Customer Service

As companies continue to evolve their CRM strategies to attract and maintain customers, the contact center has emerged as an important strategic asset. The agents staffing these centers have a direct impact on customer acquisition and satisfaction. In order to continue providing excellent service, more companies are turning to advanced analytics to ensure that their contact centers are performing at a high level.

In addition, market leaders are using insights from customer interactions to uncover...

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...

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...

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...

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".

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...

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...

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...

Why Deliver Customer Service in the Cloud?

In a volatile and hyper-competitive market, consistently delivering exceptional multichannel customer service is essential. But providing world-class service on tight budgets and to even tighter deadlines is a tough challenge for even the largest organizations. That’s why so many of the world’s most successful organizations choose to deliver customer service in the cloud.

Organizations across the globe are making the move to the cloud to help them:

•...

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...

Customer Effort Score (CES) is the new hot metric for customer service. (CES) has been widely discussed since the Harvard Business Review 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 Customer Satisfaction. 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...

What Has Your Quality Monitoring Program Done for You Lately

How do you translate voice recordings into real-time business intelligence? While most contact centers actively record customer interactions, this data is useless until it has been analyzed – a process that can be time-intensive, inefficient and overwhelming. At best, most supervisors have the capacity to analyze only a fraction of the actual data collected.

Learn how to do more with the data you have. This white paper from Aspect...

Debunking 5 Myths of Hosted Contact Centers

No Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) discussion is complete these days until someone touts the multiple benefits of moving applications to the cloud. It’s hard to ignore the promise of CAPEX and OPEX savings, especially when many businesses are still recovering from the economic crisis and searching for ways to provide additional value to their customers. But not all SaaS offerings are created equal. Some applications are a better fit for the cloud than...

Now You Want to Sell: 4 Steps to Hiring the Right Service AND Sales Agent

More and more service organizations are adding a sales component to their calls. Their goals include:

• Creating revenue opportunities that did not previously exist

• Shifting contact center operations into profit centers as opposed to cost centers.

• Pinpointing the strongest cross-sell or upsell offers to make by using available technology to automatically  review customer records.

How does selling on a service call impact...