&D team. When should AI say: “I don’t know”? No one is perfect! Humans make mistakes, and so do machines. An admirable quality in humans is to accept one’s mistakes. It turns out that it is also a valuable quality for AI. In recent years, the role of AI has become prominent in every aspect of our lives.

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Does Word Error Rate Matter?

SmartAction

Word Error Rate (WER) is a common metric for measuring speech-to-text accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Microsoft claims to have a word error rate of 5.1%. Google boasts a WER of 4.9%. For comparison, human transcriptionists average a word error rate of 4%. But what exactly does this metric measure? Does WER really matter? How to Calculate WER.

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Small Improvements in Customer Service Create Big Wins

ShepHyken

Little successes added together make for large success down the road. Small successes add up. To put it in baseball terms, you don’t need to hit a home run every time it’s your turn at bat. So, here’s the question to consider: What small change will enhance the experience for the customer, even if it is just by 1%? My friend and client, Jason Bradshaw of Volkswagen in Australia, was tasked with improving the customer experience for the VW dealerships.

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Reimagine Your Communications With A Unified Platform

Cut complexity and boost efficiency while empowering your customers with Nextiva's unified communications platform. Nextiva streamlines workflows and centralizes customer interactions, all while simplifying business collaboration, increasing productivity, and reducing employee burnout.

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How to Use Psychological Priming to Get Customers to Accept Your Word As Final

Myra Golden Media

Some of you know my undergrad degree is in Psychology. I taught college psych several years before jumping into the customer service space. I apply psychological principles to all my work in de-escalation and call control. In last week’s super-fantastic 4-day De-escalation Academy , I taught my students how to use psychology to get angry customers to back down and accept their word as final.

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McDonald’s Hot Coffee Case and the Customer Experience

Steve DiGioia

We all know that the coffee McDonald’s sells is too hot to drink when served. If you put it to your lips, you’ll most likely receive a burn that will be far worse than anything most people have ever encountered. So why do they make their coffee so hot? And how does this affect the customer experience? By now you must have heard about the famous “McDonald’s Hot Coffee Case”.

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5 Top Customer Service Articles For the Week of January 18, 2021

ShepHyken

Each week I read a number of customer service and customer experience articles from various 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. 21 Tips for 2021 Customer Experience Excellence by Lynn Hunsaker. (ClearAction) Here are 21 tips for achieving 2021 customer experience excellence in these areas and beyond.

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The New World for Contact Centers May Be Where We Were Already Headed

Contact Center Pipeline

2020 was nothing short of challenging for businesses. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, we all scrambled to adjust to the new state of the world. Virtually overnight, hundreds of thousands of agents transitioned to working remotely and the approach, management and infrastructure of contact centers were completely restructured. In the months following, we […].

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Planning for the call center hybrid workforce

CCNG

In a recent CCNG event, I spoke about the trends that I’m seeing globally in call centres. Many of the trends that my co-presenters spoke about are convergent (many people are moving to the same approach), the main example of that being the acceleration of cloud and home working driven by reactions to Covid-19. This acceleration of trends will continue through 2021 What’s happening at the agent level?

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The 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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“World Experience Organization” Created Will Help Us All Be Better in 2021

Beyond Philosophy

No matter what business you are in, the best way to connect with your customers is through the experience you provide them. However, connecting requires knowing what customers want, and today, that isn’t the same as it was 20 years ago. The Experience Economy dictates that people value experiences over material things these days. In addition to knowing what customers want, wouldn’t it also be great to know what works in Customer Experience Management?

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Best Practices to Monitor Your Remote Call Center Agents

ShepHyken

This week we feature an article from Tanya Bansal , Marketing Executive at Ameyo. Sh e shares best practices supervisors can use for monitoring call center agents in a work-from-home scenario. COVID-19 has led us to believe that we need to rethink, amend, and strengthen our contact centers with robust technology to stay ahead of the pandemic.

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Unexpected Lessons from the 2020 Contact Center

Contact Center Pipeline

About a year ago, I tried something that we would all agree now was a bit foolish: predict what the 2020 contact center would look like. Before the COVID-19 pandemic sent agents home on a massive scale, before economic disruption reinforced the need for consistent, digitally enabled customer experiences (CX), I outlined several ongoing trends […].

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Here’s 2 Sure-Fire Tactics That Have Never Let Me Down – Tip #25

Steve DiGioia

Most people have a few go-to strategies that they follow during times of need. They’re comforted knowing they have a tried-and-true method that works for them and have tactics that have never let them down. I’m no different. Experience has shown us the way and we are better off because of it. So, what tactics work for you? Oh, you don’t want to give up your secrets.

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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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313: Jeff Harry – Playing at work (Enhancing CX with Play)

CX Global Media

Sean Ryan was put in charge of an engineering team that had more experience than he had been alive. He wanted them to be more focused on the customer, but he could not possibly dictate any decision to them because they were more experienced than he was. Not really knowing what he could bring to the table, Sean tried to figure out what value that he could bring to the team, and he realized that if he could create space for them from the bureaucracy within the company, then they would be able to p

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Amazing Business Radio: Mahesh Ram

ShepHyken

5-Star CX of the Future. Concierge-Like Experiences Using Smarter Technology. Shep Hyken interviews Mahesh Ram, founding CEO of Solvvy. They discuss how next-generation chatbots and automation technology allow brands to deliver concierge-like experiences for consumers. Top Takeaways: Companies and brands are connecting in new and different ways. The companies that will win are one’s that can deliver consistent, on-brand experiences in every channel, 24-7, because that’s what consumers demand.

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Leading with Empathy: Demonstrate Understanding, Care and Compassion for Customers and Employees

Contact Center Pipeline

Everyone could use a little more empathy these days. The desire to feel heard and understood is a basic human need, and one that has a proven impact for companies. Numerous studies have linked empathy in the workplace to increased revenue and higher employee and customer satisfaction. It’s no surprise then that the demand for […].

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8 Simple Ways to Improve Agent Performance in the Call Center

Fonolo

Ready to level up your call center team this year? Improving agent performance can seem overwhelming at first, and you may find yourself wondering, “Where to start?” Don’t fret — these eight simple methods are all you need. With some hard work and a little luck, your team will be reaching new heights of operational efficiency ! Set your KPIs. You can’t change what you don’t measure.

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SME Relationships: Proven Solutions for Seamless Collaboration and Success

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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How Character Development Compliments CX

CX Global Media

How character development compliments CX strategy is one of the most important aspects we review from numerous and diverse sets of perspectives at CX Global. Read more. The post How Character Development Compliments CX appeared first on Customer Experience Strategy and Tactics.

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3 Contact Centre Trends for 2021

Call Design

Is your contact centre prepared for success in 2021? Now is the time to shake ourselves free of the challenges from 2020 and embrace new trends and technologies for the new year. Equip your agents and staff with the tools and technology they need to focus on what matters most: your customers. Utilize Real-Time Transcription. Real-time transcription can be used to study and enhance agent engagement, service, and information delivery with innovative artificial intelligence.

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The top trends that will shape CX in 2021

TELUS International

What can you expect from 2021 when it comes to digital customer experience (CX) trends? Two TELUS International executives share their predictions and advice.

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Virtual Queuing vs Call-Backs

Fonolo

The difference between a ‘ call-back ’ and a ‘ virtual queue ’ is subtle in definition but significant in outcomes. Many contact center managers have been distraught to find that what they needed was a call-back, but what they got was a virtual queue. 5 Amazing Reasons to Add Virtual Queuing to Your Contact Center. Fonolo has been the call-back specialist for over a decade, so we know a thing or two about what makes a call-back different from a virtual queue.

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Contact Center Dialers Demystified

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.

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What Are Customer Touchpoints?

GetFeedback

Identify customer touchpoints, map out a complete customer journey, and optimize the customer experience. Guides

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What Agent Satisfaction Says About Customer Satisfaction

Call Design

Contact centre agents are on the front line of your customer service efforts, fielding customer questions, and requests while upholding your organisation’s values and standards. Because of the job challenges, agent retention is a significant difficulty for contact centres worldwide. The biggest obstacle with high agent turnover is that it directly affects the satisfaction of your customers.

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If we can see it, we can fix it: How vision is expanding the roles of customer service staff

TechSee

There’s a new trend in customer service: the borders between technicians and agents are becoming blurred, with each one taking on aspects of the others’ traditional roles. Technicians normally found in the field are now stationed in a back office or working from home, guiding customers remotely as a traditional agent. Likewise, agents are now empowered to go above and beyond their standard scripts, using their newfound technical knowledge and skills to assist their customers.

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Keep Your 2021 Sales Pipeline Full Using the Selling Lessons of 2020

Integrity Solutions

By Will Milano. This past year laid bare some critical underlying selling skills and cracks in their sales pipeline that sales leaders were able to ignore or avoid while focusing on more immediate concerns. There’s no putting it off anymore. The good news is, we just went through a crash course in transformation — and there’s plenty to learn from it.

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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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Customers say the darndest things

GetFeedback

Customer service speaker, author, and coach Dan Gingiss reads real customer feedback live and gives you advice on what to do about it.

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Verint Is Uniquely Positioned to Address the Needs of SMB Customers

Monet Software

As a long-time industry analyst focused on the contact center workforce optimization market, I have long questioned why small to medium-size (SMB) businesses do not get more love from the major WFO vendors. Since 2007 Pelorus Associates has authored 19 comprehensive reports on WFO applications. Most of these included a recommendation that vendors expand their market reach to encompass small to medium businesses.

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A Bottle of Shampoo and Digital Customer Experience

NICE inContact

Your customers are living their lives digitally, so meeting them where they live makes it easier for them to communicate with you. Connecting with customers on platforms that they use and are familiar with goes a long way to driving an exceptional customer experience. Agents can engage with customers on these digital channels but so can bots, using the same rules you're applying to a chat on your website.