Customer Experience

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

While it’s easy to decide your CRM software is no longer suiting your needs, it’s not easy to implement an entirely new system. However, proper CRM software is critical for any customer care team or call center, whether in-house or outsourced. 

So, instead of jumping ahead of yourself, it may be smart to perform some auditing on the software to determine the root cause of your CRM problems in the first place. Some potential problems include:

• Over-customized software
• Outgrowing of the software
• Basic...

It's Time to Get Mobile Self-Service Right

The mobile channel has become a make-or-break point of engagement with your customers.

But most companies offer a terrible mobile engagement experience, damaging the customer relationship in the process. This white paper from IntelliResponse shows you why mobile has moved to the forefront of the multi-channel strategy, and how to get mobile self-service right. Highlights include

•  7 reasons why the mobile channel offers the greatest improvement opportunity...

Improve Your Customer Experience:
Design Your Quality Program to Link Directly to Customer Satisfaction

Everyone who works in the customer contact industry has experienced this—quality scores in the 90s, but customer satisfaction (CSAT) or issue resolution results that are in the 60s or 70s. How can that be? Why is it that quality results are not aligned with CSAT and other business measures? Do you really know what your customer is experiencing with your contact center? How can there be such a...

The Value in Naysayer Feedback - Actionable Steps to Improve Customer Experience for Contact Centers

While the call center has many metrics for determining success, the overall customer experience has the biggest impact on your bottom line, yet it is also one of the most difficult metrics to measure. Fortunately, your customers don’t think in terms of metrics. The only thing that matters to them is that they have a positive experience. Take FCR as an example: there are many ways to measure FCR,...

The global consumer electronics market was estimated at $681 billion in 2010 by Business Insights and 83% of consumers say that their purchase decison is influenced by support services accoding to Research Now. And consumers now have questions that frequently go beyond the realm of standard service agreements, involving multiple interconnected devices and programs from separate sources. 

So it's no wonder that OEMs, ISP carriers, software vendors and major retailers are all seeking...

A new white paper from COPC offers seven fundamental changes that they have recommended to their clients to drive improvements in their quality program. By doing so, they have transformed programs to directly and substantially improve their customers’ experience with their contact center operation.

These changes are:

• Redesign the quality form to align with key customer drivers

• Score only output metrics and use sub-attributes to capture reasons for errors

• Measure quality using three metrics...

I'm the new kid on the block here at CRMXchange,but since I've been involved in customer-related issues since the prehistoric days when CTI was the golly-gee tecnhology and it was still acceptable to use the dreaded 'T" word to summarize the industry as a whole, I'm not all that new and hardly a kid.

I've seen the terminology migrate from customer service to customer care, to customer relations management--before it became the acronym we now all know and love. But the growing demand for immediate...

Recent talk in the industry takes exception with the concept of making idle time productive by suggesting there isn’t really much idle time to be used, that it would cause adherence issues with the call center workforce management tool, and associating it with the detrimental effects of multi-tasking (suggesting that it lowers agent performance). We see these as critiques based on some limited information. Research data, integration technology and feedback from those using technology to manage...

Communication technology has shifted power from the hands of a few to the hands of the many, with the ramifications of that change reverberating glob¬ally across every aspect of life, from politics to parenting to customer care.

Companies are recognizing the customer experience as a critical, revenue-driving business discipline. Increasingly, they are organizing to devote budget, focus and method to operating from a customer-centric perspective. In 2011, more than two-thirds of customer...

In a recent call center agent productivity study conducted by Ventana Research, 81% of those call center leaders polled cited improving agent performance as a top priority in their organization. So, if improving agent performance is a key initiative for most call centers, and coaching is a proven contributor to positively impacting agent performance , why do so many call centers continue to struggle with providing agents with enough effective coaching?

It certainly isn’t for a lack of effort. In...

The main topics of interest at the IQPC Call Center Week Las Vegas were ‘cloud’ and ‘multi-channel’.  Attendees were also concerned with the use of social media.

How customers connect to companies is evolving.  Customers want to connect on their own terms with the channel that suites them best.  Vendors are attempting to respond to the customer’s needs with a variety of new solutions.  Below is a recap of exciting technologies and solutions that were at the event.

360'CRM   is a full spectrum CRM...