Beyond Philosophy

DECEMBER 10, 2015

People don’t choose your product or service because of the experience they had; they choose it because of the experience they remember—and these two are not the same thing! Creating a great memory of your experience in your Customer’s mind is critical to creating Customer Loyalty. Consider this quote from Professor Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize Winning Economist: “There is a big difference between an experience and the memory of an experience.”.

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Customer Experience Journey mapping Consulting Consulting 274

Callminer

DECEMBER 25, 2015

Industry experts have long estimated that 25 cents of every dollar spent by a call center goes toward fixing issues that weren’t properly addressed during the customer’s initial call.

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Call Center 182

Steve DiGioia

DECEMBER 14, 2015

are your expectations too high? This original article was written by Steve DiGioia. One of the challenges faced by a perfectionist is longevity. When we are younger and have energy to burn, we can relentlessly work through exhaustion and jump through hoops daily to achieve the perfection we seek. Usually this perfection is attained solely from our personal labor since “no one else can make it perfect but me”.

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Bill Quiseng

DECEMBER 14, 2015

This week’s post is written by Ravi Shukle. In my posts, I provide advice to improve face to face customer interactions. But today’s customers are expecting service on-line and on the social media channels that they use. One of the great benefits of social media is connecting with people who we would otherwise not meet. Since I certainly am not an expert on how to use social media for customer service, I reached out halfway around the world to someone who is, Ravi.

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Customer Service Best practices Feedback Personalization 151

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Contact Center

Contact Center Pipeline

DECEMBER 31, 2015

Training for social customer care agents and a thoughtful look at the common assumptions about agent attrition topped the list of most-read posts in December. Other topics of interest to our readers included a Q&A with the authors of a new guidebook on workforce optimization and customer engagement; a practical pointer for using daily rewards […].

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Beyond Philosophy

DECEMBER 23, 2015

Michael Lowenstein, Ph.D., CMC, is Thought Leadership Principal for Beyond Philosophy. In the past decade, we’ve seen the number of companies with an individual in the role of Chief Customer Officer (CCO) – nicely defined by Wikipedia as “the executive responsible for the total relationship with an organization’s customers” – grow from under 100 to thousands today.

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Callminer

DECEMBER 17, 2015

What is wrap up time in the call center – and why is it important for driving efficiency and improving the customer experience? Take a look in CallMiner’s latest blog post.

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Call Center Customer Experience 182

Steve DiGioia

DECEMBER 10, 2015

what is REALLY important to your business? This original article was written by Steve DiGioia. I thought my new sweater was “the cat’s meow”, ‘da bomb. Look at me all! I was struttin’ my stuff as I walked to school. High school was finally cool. I was cool. Well, not really. I was never the cool kid, mostly a band geek. But I played a mean saxophone, really, I did!

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Joe Rawlinson

DECEMBER 10, 2015

Sixty-one percent of marketers planned to increase their spending on email this year, making email a higher priority than social media, mobile marketing or any other channel, StrongView’s 2015 Marketing Trends Survey found. Marketers are focusing on automated email marketing methods, especially email triggered by recipient actions and emails geared toward stages in the customer lifecycle.

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Marketing Benchmark Surveys Sales 101

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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.

Analytics

Contact Center Pipeline

DECEMBER 30, 2015

It has been an exciting year at Pipeline with the launch of our blog. As 2015 comes to a close, we’d like to look back at our 10 most popular posts of the year. Do Frontline Agents Receive Enough Ongoing Training? We asked that question in a recent poll on Contact Center Training. The majority […].

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Win the Customer

DECEMBER 18, 2015

Metrics and statistics can’t measure the personality of employees, their ability to relate with callers, or the value they bring to an interaction. Concrete customer feedback metrics, KPIs and CRM systems can be considered as the ‘science’ behind call centers, but the soft skills of call center agents are considered as the art. Metrics and statistics can’t measure the personality of employees, their ability to relate with callers, or the value they bring to an interaction.

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Call Center call center workforce Metrics Customer emotions 93

Beyond Philosophy

DECEMBER 8, 2015

Creativity is essential to business today, particularly when the things that differentiate all of us from our competition decrease each year. A creative approach to business, to art, and to life will serve any individual well moving forward. I have written five books to date and will soon deliver number six. It occurred to me that I have learned a few things writing these books.

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Customer centricity Consulting Consulting Feedback 244

Callminer

DECEMBER 3, 2015

Interaction analytics unlocks valuable information hidden in interactions between contact centers and customers. Learn more in CallMiner’s latest resource guide.

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Contact Center Analytics 182

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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.

Contact Center

Steve DiGioia

DECEMBER 17, 2015

isn't that what customer service is all about? This original article was written by Steve DiGioia. Shopping; a necessary evil. Inattentive sales people, long lines, poor service, messy stores, high prices, etc. Retail sales people of today no longer know what customer service is. Most people don’t enjoy shopping, we wonder why. I’m no different.

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Customer Service Sales 159

BetterXperience

DECEMBER 24, 2015

Please stop me when this sounds familiar. A customer contacts your company, it goes terribly wrong with the representative, and of course you have to “learn from your mistakes”. So naturally, it’s time to find someone or something to blame so everyone else can feel better – you call it a post-mortem and almost every time you end up blaming training or “finding opportunities to improve training”.

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Coaching Calibration Feedback Personalization 91

Contact Center Pipeline

DECEMBER 29, 2015

A well-developed agent profile will allow you to understand what makes an ideal candidate before you begin the hiring process. It’s important to have a keen awareness of what you’re looking for, says Kevin Hegebarth, VP of Marketing and Product Management at HireIQ Solutions. “This is where predictive analytics really comes into play,” he says. […].

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Win the Customer

DECEMBER 26, 2015

There’s an immense difference between aspiring to deliver exceptional customer service and actually delivering winning customer service. The right team can make the biggest difference in exceptional service experiences. Every time I review customer submitted feedback, I always look for key terms that establish patters for successful customer service interactions or potential negative trends in customers’ experience.

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Customer Service Feedback Personalization Customer Support 92

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!

Customer Experience

Beyond Philosophy

DECEMBER 22, 2015

Michael Lowenstein, Ph.D., CMC, is Thought Leadership Principal for Beyond Philosophy. As they are gathering information to help in day-to-day brand decision-making, consumers want, crave, desire, seek, and value content from marketers – as long as it is reasonably altruistic, informative and objective, and minimizes the ‘look of sponsorship’ and the three most readily identifiable sales ‘P’s’: push, pitch, and puff.

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Marketing Engineering Consulting Consulting 231

Callminer

DECEMBER 23, 2015

Drive performance improvements with speech analytics, personalized coaching, and agent scorecards in the call center. Read more.

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Call Center Coaching Management Analytics 182

Steve DiGioia

DECEMBER 3, 2015

This original article was written by Steve DiGioia. It was the coldest winter ever. Many animals died because of the cold. The hedgehogs, realizing the situation, decided to group together to keep warm. This way they covered and protected themselves; but the quills of each one wounded their closest companions. After a while, they decided to distance themselves one from the other and they began to die, alone and frozen.

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Morale Personalization Customer Service 160

BetterXperience

DECEMBER 24, 2015

If you have spent a day in corporate America, you know better than to even question the truism, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Apparently, the contact center industry decided to make this mantra a religion and worship at the temple of measuring every single thing. Almost every practitioner I meet feels obligated to tell me about a new metric he or she is measuring.

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Average Handle Time Metrics Contact Center Customer effort 91

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Contact Center Pipeline

DECEMBER 24, 2015

Once you begin to form a more holistic view of the customer’s journey, you can define the interactions that truly impact the customer experience—which are the ones you want to measure. Cynthia Grimm, Chief Customer Experience Officer, CX Solutions (formerly TARP Worldwide), recommends focusing on the key drivers of overall satisfaction. Consider: What are the […].

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Customer Experience Contact Center Call Center 100

Win the Customer

DECEMBER 14, 2015

The key to customer experience success is in utilizing technology that ensures CX levels are high, while meeting strategic operational goals. Customer experience is increasingly being spoken of as a cross-company initiative. But each department in an organization has their own KPI’s to consider. While Sales need numbers, Finance are looking at the bottom line and Legal are over protective about regulations, customer experience is often not at the top of the agenda beyond the Marketing departmen

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Customer Experience Finance Banking Accountability 88

Beyond Philosophy

DECEMBER 3, 2015

Wouldn’t it be great if you could truly predict Customer’s behavior. Well you can! Welcome to the world of behavioral economics. I have recently been included in Brand Quarterly’s ‘Top 50 Marketing Thought Leaders over 50’ and they asked me an interesting question: “What do I think the next industry trends would be for the year?” I thought I would expand on my thoughts here and give a better explanation.

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Marketing Customer emotions Consulting Consulting 218

Customers That Stick

DECEMBER 1, 2015

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Customer Service 79

Customer Service 79

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

Steve DiGioia

DECEMBER 7, 2015

how did YOU get that promotion? This original article was written by Steve DiGioia. Those not in management think a manager’s job is easy. You get to “come in or leave when you want”, go to meetings all day, you make the big bucks and “never do any REAL work” They all want to be a manager. “I’m ready to be the boss, I know what I’m doing”, they say. “I’ll fix things around here”… You finally give that good employee

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Management Morale Personalization Customer Service 88

NICE inContact

DECEMBER 9, 2015

From its humble beginnings as a hat business founded by German nationals who fled Europe in 1938, to a global corporation with five brands, Columbia Sportswear is made up of real people who are passionate about the outdoors. That passion also extends to delivering outstanding customer service. As their customer support inquiries increased, Columbia Sportswear knew they needed a new contact center solution to support seasonal call volumes, e-commerce, and their unique brands.

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Customer Service Contact Center Telecommunications Call Center 75

Contact Center Pipeline

DECEMBER 23, 2015

Even the most effective measures will not impact the company’s ability to deliver an exceptional experience if the feedback cannot be translated into improvements at the point of contact. Leading-edge organizations regularly analyze behavioral data for frontline performance issues that impact the customer experience. For instance, if a manager identifies reps who have a higher […].

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