September, 2021

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Don’t Ignore The Pot-Stirring Employee

The Belding Group

The Pot-Stirrer loves an injustice. He (she) lives to find real or imagined issues within the company, or even with you. He constantly questions decisions, and, like a dog with a bone, won't let go of something once he's got his teeth in it. To make matters worse, he just doesn't seem to be happy until everyone at work is talking about it. The Pot Stirrer is almost always in the middle of workplace morale challenges.

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Contact centres simplified: 3 ways to turn theory into practice

Adrian Swinscoe

This is a guest post from Ross Daniels, Chief Marketing Officer at Calabrio. In our last two blogs, we introduced the concept of adding simplicity to […]. The post Contact centres simplified: 3 ways to turn theory into practice first appeared on Adrian Swinscoe.

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Building the Business Case: No Pain, No Gain

Futurelab

One of the most-commonly requested needs – often as a result of CEO/executive asks – is to build the business case for the business to focus on the customer experience. (It’s painful just to write that without thinking about this open letter to CEOs , excerpted from my book, Customer Understanding.) Tags: Annette Franz (Gleneicki) business outcomes change management customer experience outcomes Facebook Like.

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Lessons from The Overlook: 5 things vacation rental guests should know

Inside Customer Service

Note: Lessons from The Overlook is a periodic update on lessons learned from owning a vacation rental property in the Southern California mountain town of Idyllwild. It's a hands-on opportunity to apply some of the techniques I advise my clients to use. You can find past updates here. My wife, Sally, and I own a vacation rental cabin called The Overlook Idyllwild.

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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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Little Otter’s Rebecca Egger on making mental health care accessible to all

Intercom, Inc.

? ?. For Rebecca Egger, the CEO and co-founder of Little Otter , a mental health service designed for children, digital transformation will play a crucial role in scaling healthcare. That approach is already being rewarded and recognized – Rebecca was recently named on Inc Magazine’s influential Female Founders 100 list for 2021. Rebecca has a background in astrophysics and computer science and spent many of her formative years looking at gamma-ray bursts and supernovas, but eventually, e

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How Tone of Voice Affects Customer Service

Fonolo

As the old saying goes: “you can hear a smile through the phone.” It may be a bit cheesy, but it’s true. Studies have proven that tone of voice in customer service is even more important to a successful interaction than the specific words that are being said, and that an agent’s energy will translate to their customer even without face-to-face interaction.

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Digital teams suffer from a perception gap that hinders customer experience improvement efforts

Adrian Swinscoe

Organizations are often fraught with gaps in perception, and many of these impact their ability to improve both the customer and employee experience. Bain is responsible […]. The post Digital teams suffer from a perception gap that hinders customer experience improvement efforts first appeared on Adrian Swinscoe.

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CX Journey™ Musings: Ride for the Brand

Futurelab

What is a brand? And what does it mean to ride for the brand ? Tags: Annette Franz (Gleneicki) brand customer loyalty employee experience employee expectation Facebook Like. Linkedin Share Button. Tweet Widget.

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How to keep customers informed about shipping delays

Inside Customer Service

"The shipping container is stuck in customs." That's the best update I could get from our buyer and it wasn't encouraging. We had been waiting for a replenishment order from our overseas supplier for weeks. Backorders were piling up and customers were getting agitated at the wait. We had been getting a slew of angry phone calls and emails from customers who wanted to know why their order hadn’t arrived.

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Kevin Maney on designing your own category

Intercom, Inc.

In this era of ever-increasing digital disruption and innovation, category design can be the ultimate business strategy for brands wishing to stand out from the crowd. And one of the biggest advocates behind the movement is author, columnist, and advisor Kevin Maney. As a tech journalist, Kevin has been witnessing the evolution of the tech industry for more than 20 years.

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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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How to Create a Call Center IVR Script

Fonolo

When customers call your customer service line, greeting them with a friendly and easy-to-navigate interactive voice response system is a standard in call center software. This is often the first stage in a customer service journey, so making your welcome greeting and routing accessible and intuitive is a key aspect to your call center functionality.

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Multiple Workstyles May Signal the Need for New Compensation Plans at Many US Contact Centers

Taylor Reach Group

by JD Fairweather. After several months of remote working – a workstyle many contact center leaders would have deemed impossible to implement a year and a half ago – employers are finding it difficult to lure staff back into the office. The Delta variant notwithstanding, it seems that employees are far too settled into the routine of managing teams, work, and calls to return to onsite employment anytime soon.

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How to Celebrate Customer Service Week (3 Steps)

Myra Golden Media

Download agenda, themes, certificates and more here! Are you still trying to figure out how to celebrate Customer Service Week? After the year and a half your team has pulled your company through, don’t let National Customer Service Week pass without an epic celebration of your front line! Here are three steps to easy National Customer Service Week planning!

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Would Customers Pay to Do Business with You?

Shep Hyken

Think about this … what if you were to charge a customer just to talk to you about what you would sell them? Or, if you own a retail store, a fee to enter the store. What would you have to do for your customers to be willing to pay for the privilege of buying your products or services? I’m not suggesting that you should. This is just to get you thinking about how good you really are.

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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 orchestrate customer journeys in real time at scale

Customer Think

Customer journeys are as individual as customers. Every customer has different needs, preferences, knowledge, information and another way to resolve their issues. In brief, every customer has a context of their own. As a consequence, customer journe.

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How can you convince your senior leadership to invest more in customer experience?

Steven Van Belleghem

The rational way. I think that most people would instinctively gravitate towards the rational way: they assemble an Excel sheet with quantitative data to explain that if management invests in X and Y, the churn rate will decrease by X percent. I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of that approach. All too often, senior leaders are exposed to customers through PowerPoint presentations with statistical data, like “only 65% of our customers are happy”.

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3 Key Strategies For Call Center Customer Service

Fonolo

Your call center’s customer service strategy dictates customer loyalty, agent satisfaction, and company growth. No matter what product or service you offer, your approach needs to be nothing short of “customer-obsessed.”. Knowing exactly what your customers want and don’t want will help you to maximize your call center’s customer care, leading to growth and revenue opportunities for your business.

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Five Overlooked Moments that may be Wrecking Your Customer Journey

Experience Investigators

This article is sponsored by PayPal. ne·glect /n???lekt/. verb: fail to care for properly. noun: the state or fact of being uncared for. from Oxford Languages. Neglect can feel like a harsh word. It’s easy to think that if we’re neglectful toward our customers, it must be through some negative action. But the most common type of customer neglect we see is simply the lack of attention paid to putting the customer first.

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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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How to Enforce a Mask Mandate In Your Theater, Museum, Library or Store

Myra Golden Media

We thought we’d be done with COVID by now. Yet, here we are. I was supposed to be boarding a plane tomorrow to deliver the opening keynote for a large event in D.C. It’s now virtual. A workshop I’m facilitating in Tulsa in a few weeks is now online. My son’s school reinstated mask mandates this week. Speaking of masks, I’m doing a lot of digital de-escalation training for clients in museums, libraries, theaters, and medical offices.

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You’re Terminated: Three Reasons Customers Will Stop Doing Business with You

Shep Hyken

One of the favorite chapters I wrote in my recent book, I’ll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again , was about why customers would terminate their relationship with you. Yes, the word terminate ties into the movie Terminator , which somehow became a theme in the background of the book. So, why would a customer terminate his or her relationship with you?

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How Language Inequity Impacts the Customer Experience

Customer Think

Anyone who has traveled to a different country and didn’t speak the language knows the feelings of frustration and anxiety that come with that experience. Even fluent speakers who are experts in their fields can face bias if they have an accent. Somehow, as a society, we’ve correlated language skills with intelligence, when that’s far […].

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Five things we can learn about customer experience from Starbucks

Steven Van Belleghem

Reinvent a commodity. During my keynotes, I often get the question “Where should we focus on if we work in a commodity business?”. I always confront them with questions of my own, when they do: “Is there really such a thing as a commodity business? Isn’t that just something that happens when we allow ourselves to become boring and by not being unique?”.

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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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3 Reasons Your Call Center is Missing Benchmarks

Fonolo

If sales and profits are up, business is good, right? Usually, yes. But customer success leaders know that performance isn’t always based solely on profit. Call center managers must be aware of industry trends, customer needs, and the latest call center technology. Market research helps, but it isn’t enough. That’s where benchmarking comes in. Benchmarking helps call centers compare their operations and processes to other call centers.

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Not All Customers Are Created Equal

Doing CX Right

Businesses need to take extra care of high-value customers, or they'll go to a competitor Read & apply customer appreciation best practices. The post Not All Customers Are Created Equal appeared first on Doing CX Right.

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The Ultimate Guide to Small Business Customer Service

Help Scout

With access to fewer resources and generally leaner teams, small businesses need to be more creative and tactful in their approach to customer service. That’s not to say they can’t provide a top-notch experience — they absolutely can. They just need to be a little more focused with their efforts. In this guide, we cover some common topics surrounding small business customer service and provide some insights gained from our years of working in support — as well as insights from small business lea

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Best in Class Versus Best in Industry

Shep Hyken

Here is an interesting idea. Most businesses are competitive. They want to be better than their competition. Sometimes they try to out-service their competition. Sometimes they lower their prices to beat their competition. The point is that they are only looking at the competition. What if they looked beyond the competition? What if they looked at the world?

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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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How to Use Voice AI to Empower Live Agents

Customer Think

Your call center agents are the lifeblood of your contact center. They have a huge responsibility to represent your brand during a customer’s time of need and frustration, all while actually solving a customer service issue in real-time. Now that’s a tall order. Whatsmore, positive and negative experiences with your call center agents have a […].

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7 things you can learn from Walmart about CX

Steven Van Belleghem

Follow the data. Predicting and managing the supply chain in the most accurate and efficient of manners, became an enormous asset to offer the best customer experience in the COVID-19 era. And so the retail giant has successfully invested a lot in creating an intelligent flow in a fully integrated data system. An example are the “internet of things” sensors across over 2,200 trailers to give real-time information around the quality and freshness of its deliveries.

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Everything You Need to Know About Adherence Reporting in the Call Center

Fonolo

Efficiency is important to every business, but in a call center, it directly impacts your success. While efficiency can be difficult to quantify, adherence reporting can help you gain insights on the effectiveness of your team’s daily activities. Adherence is the biggest factor in achieving ROI from a workforce management perspective. Call center managers want to ensure that overall agent performance is meeting service levels, and that agents are working when and where they’re needed

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I’ll Be Back! The Phrase We All Want Our Customers To Say

Beyond Philosophy

We all want customers that return and buy more for us. Returning customers often buy more than new customers and require fewer resources to attract. So, how do you get customers to come back? . I went outside my own resources to get you an answer to that question. On a recent podcast, we hosted speaker and author Shep Hyken, one of the most influential voices in Customer Experience today.

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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.