SharpenCX

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

Picture this: It’s the week of Thanksgiving and the phones at my neighbor’s bakery are going wild. See, my neighbor, Christina, runs operations for a chain of bakeries in the Midwest. She worked with her teams to carefully package the baked-to-perfection pies and slap the right labels on the boxes to get them out the door. Then she staffed up her customer service team to handle the imminent flow of questions and add-on orders.

Metrics 64

Metrics Best practices Call Center Surveys 64

Playvox

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

According to Peppers and Rogers Group , only “65% of companies provide effective tools and training to their agents.” Harris Interactive reports that “.customer service agents fail to answer customer questions 50% of the time.”.

Personalization 41

Personalization Customer Service Management 41

Interaction Metrics

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

The prevalence of Survey Monkey and other DIY survey platforms have made it cheap and easy to implement customer satisfaction surveys. And while these platforms might be right for you, before you jump in, hit pause and think your DIY strategy through. With a DIY Customer Survey, some of the areas you’ll need to address are data accuracy, objectivity, customer engagement, and overall ease of use.

Surveys 48

Surveys Feedback B2B Enterprise 48

The Northridge Group

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

Ensure your contact center is equipped with the right recruiting, screening, and training processes to boost call center strategies with these three tips.

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Contact Center Call Center 277

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Preparing for impactful coaching sessions shouldn't be a bottleneck to success. "Innovation Insight: Coaching Tech to Boost Customer Service Performance" from Gartner shows practical ways to turn this around. In the research, Gartner found that “customer service and support supervisors, who are responsible for coaching, often lack availability and only spend an average of 30% of their time on it.” 1 We believe this valuable resource offers an objective look at how technology can facilitate more

Customer Service

Contact Center Pipeline

NOVEMBER 13, 2019

The winter holidays aren’t always “the most wonderful time of the year” for the contact center. Time-off requests and spikes in call volume, especially in the retail industry, can bring forecasting and scheduling headaches that rival those induced by too much eggnog at the office party. New technologies powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can change […].

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Contact Center Technology Chatbots Analytics 147

Toister Performance Solutions

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

My local car dealership struggles with service. On multiple occasions, I've arrived for an appointment only to learn a needed part didn't arrive as expected. That meant I had to drive home and come back another day. The mechanic once badly scratched my car's front fender and didn't say anything—I noticed the damage just as I was getting in the car. The dealer fixed it, but my car was in the body shop for a few days.

Surveys 65

Surveys Feedback Metrics Customer Service 65

ShepHyken

NOVEMBER 13, 2019

It wasn’t that long ago that you would go to a store, dine at a restaurant, do business with a vendor or call a customer support center and notice how good the customer service was. A great service experience stood out. It was noticed. It was a differentiator. I started my speaking business in the 1980s. I know, I look much younger than I actually am, but it really was that long ago.

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ShepHyken

NOVEMBER 15, 2019

This week we feature an article by Nogol Tardugno who tells us how to get our contact center interactive voice response (IVR) to deliver the best customer experience. Any reports of the death of interactive voice response (IVR) as a customer service channel have been greatly exaggerated. In 2019 businesses continue to fund their IVR call solutions as statistics both formal and anecdotal continue to demonstrate the need.

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Beyond Philosophy

NOVEMBER 15, 2019

Customers have an idea of whether you are a low- or high-priced store almost before they ever interact with you. There are many reasons for it, and you are responsible for a lot of them. There is a story that demonstrates this concept that happened in a neighborhood in Boston called Jamaica Plain. It was historically a working-class neighborhood with many immigrant families living there.

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Construction Consulting Consulting Airlines 301

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This comprehensive report explores the evolving landscape of customer and business expectations, with five key trends that will help you understand your customers and stay ahead of the competition. Discover how your peers are implementing AI to improve customer experience with granular insights into their CX investments and specific AI use cases. For the first time, customers prefer digital channels when interacting with a business.

Customer Experience

Connect

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

Live web chat is a popular way to deliver customer support, in fact, you can argue that some demographics prefer website chat to other channels such as voice or email. Web chat has its challenges though, particularly in terms of scalability. Chatbots promise to alleviate typical web chat limitations, but what exactly is the difference between chatbots and web chat, and when should you choose one over the other?

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Chatbots Customer Support Customer Experience 40

CSM Magazine

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

Despite the power of artificial intelligence to transform the customer experience, many AI projects fail at the first hurdle. Henry Jinman at EBI.AI outlines the 5 most common mistakes and how to avoid them using a tried and tested checklist. While Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises a new dawn of efficiency, performing tasks better, faster, with fewer people, at lower cost and on a far larger scale, it also holds the key to transforming the customer experience (CX).

Chatbots 49

Chatbots Technology Customer Experience Marketing 49

Nicereply

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

Luckily, as customer experience has grown in importance, so has the tooling that helps us provide it. Customer Experience, up until recently, wasn’t really in the limelight. People knew what it was, but it didn’t really seem too important. As long as your customers’ questions got answered, it didn’t really matter how it happened. However, it’s become increasingly important to provide a good experience to your customers.

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Journey mapping Customer Experience Multichannel Contact Center 75

Andrew Mcfarland

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

Every company likes to believe that they have a unique culture. Indeed, someone once described culture as “the way we do things around here when no one is looking!” So, whether a company invests a little time on culture or.

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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.

LiveVox

NOVEMBER 13, 2019

An Introduction to Two-Way SMS for Contact Centers A two-way SMS platform is one that incorporates outbound and inbound text messaging into a unified service. SMS is one of the fastest-growing channels for business communication. And it’s no surprise as SMS engagement and costs outperform the more traditional phone and email. Here are a few. The post What is Two-way SMS Messaging and Why do 64% of your Customers Want It?

Contact Center 41

Contact Center 41

Noble Systems

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

The cloud communications market is fast and everchanging. Recently, industry analyst Jon Arnold sat down with Noble Systems’ Karl Koster to discuss the approaches cloud providers are taking to have success in a crowded market where it’s hard to differentiate, highlighting how they are growing today, and how they plan to grow tomorrow. As Arnold explains, these approaches are worth noting since the cloud is really a dual-edged sword.

Analytics 59

Analytics Contact Center Marketing Technology 59

Guru

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

When we think about our daily interactions with technology, “searching” becomes synonymous with “surfing.” Searching has become ubiquitous with the internet—nearly any “connected” action we can perform begins with some kind of a search. This means two things: first, that as consumers of technology, we’ve come to expect seamless search experiences; and second, that the companies providing us these opportunities to search have a whole lot of data around how we’re doing it.

Technology 55

Technology Marketing 55

CallSource Insights

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

Do you know what your connectivity rate is at your dealership? When data shows that phone calls are the second-most-common initial form of contact with car dealerships, you have to pay attention to phone skills. Dealers must make getting calls to the right person the first time a priority, so customers don’t hang up and call the next dealership. In today’s automotive marketplace, the phone call has become more important than ever as customers spend less time in the dealership and more time doing

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Automotive Interactive Voice Response Coaching Sales 40

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

Eptica

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2019 Author: Taoufik Massoussi - Product Manager & Head of AI Why you need more than NPS to drive CX excellence. Published on: November 12, 2019. Author: Taoufik Massoussi - Product Manager & Head of AI At a time when customer experience ( CX ) is critical to business success , being able to measure your customers’ satisfaction levels is hugely important.

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Airlines Metrics Best practices Analytics 74

Steve DiGioia

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

Great service is comprised of many parts and each must be present to create the experience every customer desires. Let’s briefly discuss each one of my top 8 until we get to “memory”. I know you’ll agree with me that it should be near the top of your list. Training. Training for the needed service skills is an essential foundational aspect of great service in any industry.

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Best practices Management Customer Service 231

Beyond Philosophy

NOVEMBER 15, 2019

Tribalism: Are You In with The In-Crowd? As humans, the need to belong is essential to us. Most of us have a deep need to feel we are part of a broader community that shares our values and interests. In other words, we need to find our tribe. Tribes are connections between people that form communities, which can be formal or informal. Sometimes tribes are associated with where you were born and from whom, which are the formal types of tribes.

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Consulting Consulting Surveys Marketing 240

ShepHyken

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

Create a Disney-Worthy Customer Experience. Building a magical customer experience at every level. Shep Hyken interviews Dennis Snow. They discuss how to define an organization’s level of service and company culture by looking at examples from the Walt Disney World Company. Top Takeaways: There are two steps to defining your organization’s level of service.

Coaching 232

Coaching Consulting Consulting Customer Experience 232

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Discover a new approach to reducing contact center attrition with our in-depth eBook. After analyzing 20+ academic studies, we highlight overlooked causes like lack of leadership trust, emotional labor, and job shock, and introduce the Attrition Velocity metric to better understand attrition's real cost. Our guide doesn't stop at diagnosis; it offers actionable strategies and tools to address these issues head-on.

Contact Center

Callminer

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

Learning how to optimize your own surveys can help your business capture key information from customers consistently.

Surveys 207

Surveys 207

Contact Center Pipeline

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

As one customer recently shared in a G2 review, “We have realized millions of dollars in savings by not only taking advantage of offline time but being able to notify agents when certain performance metrics are out of line, such as extended ACW, allowing them to spend more time focusing on productive work.” Hats off […].

Metrics 145

Metrics Contact Center Call Center Technology 145

TechSee

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

Smart Home technology is expected to become a $151.4 billion market by 2024. However, it still has a long way to go before it reaches its full potential. Many consumers face significant technical challenges as they set about smartening up their homes. While in theory, smart devices should be easy to set up – most are wireless and can be remotely connected – in reality, non-technical customers are often insufficiently skilled to set up these products on their own.

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Technology Self service Wireless Contact Center 138

ShepHyken

NOVEMBER 11, 2019

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. 3 Ways Store Layout Decisions Impact on Customer Experience by Oisin Ryan. (ServiceDock) The following covers three of the most common and obviously non-customer-centric strategies that retailers use.

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Customer Service Customer centricity B2C B2B 231

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Today’s digitally savvy customers have high expectations of retailers for convenience, responsiveness, and ease of doing business both in-store and online. Our recent survey of over 2,000 US consumers found that retailers that can drive a seamless, omnichannel customer experience (CX) – across physical and digital channels – have huge benefits for brand relevance, profitability, and customer loyalty.

Customer Experience

Callminer

NOVEMBER 10, 2019

Call Center Outsourcing allows a business to offer its customers services it otherwise would not be financially well-positioned enough to offer.

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outsourcing Call Center Customer Service 182

Contact Center Pipeline

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

Contact center leaders often find themselves faced with the challenge of having to quickly staff up to accommodate business growth and expansion. Identifying a top candidate who has the passion and skills to deliver on your CX vision, whose values align with your company’s and who is a natural fit for the culture requires management […].

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Banking Contact Center Management Call Center 113

Peter Lavers

NOVEMBER 13, 2019

International recognition as a top influencer / expert in the field of Customer Experience (CX) is not something that WCL Customer Management founder Peter Lavers has actively sought, but it is very much appreciated as it’s independent recognition of his thought leadership and passion for driving the customer centric agenda in business. Cloud Knowledge Management specialists Panviva have again named Peter in their list of top 25 CX professionals to follow.

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Customer centricity Customer Experience Management CRM 100