I love technology... all of it. Part of that probably comes from my early years as an electrical engineer and programmer. That placed me square on the forefront of the digital revolution and I've stayed there ever since. I'm in awe of the transformative power technology holds. Our lives, society and business have been radically changed, and that change continues everyday.
We often see technology as the driving factor of this transformation, but that's not quite right. It's the 'application' of technology that creates transformation. On its own, technology is little more than an intriguing concept. Only when it is used to solve a problem or fulfill a need does change really happen.
For the last 15 years or so of my career that's what I've done, figuring out how to apply technology to create change and passing that knowledge on to other people. As a blogger for CRMXchange my goal is to help you understand what call center and CRM technology offers and provide insights into how to successfully deploy it within your business.
The horror stories of security breaches where millions of
consumers have had their personal information exposed are all too
familiar, TJX is probably the most infamous. Since its initial
release in 2008, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard
(PCI DSS) has become a sort of ‘gold-standard’ for the protection
of consumer information. In fact, some states have even written
parts of the standard, or compliance with it, into law. A trend
that is likely to continue.
A recent update to the PCI...
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The days of ‘telephone-only’ customer service are long gone. Our
customers now expect to contact us through email, chat and the web,
including social media. Managing service across all these disparate
communication channels can be a challenge. Businesses that do this
well have a distinct and potent competitive advantage. Their
customers are more satisfied, less apt to take their money
elsewhere and inclined to increase the business they conduct.
One key to improving customer satisfaction,...
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We talk a lot about balancing efficiency and effectiveness in our
call center operations. Something we don’t talk as much about is
balancing agent productivity and quality of life. Agent attrition
is the bane of call centers, and its costs are huge. For every
agent that leaves a new one must be recruited, screened and
trained. Those are just the direct costs associated with
agent turnover. Often overlooked are the indirect costs from
turnover’s impact on productivity, service quality and...
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Quite often, when customers contact a business a moment of truth
occurs during that interaction, the crucial instant where the
customer’s satisfaction depends on agent’s actions. We prepare our
agents as best as possible to successfully navigate these critical
points through training and coaching. By necessity, these efforts
take place before the interaction occurs, and that presents some
problems.
The flow of an interaction is dynamic. It’s subject to change
depending on what happens, how the...
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One trait successful companies have in common is the ability to
detect impending change and adapt to it. The world of customer
service is undergoing one of these major shifts right now, moving
away from the traditional reactionary service mode towards a more
proactive engagement model. I like to call this Customer Service
2.0.
Customer Service 2.0 extends the boundaries of the
company/customer interaction into social media and moves away from
the call/respond service model. This entails much...
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Whether you call it cloud computing, software as a service (SaaS)
or on-demand systems the move away from premise-based equipment is
accelerating rapidly. Two primary factors are driving this move –
total cost of ownership (TCO) and Flexible Functionality.
TCO for a SaaS solution is generally much less than that of
the premise-based equivalent. This is due to the elimination of
needed IT infrastructure, reduction in maintenance efforts and
lower deployment costs for SaaS. SaaS solutions also...
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It seems that every new technology or solution holding a lot
of promise tends to fall prey to over-hyping. This happens because
when a really good idea comes about, everyone wants to get on the
bandwagon. Cloud computing is one of the latest new offerings to
fall prey.
There are many potential benefits of cloud computing in the
contact center. High availability, lower IT costs, instant scaling
and worry-free upgrades, to name a few. With everyone climbing
aboard the cloud bandwagon, it’s more...
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Customer centricity is a hot topic in the industry. Everyone wants
to be customer centric; in fact I’ve never met a business leader
who would say their company isn’t customer centric. But what does
that look like?
To me, it means running your company from the customer’s
viewpoint. What is it like from their perspective to do business
with you? The key to driving your organization towards customer
centricity is to focus on the customer experience. After all,
that’s how your customers’ measure...
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One my favorite Yogi Berra quotes came to mind the other day while
reading a white paper on the importance of good planning in the
contact center. “Prediction is difficult, especially about the
future.”
Accurately predicting future resource requirements is very
difficult in the contact center because of the impact of
seasonality and other complex factors. It’s difficult, yes, but
that doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and give up. Many
people in the industry view workforce management...
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Quality management has stood as a cornerstone of contact center
performance management for many years, and for good reason. It
focuses on the interactions between agents and customers; those
little moments of truth where customer satisfaction hangs in the
balance. For the most part, quality management hasn’t changed much
through the years. The advent and rapid adoption of analytics
technologies in the contact center is about to change that.
A new white paper from Ventana Research explores...
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Without the proper training it doesn’t matter how effective
resource planning is in your contact center. If your agents lack
needed knowledge when interacting with customers, satisfaction will
suffer. A well trained workforce also provides another benefit to
the business. Agents are likely to be more satisfied with their
job, leading to lower turnover rates.
Training isn’t free and has its own associated costs though.
Agents in aren’t available to service your customers. You also need
to hire...
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Cloud computing is a hot topic in the IT world, and as with many
hot topics there’s a great deal of marketing hype associated with
it. Hype frequently keeps close company with its friends
misunderstanding, unrealistic expectation, uncertainty and very
often disillusionment. That’s not to say there aren’t real, and
significant, benefits to an IT organization by embracing cloud
computing concepts.
The key to success, as with many potentially over-hyped
technologies, is being able to separate the...
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It’s universally accepted that providing superior customer
experiences promotes customer satisfaction, loyalty and ultimately,
long-term business prosperity. That being said, knowing what to do
is often much easier than knowing how to do it. I came across a
white paper from Cicero that provides some good
insights into how to position your business to deliver
satisfaction-winning customer experiences.
The paper summarizes feedback and identifies practical steps
from customer contact professionals...
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The rapid growth of social media is forcing businesses to
develop strategies for integrating it into their operations.
Unfortunately, the poor attempts greatly outnumber the successful
ones so far. A primary contributing factor in many failures is the
tendency to view social media channels as just another marketing
medium, a new way to push out press releases and sales campaigns.
More enlightened companies realize that social media is more about
pull than push.
Social media provides its users a...
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The customer service industry is bipolar, and no, I’m not
talking about the clinical definition of the term. We’re bipolar in
the sense that we get to experience customer service from both
sides, as customers and as service providers. That gives us a
unique viewpoint we can use to gauge and manage contact center
performance, one we need to use.
This thought occurred to me while reading a white paper from
Genesys on
cross-channel customer experience. The paper is the work of
independent...
It shouldn’t come as earth-shattering news to anyone that the
experiences customers have when interacting with a business have a
major impact on satisfaction, and ultimately the company’s
survival. Before you can effectively manage customer experience
though, you need to know where your organization stands today. The
old adage, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”, still
applies.
One good way of measuring current performance is through a
formalized benchmarking process. A major benefit of...
continue reading this post »
Pardon my mangling of that famous line. It’s appropriate though,
given the explosion of social media and that communication
channel’s accelerated ability to spread word of mouth. In a
previous post I discussed the importance of
incorporating social media into your customer feedback program,
but an effective social media strategy must encompass much more
than that.
It’s tempting to treat social media as simply
a new contact channel, like email and chat once were. There are
significant (and often...
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Like many people, I enjoy keeping in touch with friends and
acquaintances through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and
LinkedIn. It’s become a part of my daily routine, and it seems like
I have lots of company. A recent survey by
CustomerThink found that 70
percent of U.S. consumers say they frequently exchange messages
with friends and colleagues. That’s a lot of socializing!
From a business perspective social media is
similar to word-of-mouth, with one very important difference....
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Do you know if your interactive voice response
(IVR) system is successfully handling customer interactions and
providing your company the expected return on investment?
Businesses need quantifiable information in order to effectively
focus their IVR efforts; however, there is no commonly accepted
standard for measuring IVR performance.
That’s not to say there’s a shortage of
popular IVR metrics – there are plenty of them in fact. Many of
them focus on indirect measurements like containment and...
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It shouldn’t come as earth-shattering news to
anyone that the experiences customers have when interacting with a
business have a major impact on satisfaction, and ultimately the
company’s survival. Before you can effectively manage customer
experience though, you need to know where your organization stands
today. The old adage, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”,
still applies.
One good way of measuring current performance is through a
formalized benchmarking process. A major benefit of...
continue reading this post »
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