July, 2021

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Redesigning our job levels for product designers

Intercom, Inc.

The only thing harder than designing a product is designing your career. And many organizations, unfortunately, don’t make it any easier. For instance, the Design Career Index shows that 71% of design orgs don’t have a career progression framework. Less than 1% have documented competencies with scorecards for rating performance. But if you don’t have a map for your career, then how do you know where you’re going?

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Employee Experience: Are You Providing Feedback or Feedforward?

Futurelab

A critical component of a great employee experience is feedback – both from peers and from management. The iterative, continuous improvement that happens as a result of that feedback is important to an employee’s development, productivity, and engagement. But does that improvement really happen? Or is providing/receiving feedback more of a demoralizing exercise?

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Sales Development Representative

Uniphore

WE'RE HIRING. SALES DEVELOPMENT REPRESENTATIVE. Sales Development Representative. If you thrive in the thrill of the hunt and celebrate gaining the interest and respect of prospective buyers, then we need to talk! We’re seeking a curious, gritty and persuasive professional with sales development experience in the enterprise software space. The right candidate will have a knack for learning a new domain and using that knowledge to nurture and persuade senior stakeholders (Director, VP and C-level

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7 ways leaders can model great customer service

Inside Customer Service

I recently worked with two clients in the same industry. There were a lot of similarities between the organizations. The business models were similar, they were roughly the same size, and their products were essentially the same. Both even professed to be fans of the principles outlined in The Service Culture Handbook. Yet one company was growing while the other struggled.

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The Pragmatic Path to Composability: Adapting to the Future through Modularity

Speaker: Jason Cottrell

Brands used to look for a vendor who could do everything. Over time, one vendor was no longer enough to meet a brand’s needs, and they added, added and added. Now they need all their vendors to work well together. That’s composable, and only some will make the cut. As customers — and your board — expect you to be in new channels and to rapidly adapt to shifts in the market, the need for true composability is more crucial than ever before.

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6 Important Soft Skills Every Call Center Agent Needs

Fonolo

Call center employees wear many hats! Agents are tasked with providing customer service, solving customer problems, and conducting research — all with a smile and a positive attitude. While call center agents rely on hard skills — or technical skills — to handle contact center technology, call center soft skills are just as critical for success.

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Is Outsourcing Your Customer Experience Really A Good Idea or Just Wrong?

Beyond Philosophy

Sometimes your Customer Experience requires you to outsource a portion of it to a third party. Maybe it’s an installer or a tow truck service, or even an entire call center, but whatever or whoever it is, this part of the experience is not under your control. Today, we will examine whether this is a good idea or not. We discussed this topic of outsourcing on a recent podcast , where my co-host shared a story about his friend who ordered a trampoline.

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The Shortest Customer Service Keynote Speech Ever!

Shep Hyken

I’ve written about today’s topic before. The idea I’m about to share is really common sense. Even if you didn’t read my past articles or watch my videos about this, you still know and understand it. Yet, it’s worth bringing up again, as I have a new twist on it. In my latest book, I’ll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again , I share a story about the shortest customer service keynote speech I’ve ever delivered.

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How to Cut Call Center Agent Onboarding In Half

Uniphore

How to Cut Call Center Agent Onboarding Time in Half. and Make Every Agent Your Best Agent. August 25th | 11 AM EDT | 4 PM BST. Register Now. Brian Cantor Leading CX Industry Analyst Contact Center Week. Kumaran Shanmuhan CX & Automation Consulting Leader Jacada. Live Demo Featuring 10 Ways to Simplify Agent Onboarding With AI & RPA. Embed learning in the flow of activities that employees and the enterprise perform to deliver their outcomes.

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How to Avoid the “Woe is Me” Employee Mentality

The DiJulius Group

Are you fighting “Woe is Me” syndrome? By Dave Murray Many organizations today, regardless of business model or industry, are experiencing the same struggles – customer demand is at an all-time high and staffing is a major issue. This toxic combination can leave even your best team member saying, “woe is me…we need help!” As. Read Full Article. The post How to Avoid the “Woe is Me” Employee Mentality appeared first on The DiJulius Group.

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7 Call Center Empathy Phrases Every Agent Should Use With Their Customers

Fonolo

Every company needs strong customer service to set them apart from its competitors. After all, customers are more loyal to businesses that treat them with respect, kindness and that support their needs. Customer service in a contact center is especially important. Most call center agents are familiar with the rage of angry customers, frustrated with long wait times, and other problems.

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Turn Payments Into Personalization: Unlock the Value of Transaction Data

Speaker: Loreal Lynch, Everett Zufelt, and Michaela Weber

Once upon a time, in the vast realm of online commerce, there lived a humble checkout button overlooked by many. Yet, within its humble click lay the power to transform a mere visitor into a loyal customer. 🧐 💡 Getting checkout right can mark the difference between a successful sale and an abandoned cart, yet many businesses fail to make payments a part of their commerce strategy even when it has a direct impact on revenue.

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Your customer service “Oh Sh*t Kit”

Customer Service Life

Planning the bachelorette party for a dear friend, I knew that “Oh Sh*t Kits” are a must to include for the bride tribe. In each “Oh Sh*t Kit”, you’ll find things like Tylenol, lip gloss, a scrunchie, hydrating face mask, sunscreen, body lotion, an electrolyte beverage, mints, tissues, bandaids and more. You just never know what will happen and you want to be prepared!

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BrowserStack’s Mark Rudden on hypergrowth in a global pandemic

Intercom, Inc.

Well, at the beginning of 2020, no one had the playbook for that. And so, Mark Rudden and his team had to figure it all out by themselves. Ever since he was hired as the Director of EMEA Sales at BrowserStack , a web and mobile testing platform that lets developers test their websites and mobile applications across browsers, operating systems, and mobile devices, he had to completely rethink how to successfully onboard hundreds of salespeople just as everyone was going remote.

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How to Say YES – Every Time

Shep Hyken

How do you say Yes to every customer request ? Is it possible? Is this customer service utopia? My friend Christine Trippi wrote a book titled Yes Is the Answer. And Cameron Mitchell, about whom I’ve written before, wrote a book with a similar title, Yes is the Answer. What is the Question ? Both of these authors have a hospitality background. Trippi is a world-class, award-winning hotel manager and Mitchell is a super-successful restauranteur.

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Social Media Study: Stress Hurts Call Center Employees and the Customer Experience

Uniphore

Atlanta, GA – July 1, 2021 – Jacada, a leading provider of AI and RPA powered virtual assistants , recently released key insights on why contact center employees are stressed and how their stress negatively affects the customer experience. We wanted to get an unfiltered, insider look into how contact center employees view their roles, what their pain points are, and what solutions they feel could help them consistently deliver great customer experiences.

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Reimagine Your Communications With A Unified Platform

Cut complexity and boost efficiency while empowering your customers with Nextiva's unified communications platform. Nextiva streamlines workflows and centralizes customer interactions, all while simplifying business collaboration, increasing productivity, and reducing employee burnout.

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How To Reduce Turnover and Retain the Top Talent in an Employee Market

The DiJulius Group

Across the United States, companies are struggling with hiring and retaining quality employees. Unemployment rates are high but still there is a labor shortage. With many open positions, it’s very difficult to get people to apply and show up for interviews. The market is hot! It’s more important now than ever before that you have. Read Full Article.

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6 Tips to Optimize Your Call Center IVR

Fonolo

You’re probably familiar with IVR, or Interactive Voice Response, is a menu system that connects customers to the information they need in your call center. Callers will use either a dial pad or tap-button options ( Visual IVR ) to connect with an appropriate agent or department to address their needs. An optimized IVR system is essential to call center software , as it reduces costs, improves customer satisfaction, increases first-call resolution (FCR), and increases overall call center efficie

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How to Boost User Experience With Interactive Design

Customer Think

What is the point of a product or service? To benefit the people who use it! A successful product or service will focus on user experience as a metric of success. A big part of this is to look at interactive design. Interactive design is the relationship between the digital product and the consumer. In […].

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11 Types of Bad Customer Service (and How To Avoid Them)

Help Scout

Sometimes the customer service teams who are supposed to be solving problems somehow manage to make them so much worse instead. These are their stories — along with some tips to help you avoid ending up on this list next time we update it! 1. Running from responsibility The root of many terrible customer experiences is a company that is happy to collect money from a transaction but not to accept responsibility when things go wrong.

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Strategic CX: A Deep Dive into Voice of the Customer Insights for Clarity

Speaker: Nicholas Zeisler, CX Strategist & Fractional CXO

The first step in a successful Customer Experience endeavor (or for that matter, any business proposition) is to find out what’s wrong. If you can’t identify it, you can’t fix it! 💡 That’s where the Voice of the Customer (VoC) comes in. Today, far too many brands do VoC simply because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do; that’s what all their competitors do.

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The “Always” Concept: What We Must Always Do For Our Customers

Shep Hyken

One of the big concepts we teach in our customer service training programs is the concept of Always. This is the backbone of creating customer amazement. When the customer uses the word always followed by something positive, you are creating a predictable experience, and even more important, you are operating in the zone of amazement. For example, your customers might say: “They are always so helpful.”.

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How Customer Listening Assessments Create Better CX

Experience Investigators

How Customer Experience Maturity Develops. There is a natural arc to how an organization matures when it comes to customer experience. Let’s look at a common example scenario: First, it starts with an idea: customers are important! We should pay more attention to them. Next, it moves to what can be done. Typically, this means collecting customer feedback.

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048: A World-Class Patient Experience

The DiJulius Group

Chief Revolution Officer John DiJulius of the DiJulius Group interviews Dr. Vance Thompson, owner of Vance Thompson Vision, who have totally disrupted the LASIK and cataract surgery industry. They provide a world-class employee experience, patient experience, vendor experience, and community experience. Vance’s genuine love for people and enriching their lives is contagious and inspiring.

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What is a Net Promoter Score?

Fonolo

Companies use all sorts of metrics and techniques to evaluate their customers’ satisfaction with their products and services. Google reviews, social media activity, and customer service surveys all help companies learn about their customers’ experiences. Contact centers use a few different metrics to measure customer experience. Floor-level metrics assess the efficiency of the contact center’s operations, and include Average Speed to Answer (ASA), Auxiliary Time, Handle Time, and more.

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Software Composition Analysis: The New Armor for Your Cybersecurity

Speaker: Blackberry, OSS Consultants, & Revenera

Software is complex, which makes threats to the software supply chain more real every day. 64% of organizations have been impacted by a software supply chain attack and 60% of data breaches are due to unpatched software vulnerabilities. In the U.S. alone, cyber losses totaled $10.3 billion in 2022. All of these stats beg the question, “Do you know what’s in your software?

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CX Transformation with AI Chatbots is not a “One-Size-Fit All” Approach

Customer Think

Businesses now realize the need for a customer-centric approach to transforming their customer experience (CX). According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2021, 75 percent of company leaders agreed that the global pandemic accelerated the acquisition of new technologies to get customer-centricity right. But, there are challenges too.

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The Role of a Chief Customer Officer

Totango

The role of a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) is a fairly new addition to the C-suite, but it has been on the rise over the past several years as companies are better understanding the importance of creating a customer-centric culture within their organizations. Customer success (CS) teams are designed to build, maintain and optimize lasting relationships with customers by helping them fulfill, and even exceed, their own business goals.

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Guest Post: How to Use an LMS for Employee Skill Development

Shep Hyken

This week we feature an article by Ehsan Memari, a blogger for SkyPrep. He writes about how using a learning management system (LMS) expedites employee skill development in your organization. We are in the middle of a skills gap crisis. According to a study from the Society for Human Resource Management , 83% of HR professionals noticed a decline in the quality of job applicants, with one-third citing a lack of technical abilities. .

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Create Your CX Charter with These 6 Questions

Experience Investigators

Customer experience (CX) programs often begin with an idea and a dash of sincere enthusiasm…and little else. To arrive at real outcomes, CX programs depend on cross-functional leadership to turn words and ideas into actions. But what is that cross-functional team supposed to do, exactly? . A Customer Experience Charter can answer that question.

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7th Annual CX Report by The Northridge Group Uncovers Priority Training Focus

JUST RELEASED! New research reveals 92% of business leaders would like to provide additional training to their customer service representatives. Soft skills training stands out as a priority area of investment and/or improvement. Check out The Northridge Group’s latest CX research report —the 7th annual CX survey of 1,000 customers and 250 business executives—to see additional statistics as well as insights that businesses can use to benchmark their customer service and improve the overall exper

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Best Advice From Great Podcasters

The DiJulius Group

Great Commencement Speech One of my favorite bloggers and podcasters, Scott Galloway wrote a great piece called Advice to Grads: Be Warriors, Not Wokesters. Here are a few of my favorite lines: “Don’t do what you are asked to do, but what you are capable of doing…Get strong, really strong. You should be able to. Read Full Article. The post Best Advice From Great Podcasters appeared first on The DiJulius Group.

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Conversational AI: The Beginner’s Guide [2021]

Aquire

Conversational AI today is probably the closest technology has come to mimicking human interactions. That’s one of the reasons this tech has grown in popularity — and for customer experience in particular. In a world where businesses try to engage their customers on a personal level across digital touchpoints, virtual assistants and AI tools make effective (and cost-efficient) allies.

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9 Actionable Tips For ECommerce Multichannel Marketing

Customer Think

In a world where smartphones are ubiquitous and 76% of adults living in advanced economies have a world of information at their fingertips, it should be no surprise that the future of marketing lies in tapping into the customer’s online experience. Image Source Ecommerce multichannel marketing—consistent brand presence across multiple online and offline channels—is an […].

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These 20 Empathy Statements Will Straight-up Make You a Customer Service Boss!

Myra Golden Media

Download the empathy statements PDF and practice your first five empathy responses to customers. Grab your empathy sheet!

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When Customers Win, You Win: How to Deliver Value That Transforms Your Customer Experience

Speaker: Donna Weber - Customer Onboarding Expert

Customer onboarding is so much more than going live with your product and driving adoption. The truth is, onboarding is the most important part of the customer journey. When you set positive first impressions, establish trusting relationships, and quickly deliver meaningful outcomes, you create customers for life. Invest an hour with Donna Weber to learn why your customer onboarding is critical to your success.