CRMXchange

According to Nemertes Research, five key trends are reshaping customer-­‐experience management:

Increasing adoption of mobile devices enables engagement with customers and business partners across broad array of devices.

Big Data and speech analytics delivers new and insight into contact center performance and allows companies to improve customer service experience.

 Popularity of consumer social services such as Facebook and Twitter are emerging as a new interaction channel for customer engagement...

In today’s highly competitive consumer marketplaces, effective customer engagement becomes the key differentiator that can separate an organization from the pack and enable it to quickly win market share over domestic and international competitors. Having the capability to quickly respond to marketplace forces and impactful events to deliver performance improvement is critical to immediate and long-term success.

As companies face commoditization of their product and service offerings, they need...

Coaching is as much a critical process in today’s contact centers as workforce management, quality monitoring, and call routing.  Agents need feedback and goals to improve and succeed, and it is the supervisor’s role as a coach to manage and deliver that performance guidance. Unfortunately, in many contact centers today, coaching is not managed with strategy and rigor or treated as a first-class process. Often, the supervisor-agent relationship is broken, jeopardizing the success of...

If you count all customer touch points – from support interactions and in-person conversations to advertisements – the average company has millions, if not billions, of customer interactions a year across paid, earned, and owned channels. For your business, each channel touch point represents an opportunity for greater insight. A branded customer community connects your customers to each other – and your employees – as they talk about your products and services. The insight you can gain from...

It’s no secret that excellent customer service is the key to increased business and revenue. According to Gartner, a mere 5% improvement in customer retention can increase business profits anywhere from 25% to 125%.1 Contact centers have emerged as an important strategic asset for many companies since front line agents have an immediate and significant impact on customer experience.

Contact analytics takes the raw data that is trapped in customer interactions like phone calls, emails, and chats...

Many customer contact organizations have implemented Workforce Optimization (WFO) As an operational strategy to improve the performance of customer care professionals once they are on the contact center floor.

However, an agent’s relationship with a company begins well before he or she handles their first interaction. Therefore, a sound WFO practice starts well before then with the recruitment and hiring of agents who demonstrate the necessary skills and abilities to be successful.  A new HireIQ...

Technology is advancing at an exponential rate. Only a few years ago you might have been expected to offer just one or two communication channels for your customers. But over the last decade we've seen the arrival of web chat, customer forums, smart phone apps and social networks.

With all this excitement, you might be forgiven for thinking these new channels are going to reduce the number of calls you get on the traditional telephone in your contact centre. However, we believe the addition of...

In a six month study, Mattersight Corporation commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the total economic impact and potential return on investment  enterprises may realize by deploying its Behavioral Analytics platform.

The Behavioral Analytics platform captures customer and employee interactions, and then automatically analyzes those interactions using proprietary algorithms and unique behavioral models. The output of this analysis is new data attributes on every interaction measuring...

Today’s customer support operations are overwhelmed by data—more often than not, leading to inaction. Customer support leaders, however, find themselves at an inflection point—they will either harness the tremendous wealth of data at their disposal to deliver transformational service and emerge as new leaders, or ignore the opportunity and engage in the status quo. The deluge of social media content, survey data, rising interaction volumes, KBs, recordings, chats, and more flowing through...

Yeah, I know, you've heard it before. Probably more than 90% of the sales and marketing people reading this post already know what I'm going to say — my concern is for the 10% who, at any given point in time, lose sight of what CRM is… and isn't.

Blame it on aggressive marketing by certain CRM solutions vendors, but there is always a percentage of sales and marketing people (especially the "noobs") who fall for the misconception that CRM is something that was created by software developers to...

A couple of weeks ago, a leaked memo revealed that tech giant Yahoo had decided to end its remote working policy. The move has certainly rattled the cages of employees and commentators alike. Forbes called it an ‘epic fail’ – even Richard Branson waded into the kerfuffle.

And the debate rumbles on. For in the greatest age of flexible working, powered by conveniences like the cloud, why expect people to be tied to an office?

Sure, an office environment can’t be beaten for building a culture and...

By Greg Levin

True contact centre success comes when organisations make the critical switch from a ‘measure everything that moves’ mind-set to one of ‘measure what matters most’. Given that we are now living in the Age of Customer Influence, ‘what matters most’ is that which most increases the likelihood of the customer not telling the world how evil you are via Twitter.

No longer can companies coast on Average Handle Time (AHT) and Number of Calls Handled per Hour. Such metrics may have ruled...

The cloud contact center market is experiencing tremendous growth, while the on-premise sector struggles on. NewVoiceMedia, a leading provider of integrated cloud contact center services, experienced fourfold growth between Q1 2011 and 2012, and now serves more than 8000 agents in 30 countries including PhotoBox, QlikTech and SHL.

NewVoiceMedia’s CEO Jonathan Gale believes that the contact center market has lacked innovation from traditional on-premise vendors for many years. The company is...

Interior Concepts has a dedicated team that works with individuals in the contact center industry on a daily basis. These close interactions allow us to keep up to speed regarding changing market conditions and trends. Click the links to see virtual tours of successful contact center installations for NOVO 1 and OLC Global.

A new Interior Concepts white paper, Eight Trends for Contact Centers in 2013, focuses on eight trends to keep in mind when you build or retrofit your contact center this...

Delivering an exceptional customer experience is both an art & science. The “art” of an experience is based on the premise that every customer is a unique individual. Therefore, a contact center must tailor their interactions “creatively” instead of engaging all customers in a uniform way. The “moment of truth” strikes when the right information is delivered at the right time in the right way with the goal of ultimately making it easier for customers to accomplish their task. These experiences...

The social help desk may turn out to be a game-changer in the ongoing relationship between businesses and their customers. As customers increasingly turn to social media sites for customer service, the social help desk lets you respond in real-time to meet the evolving customer definition of "now." Take a look at this infographic  "The Social Help Desk Revolution".

The call center agent’s job isn’t easy. Most of the day is spent interacting with customers and keeping them satisfied. When time permits agents may be asked to complete training and coaching activities that enable them to do their job well.

Finding the time to train, coach and even communicate with agents remains a challenge for many centers.  As transaction types become more complex, the agent learning curve has become even steeper. Many agents become frustrated with the endless grind, lack of...

Customer Effort Score (CES) is the new hot metric for customer service. (CES) has been widely discussed since the HBR Article, Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers (July, 2010), where Customer Effort Score was touted as being a better predictor of customer loyalty than Net Promoter Score or First Contact Resolution. While CES is an important metric and arguably the best metric to focus your service operation, there is no such thing as a “magic metric”. Getting results from implementing CES...

The digital age has effectively transformed the modern “path to purchase” into a dynamic place with multiple, consumer touch points. While brand influence still remains central to the path to purchase, the customer’s voice is gaining more control at the expense of the enterprise.

The idea behind a VoC program is to ensure that the customer voice is heard and considered by a company. The customer voice is typically shared with the company through qualitative and quantitative methodologies, with...

Expert Planet - Why and How We Use Virtual Agents

Expert Planet designs, develops and measures targeted sales and marketing campaigns for some of the largest organizations on the planet. Using a unique community of topical experts—talented agents with sales skills and specialized knowledge relevant to client programs—this outsourced contact center service provider is able to quickly deploy, test, measure, and optimize client programs, without operating a physical contact center.In four years, the...