April, 2021

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Sound and Smell: The Crucial Missing Aspect in Your CX Design

Beyond Philosophy

Businesses often underestimate the importance of the areas of sound and smell in their Customer Experience. However, these two areas are crucial to get right—or you risk ending your Customer Experience on a sour note. This underexploited area is why I was so keen to get Simon Faure-Field , CEO of Equal Strategy , an experience design consultancy, on a recent podcast.

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Are There Better Ways to Staff the Contact Center?

Contact Center Pipeline

Executives regularly ask contact center leaders to explore new operational paradigms that could benefit their organizations. Some of these ideas come from things they hear from peers or vendors. Others result from their own research or exposure to analyst perspectives that speak to innovation and disruptive change. The following three ideas crop up frequently on […].

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Stop Reading From The Script!

ShepHyken

This is why some companies get a bad rap! Our colleague here at Shepard Presentations, Nate Jones, shared a story about something that recently happened to his father. This is a great customer service training lesson. He bought a new car. About a month later he’s in a parking lot and the car won’t start. So, he calls the dealership’s customer service number, which was actually a support center for all of that brand’s dealerships in the U.S. – maybe even the world.

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Migrating Contact Center Solutions to the Cloud – a Business and Operational Perspective

CCNG

Contact Center solutions have evolved significantly over the last two decades. Before 2005, the vast majority of contact center software was On-Premise based and highly fragmented. At around that time, Cloud-based solutions began gaining popularity, but the first Cloud-based solutions were still point solution-oriented and didn’t offer integration between systems so businesses had to deal with multiple vendors and configure back-end integrations themselves.

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The Contact Center Manager’s Guide to AI

Step-by-step instructions on how to use AI for growth in your contact center Learn how AI can transform your contact center operations. In this ebook, dig into the different AI technologies, then see how each can help automate tasks, streamline service, and turn your contact center from a cost center to a profit house. Plus, we’ll give you practical tips on choosing the right AI tools, getting them up and running, and measuring their impact.

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How to Train and Support Remote Customer Service Employees

Myra Golden Media

This morning I hosted a webinar for leaders of customer service departments and operations. I walked everyone through how to prepare customer service specialists to apply psychological tactics to bring down the temperature in interactions and de-escalate. When we moved to Q & A, Sherry asked a question about training and supporting remote agents: Our contact center agents will work remotely for the foreseeable future.

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The 10 Most Effective Ways to Influence Your Customer Behavior

Beyond Philosophy

Emotions rule your customers’ buying decisions. Sure, their rationality weighs in sometimes, too, but often, it’s the emotional side that drives customers to buy. These two parts of us, the emotional and the rational represent the two ways of thinking that serve as the foundation for understanding customer behavior. Knowing how these two systems of thinking work together and, in some cases, against each other to make decisions is vital to achieving customer-driven growth.

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Evolving Challenges Require Evolving Solutions

Contact Center Pipeline

Many articles written toward the tail end of 2019 pegged 2020 as a year of big change for the contact center industry. Predictions from a variety of industry experts included more adoption of digital interaction tools, greater automation of interaction evaluations and the growing importance of agent engagement and satisfaction. We couldn’t possibly have known […].

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There Is No Excuse to Not Respond to a Customer

ShepHyken

Let me put it to you in the simplest terms possible. When your customer calls, emails or texts you, you must respond. That is unless you don’t care if they ever do business with you again. One of our subscribers to The Shepard Letter , Andy Saks, owner of Spark Presentations and professional corporate presenter , sent in a story worth sharing. (By the way, if you’ve got an amazing – or horrific – customer service story, send it over.

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Lessons from the Pandemic to Improve Your Customer Experience Now

Bill Quiseng

When first confronted with this pandemic we moved quickly to identify the high risks for our employees and our customers and then worked to define the action steps required to minimize those risks. We got everyone involved at all levels of the organizations, followed local, state, and federal guidelines which changed week-to-week, and innovated, looking at every possible solution to keep us safe.

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Frost Radar: Voice of Customer Analytics, 2024

Understanding and improving your customer experience (CX) can have a massive impact on your bottom line. Choosing the right voice of customers (VoC) solution is a critical step to elevating CX. Frost & Sullivan researched more than 50 leading VoC vendors, analyzing both their “innovation index” and “growth index” to independently select the top 10 performers in each of these categories.

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Handling Foreign Accents Professionally + Using Positive Phrases

Myra Golden Media

Was This Helpful? I’m asking you because I share ideas like this weekly to my private email list. Signup here to get help improving the sound, feel, and flow of your customer interactions.

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At Least Grumpy Old Guys Know What Great Customer Service Is

Steve DiGioia

As I’ve gotten older, I better understand why many “old folks” (speaking from the viewpoint of me as a kid) got so grumpy. They’re tired of dealing with years of B.S. from so many people and have had enough of it. They just want to live their lives in peace and will no longer accept subpar work or attitudes. Me too. During our young adult years, we’re still concerned about “fitting in” and finding our place in “work world” – which is either far different from or eerily similar to “school world”.

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Discover the Actual Number of People You Can Effectively Manage

Beyond Philosophy

Let’s imagine that you’re an account manager with 200 customers. If you know that 80 percent of your revenue comes from 20 percent of those customers, what do you think happens to the other 80 percent that only accounts for 20 percent of the revenue? Yep, you guessed right, not much. However, the reason not much happens with these accounts could be influenced by the biological amount of bandwidth you have for maintaining relationships.

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Top Seven Call Center Software Requirements for the “Now Normal”

Contact Center Pipeline

2020 was already showing signs of being a transformative year for the call center industry—with growing interest in “all things cloud” due to the benefits of an OpEx model, zero-touch roadmap upgrades, and the beginning rumblings of moving away from the traditional brick-and-mortar facility to save on capital expenses and attract talent from a wider […].

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Your Roadmap to Successful AI Implementations in the Contact Center

CX leaders are in a gold rush for AI, lured by the promise of cost savings and a revolution in service delivery. But simply deploying AI in your contact center isn't a magic bullet. There are hidden dangers that can derail your AI dreams. Recent incidents, such as the missteps of an AI chatbot deployed by Air Canada, have underscored the complexities and risks involved in leveraging AI in customer-facing roles.

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Amazing Business Radio: Stacy Sherman

ShepHyken

Diversity and Inclusion Within the CX Featuring Stacy Sherman. How diversity and inclusion impact the customer experience and what practices to adopt. Shep Hyken interviews Stacy Sherman, Founder of DoingCXRight and Director of Customer Experience & Employee Engagement at Schindler Elevator Corporation. They discuss Diversity and Inclusion and how it links to the Customer Experience.

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Social Media is Bad for Customer Service

Bill Quiseng

Social media is bad for customer service. Whether ranting or raving, customers are telling stories online about businesses whether those businesses are listening or not. With customers using platforms like Twitter and Facebook to complain loudly and sometimes virally to the world, companies have had to add resources to respond accordingly. But I am not against monitoring social media or using it as a responsive customer service channel.

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AI in Call Centers: Top innovations for 2021

TechSee

Call centers are busier than ever. According to a 2021 survey, 65% of U.S. consumers have required assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic. These growing call volumes – coupled with the continuous need for cost optimizations – have driven the demand and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in call centers. AI is moving forward rapidly, with contact center AI software continuously evolving and dramatically improving, and ultimately delivering more value. .

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Let Them Figure It Out – Tip #31

Steve DiGioia

Many managers love to micromanage. They just can’t help it. They believe that telling an employee exactly how to do something and when to do it will fix all their ills. This makes the employee’s job easier. They don’t have to think. Simply “tell them what to do” for every situation and they’ll do it. But what happens when the boss isn’t around? What do the employees do?

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How to Optimize Call Monitoring: Automate QA and Elevate Customer Experience

Speaker: Laura Noonan, Chief Revenue Officer at CallFinder + Angie Kronlage, Director of Program Success at Working Solutions + April Wiita, Vice President of Program Success at Working Solutions

Are you still manually reviewing calls? 🤔 It's time for a change! The traditional method of manual call monitoring is no longer cutting it in today's fast-paced call center environment. Industry experts Angie Kronlage and April Wiita from Working Solutions are here to explore the power of innovative automation to revolutionize outdated call review processes!

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5 Rules for Successfully Managing Your Company Politics

Beyond Philosophy

There is a surprising lack of literature on company politics. For such an important topic that can be awkward for people, it seems there should be books, podcasts, training, and everything else on it. Today I am going to do my part on being some of the change I want to see in the world. I am sharing the five rules for dealing with company politics that I learned over my career.

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What to Do After Migrating Your Contact Center to the Cloud

Contact Center Pipeline

Over the last year, we’ve seen much of the workforce shift to remote work as companies adapted to operating during a global pandemic. With this transition, businesses turned to digital technologies powered by the cloud to support their contact center operations. In addition, some organizations have taken it one step further by transitioning their contact […].

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Amazing Business Radio: Jeff Toister

ShepHyken

An Amazing Customer Experience, Guaranteed . How to Get Customers to Gain Trust and Confidence in Your Brand. Shep Hyken interviews Jeff Toister , a customer service author, consultant, and trainer. They discuss how making or breaking promises effects the customer experience. . Top Takeaways: . Broken p romises to your customers can be either implicit or explicit depending on the situation or marketing strategy. .

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6 Essential Tips to Increase a Low CSAT Score

Fonolo

For today’s businesses, closing deals and making sales isn’t enough. If your customers aren’t happy with the experience you provide, they’ll leave you without a word. That’s where CSAT — or customer satisfaction — scores come in. This KPI is essential for contact centers to measure how their customers feel about their service. It’s a great way to explore trends within customer feedback and identify problem areas.

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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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Once in a Century

Taylor Reach Group

By Colin Taylor. We are now more than a year into the “new normal” and increasingly contact center organizations are recognizing this fact. I am often asked if I think that contact centers will ever go back to 100% “bricks and mortar”, and the answer I give is no, that ship has sailed. Organizations were forced by the pandemic to deploy work from home and it wasn’t, as many feared, dominated by staff sitting on the couch eating cheese doodles and watching “The Talk”.

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4 Reasons why your Customer Service Needs to be a Profit Generator

TechSee

Is customer service a cost center or a profit center? If you answered ‘cost center’, right now is the perfect time to challenge that assumption. Read on to learn four reasons why this is the case – and how to make the shift within your company. The traditional outlook on customer service. A cost center is a function or department – like customer service – that costs your business money to operate but doesn’t actively generate revenue.

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How the pandemic is shaping the future of social commerce

TELUS International

Social selling, or social commerce, is revolutionizing the way organizations do business online. Here's how it can help you deliver a more satisfying customer experience.

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What Is Your Customer-Centric DNA?

Contact Center Pipeline

The definition of a “truly customer-centric” organization is one that has mastered the ability to intentionally design and consistently deliver the ideal customer experience across all products, channels and brands. The processes to design, organize and oversee every interaction between a customer and an organization is managed through a disciplined customer experience management approach.

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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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Here’s How to Get Your Customers to Say, “I’ll Be Back!”

ShepHyken

Many companies think they have to compare themselves to their competition. They want to know what the competition is doing that they are not. And when they figure it out, you know what they do? They copy them. It’s not a bad idea to do that, but it’s not the best idea either. If all you do is compare yourself to your competitors, you may be missing your best opportunities to create the best experience for your customers.

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Why is Occupancy Rate So Important in the Call Center?

Fonolo

Occupancy Rate is one of the most widely used metrics in the call center industry. But what exactly does it mean, and how can you leverage it to better your business? If you’re new to call center KPIs or need a refresher, you’ve come to the right place. Read on for a crash course on occupancy rate! The Executive Guide to Improving 6 Call Center Metrics.

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Customer Service in Higher Education: Why is It Important and How to Improve It

HelpCrunch

When I was a university student, I somehow managed to dig up all the information by myself. There was no one to guide me through dozens of processes, show how tasks should be done, or [ … ]. The post Customer Service in Higher Education: Why is It Important and How to Improve It appeared first on HelpCrunch blog.

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