Voice of the Customer

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

If you are doing social media programs, you may be witnessing your customers making purchase decisions based on what other customers write in reviews or clicking on your deal links in Twitter. You may be seeing that the sentiment towards your brand went from being negative, to now more favorable because you are reaching out to unhappy customers and making things right. You might be gaining share of voice online over your competitors or seeing that customer advocacy for the brand is building...

The process of hiring customer service professionals, whether in the commercial contact center, retail store or bank branch, often includes a telephone interview early in the recruiting and hiring process. This manual process frequently means that recruiters spend significant time and multiple contact attempts to schedule and conduct these phone interviews. This unnecessarily elongates the hiring cycle and often overlooks well-qualified candidates who might not be available during a recruiter’s...

Fizzback’s experience in the sector provides a framework through which they drive positive business transformation and allow their clients to ‘drive by the voice of customer’. The rules represent a guideline to engage with clients on a case-by- case business ensuring the solution they provide is tailored to each of their clients’ unique culture, & conditions.

Below are a few Fizzback rules:

“Define your brand DNA. Own it. Name it.” stresses the importance of companywide ownership &...

As the contact center landscape changes, so too must the reporting and analysis solutions that drive decision-making and performance management. Each contact center is a unique mixture of systems, applications, people and culture serving a specific customer or client segment, each will need a different roadmap to their destination.

There are four common reasons that contact centers are driven to undertake this journey in the first place:

1. Current reports don't meet requirements: Typically,...

 One of the key priorities for a customer care organization is the engagement and retention of customers. To strengthen rapport with customers at scale, some companies are turning to interactive outbound interactive voice response (IVR) solutions. However, poorly executed outreach can alienate customers rather than ingratiate them, so it is important to select a platform that delivers your ideal customer experience.

Customer service is increasingly viewed as a strategic element of a product’s...

Features commonly provided by unified desktop solutions are as follows:

Single login/logout - Once the agent logs into the application they have unified access to multiple applications. There is no need to log in and out to access data bases or other applications.

Pre-populated screen pops - Unified desktops rely on the CRM as well as other sources, such as IVR entries and data gleaned from enterprise data bases to fully populate screens before the agent takes the call. All unified desktops pop...

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...

Customer Experience has become the mantra of senior management looking to enhance revenue and margins. This is a huge opportunity for whichever department can create a unified picture of the current CE and then help management to decide how to manage and improve it. Innovative, data driven departments as diverse as customer service, quality, consumer affairs or marketing services could capitalize on this opportunity to dramatically raise both their visibility and status within the organization.

Cu...

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...