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:
•...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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“Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is
made in the small ones.”
~Phillips Brooks
Call center agents hold the power of your brand promise in their
hands.
The moment of truth can be when customers need to talk to an agent
after exhausting self-service options. Or, it can be the
accumulation of experiences across all channels.
As problem calls increase and interaction
points expand, companies need to adjust their customer
experience strategies to ensure agents are equipped to...
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Contact center executives like the certainty contact demand,
resource availability, operational efficiency, and maybe most
importantly, the certainty of agent performance and customer
experience delivery.
However, certainty is the one thing that the manager of such a
complex operation will never have.
The best equipped contact center executives tame the uncertainty
of their environment with good management and with the help of
mathematical models. These models provide the next best thing to...
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Since the emergence of multi-channel self-service, there is a
growing disconnect between the typical strategy employed in
telephone self-service design and what many customers actually
need. A new Nuance report details the results of a
commissioned survey which attempts to uncover customer channel
preferences for an array of banking tasks, including
recommendations for optimizing the IVR to both accommodate those
preferences and minimize the frustrations associated with today’s
multi-channel...
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According to Forrester Research, 72% of U.S. online consumers
prefer to use a company’s Web site to get answers to their
questions rather than contact companies via telephone or email.
Clearly, the web has become the primary first point of contact
between many organizations and their stakeholders. Despite this
fact, frustration and inefficiency abounds online, resulting in
unsatisfied customers and increases in escalations to expensive
contact center mainstays like phone calls and e-mails.
For...
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The following are some more information on the vendors who
attended the IQPC event.
Analytics
For companies frustrated with isolated or disparate data sources,
360'CRM's latest advances in its InSight data
analytics tool provides new levels of actionable information for
the Call Center or Channel Management practitioner. InSight
not only automatically draws call center performance data in to a
common, universally comparable dashboard and report analytics
library, it also integrates internal...
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Your customers are coming to you via an variety of
channels. As a result, every employee is now customer facing
— either directly or indirectly — and distinctions between the
front
office and back office are blurring. With many more channels
coming to the multi channel contact center, and a
much more dispersed workforce, organizations today are forced to
manage a dizzying array of customer service systems, customer touch
points and customer-related tasks.
The question is, how do you make sure...
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According to a
KnoahSoft reprint of the
DMG Contact Center
Surveying/Feedback and Analytics Market Report, the market
trends are as follows:
•The contact center surveying sector is doing well, as
organizations seek to improve relationships with customers.
•Social networking/social media is starting to play a significant
role as a source of unsolicited customer feedback for contact
centers.
•A growing number of multi-channel surveying application providers
are delivering solutions that address...
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From June through September Opus Research mounted a Web-based
survey to gain insights into the deployment plans and levels of
interest in a variety of channels and networks for customer care
and marketing efforts. Here are the top line findings:
• Transformational times in the Contact Center – Contact center
personnel are increasingly engaged in multi-modal, multi-channel
and social interactions.
• Monitoring and call recording are high profile – In response to
questions about technology in...
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Intelligent QA systems rapidly identify and deliver insights into
critical business issues and opportunities to improve the customer
experience and revenue.
A new
VPI
white paper,
Quality Assurance 2.0, The Rebirth of
Contact Center QA, defines Quality Assurance as:
1) A proactive method for rapidly identifying and resolving
business issues associated with customer interactions.
2) A requirement to minimize liability risk and ensure compliance
with laws, regulations and internal policies.
3) A...
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A great deal has changed in the contact center and CRM technology
landscape in the past ten years, and most companies lag way behind
in taking advantage of new functionality. An obvious example is
social media.
DMG Consulting estimates that more than
93% of existing servicing/CRM applications do not have the ability
to access, route, queue and respond to social media
interactions. However, this is not the only capability missing from
servicing/CRM solutions. Unified communications, desktop...
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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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Text analytics has been a recognized IT sector for more than 15
years, yet it remains one of technology’s best-kept secrets. With
an estimated 3,500 text analytics implementations globally, there
is a huge opportunity for vendors to better educate the market on
the practical application of this technology in the marketing and
business worlds. And end users have a real chance to utilize this
application to gain a competitive advantage by knowing exactly what
is being said about them, over what...
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The operational planning process evolved to solve the core
inbound contact center business question: given the seasonality
of call volumes, the seasonality of agent attrition, the
seasonality of agent sick time, vacation requests, and other
shrinkage items, the seasonality of handle times, given that all of
these items are different by center location and type of staff
required, and given learning curves, training times, and other
important and complicating characteristics, how does...
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According to
Gartner, through 2013, four major initiatives will
dominate overall customer service strategies:
•Tying together service interaction channels
•Integrating social CRM capabilities
•Analyzing the customer experience
•Applying business rules and knowledge in real time
Two major challenges will impact the definition of market leader in
the CRM customer service contact center space, which focuses on
tools for the human agent or service representative:
•A new generation of customers has a...
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How many calls do you deal daily that have with poor voice
quality? Too low, not clear enough, too much
interference – these are some of the typical distractions that we
encounter. Our contact centers focus on providing a
highly satisfactory customer experience by training their agents
and adding technology to make the customer experience more
satisfying across multiple contact points. Multi
channel contact centers give users customers the ability to choose
their preferred method of...
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Your company’s brand and
reputation depend on your team’s ability to deliver a superior
customer experience. Yet, people, processes and technology often
conspire to create headaches for management and unsatisfactory
interactions for customers.
Do these problems sound
familiar? You receive calls from management demanding answers about
why a host went down or why customer complaints are up. You may be
off for the weekend but you still worry that a problem will not
be detected as quickly as it...
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