Contact Center Observer

Delivering Improved CX for the Gamer Community

2018-09-11T10:16:00.000-04:00

In 1972, a simple video game mesmerized players around the world: Pong. Despite its rudimentary black-and-white graphics and limited gameplay, the table tennis game kick-started the video game industry, launching one of its first giants, Atari. Now, as the industry approaches the half-century mark, it’s projected to surpass a global value of $90 billion USD.

But for every World of Warcraft or Assassin’s Creed, hundreds of other titles flounder in the marketplace. With so much at stake in the industry, forward-thinking companies have begun focusing on the player experience after a release: in other words, on customer service.

No matter what platform a game surfaces on — mobile phones, PCs, or consoles such as the Playstation 4 or Xbox One — customers demand quick, friendly customer service that’s both in-game and utterly seamless. They want to reach game publishers to address bugs, player bans, billing issues (for subscription services), questions about in-game transactions, and more without leaving the immersive environment they’ve come to love.

Increasingly, those publishers turn to omnichannel customer-service software to keep their customers returning to their carefully crafted worlds—and those that do are reaping the benefits.

Headlines (Read on for more content from the original source material)
In-game support with Mobile SDK
Custom-built tools powered by Zendesk’s API
Faster Chat, Happier Players
Serving up self-service in-game

#CX
#CX for gamers
#Improved CX

10 Contact Center Tips to Help with Customer Satisfaction

2018-07-02T12:02:00.000-04:00

Companies have long relied on location, product innovation and pricing to gain a competitive advantage. However, customers can now find nearly any product or service at the lowest possible price, right at their fingertips. In other words, the key differentiator between companies is the customer experience.

With increased competition and ongoing pressure to continuously meet rapidly evolving expectations, it has become vital to focus on customer satisfaction. This means having the right strategies in place. The following are 10 rules to get customer satisfaction right, regardless of the industry you’re in:

1. Every Interaction Matters

In the digital age, when one complaint can be shared widely across social media channels, there’s no margin for error when it comes to customer satisfaction. To add to this challenge, customer journeys also are increasingly complex, across both self-service and assisted-service channels. This requires increased effort to provide a great experience across every channel, every time. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but it’s essential to keeping customers from shifting to the competition.

2. Upset Customers Can Become Your Most Loyal Customers

Even when service levels are high, problems can still happen. While it is easy to just let an angry customer walk away and consider them a loss, successful companies see the opportunity in customer service recovery. This means an upset customer can actually become loyal and happy if a mistake is handled correctly. Many customer service experts consider the Disney Institute’s HEARD method as the gold standard in customer service recovery:

Hear – Enable the customer to tell their complete story without interruption.

Empathize – Communicate an understanding of how the customer feels.

Apologize – A genuine “sorry” can go a long way to defuse anger.

Resolve – Solve the problem as quickly as possible. This requires employees being enabled to do so.

Diagnose – Learn from the mistake without placing blame on anyone. Fix the process, so it is not repeated.

3. Every Customer Is Unique

Increasingly, customers expect personalized interactions that meet their specific needs. Fortunately, contact center technology has evolved to the point that both inbound and outbound interactions can be made personal. Even self-service can be fine-tuned to each customer.

4. Speed Isn’t Everything

It’s easy to get hung up on providing fast service, but good people skills are equally as important. In fact, increased customer engagement and satisfaction is closely linked to empathetic, friendly and competent support.

5. Make Things Simple

Do you have 14 options on your IVR system? Are customers frequently transferred multiple times to reach the right agent? If you’re adding extra steps for your customers to obtain service, you’re risking losing them in droves. Today’s customers expect user-friendly experiences that they can understand and navigate. Solutions such as skills-based routing, callback and more self-service options can enable customers to get the hassle-free experiences they appreciate.

Continue reading the list which was originally written By Roman Kowalski: http://www.brandquarterly.com/contact-center-tips-10-rules-customer-satisfaction#

#CustomerSatisfaction

8 ways your Contact Center Can Reduce Customer Effort

2018-03-20T09:16:00.001-04:00

- FAQs:
Add a frequently asked questions page on your website as part of a self-service initiative. Customers can reduce effort by quickly searching and finding the answers to their questions. Often better than IVR hell.

- Direct Dial #s:
Giving customers access to contact their agents directly can save a few steps.

- Be active on multiple channels:
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Email, Webchat, SMS. It's more than just audio and your customers will appreciate the availability and a quick acknowledgement and response.

-- Team Building:
One important aspect to express in your company is teamwork. The agents should be encouraged to share ideas and experiences, good or bad, on different ways they were able to reduce customer effort.

- Trends:
Develop an ongoing cycle of agent and customer feedback and use your business intelligence tools to analyze trends.

- Training:
Explain how you define customer effort and what is expected from your agents.

- Proofing:
It is important to maintain a low rate of call backs from the customer you are contacting. Make sure quality, spelling, grammar and dates are correct.

- Metrics:
Measure and improve customer effort. A workforce optimization solution such as Virtual Observer provides tools and reports to track customer effort and allow for continuous improvement.

5 ways Cloud Contact Center technologies have transformed your contact center

2018-01-14T15:22:00.000-05:00

The cloud contact center layout presents a standard foundation to provide a stable and ever scalable platform, allowing customers an affordable way to offer sophisticated omnichannel customer support in a managed environment, extending a number of tremendous benefits to today's contact centers.

One underlying technology for cloud computing is virtualization.

In computing, virtualization refers to the act of creating a virtual version of something, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources. A virtual contact center is a contact center that is cloud-based and managed completely by the cloud provider.

Cloud Contact Centers will often:

1) Provide big cost savings:

Cloud Contact Centers carry inherent lower costs due to increased efficiency and the economies of scale. Financially, virtualization has significant advantages over traditional deployment methods. One-for-one physical servers are often underutilized, likely using only a small fraction of their resources to deliver a particular application or need. Despite this, companies are still willing to pay a premium by using a single-server-per-application methodology. Cloud contact centers consolidate multiple applications into a fewer number of servers, each running more efficiently. Using less physical servers, as well as less specific and often-times limited vendor-specific appliances, allows businesses to maximize physical resource utilization and minimize capital spending.

2) Provides a greater level of security and business continuity:

With the cloud, improved business continuity is possible, along with security compliance advantages and disaster recovery planning benefits. There are also planning advantages gained from a newfound ability to manage massive teams (potentially thousands of agents) using centralized reporting tools available in the cloud.

Disaster recovery initiatives are mission-critical and downtime can lead to lost revenue. With legacy solutions, creating a highly redundant environment was complex and extremely costly. Companies that could not afford for downtime in their communications platforms needed to purchase expensive redundant servers and additional licenses. Cloud platforms instead include features such as high-availability or redundancy and storage migration to keep applications running even in the event of a hardware failure.

Utilizing multiple virtual servers, it is now possible to create an environment where multiple servers act as one, allowing applications to remain online automatically and seamlessly during hardware outages. Cloud service providers also provide companies with a method to create a private infrastructure for disaster recovery. Redundant virtual servers can be placed off-site, allowing systems to be accessed even in the event of a weather-related outage, power outage, or any other unforeseen event that occurs at the main office.

3) Offers more scalability and flexibility:

Solving scalability requirements is one check off which can't be met with a legacy contact center system. No longer do companies need to worry that they’ll outgrow their phone system equipment. Deploying and maintaining separate hardware for every application is time consuming and creates a constant challenge for your internal teams to keep up to date. Systems that are virtualized can be deployed faster and maintained more easily, while reducing technology management headaches.

4) Enhances hiring flexibility:

With cloud contact centers, it becomes far easier for companies to hire remote workers, since the contact center solution is available everywhere. Employees can work from anywhere – their homes, a hotel room, or even a coffee shop – though noisier public areas might mean the agent can only answer texts, emails or support tickets, rather than phone calls. A reduction in commute time can also help boost agent morale.

In addition, it means that the company does not have to invest in extra office space, desks or computers, since the vast majority of home workers provide their own devices. The recruiter gains access to a wider talent pool of agents for more specialized jobs; for example, a London-based contact center could recruit highly skilled agents in Scotland if necessary. Additional capacity is easily obtained by adding resources to the virtual servers.

5) Creates an Eco-friendly environment:

In a world with rising utility costs, and scary levels of global warming concerns, demonstrating concern for the environment has become an essential and humane corporate concern. Eliminating the need to manage a server room’s power, cooling, and capacity is directly related to the managed cloud choice.

3 Customer Service Trends Expected for 2018 and Beyond

2017-11-16T11:24:00.000-05:00

These 3 takeaways are from a well written article on the Agility PR site.

* In a customer service survey, only 19 percent of respondents trust completely what brands say on their website. Instead, they rely on reviews on other sites to provide honesty. These will be sites such as TrustAdvisor or G2Crowd.

* Most customers will only tolerate a 1-hour response window. This is regardless of how they reach out (social media, web chat or web contact form).

* Customers are online from early morning until after 10pm. This will likely start to shape new hours of operations for social media and customer service departments and/or increase the use of other digital properties like messenger bots.

Please read the original article on https://www.agilitypr.com/pr-news/public-relations/customer-experience-trends-2018-whats-coming-pike/

#CustomerService #CustomerTrends

Zendesk: Creating a great customer experience during the holidays

2017-11-03T14:52:00.002-04:00

This story was originally created on https://www.zendesk.com/blog/providing-great-customer-experience-holiday-rush/

In a Zendesk Research survey, they found that ticket volumes can increase as much as 42% over the holidays. To help keep the annual flurry of customer inquiries manageable, they compiled a list of tips that’ll help your team deflect more tickets and keep holiday CSAT scores high (all of which are capable with the Zendesk platform)

1. Build a list (and check it twice)
2. Bring the gift of self-service (to your site or mobile app)
3. Bots… the new elves in your support workshop
4. Chat your way to a few more holiday sales
5. A few more gifts under the tree

Of course, you can also explore the integrated ticketing solution bolstered by Virtual Observer and Zendesk.

Read more about this in the original post

#CustomerExperience #Zendesk #CSAT

Virtual Observer unveils Cisco MediaSense Call Recording Replacement Program

2017-06-05T09:41:00.003-04:00

Coordinated Systems, Inc. (CSI), of East Hartford, CT, a member of the Cisco Solution Partner Program is making it incredibly logical for Cisco MediaSense customers to transition seamlessly to a full WFO environment by replacing the MediaSense recording licenses at a discounted price as well as offering the first year of maintenance at no charge.

Included with the Virtual Observer recording license is a complete suite of quality monitoring features including interaction scoring and evaluation, performance and trending reporting with dashboard analytics, agent portal with e-learning, as well as the VO Live set of agent assistance tools, which offer real-time agent screen monitoring, chat assistance and supervisor screen control. The solution also offers agent webcam recording and monitoring for additional performance coaching.

Read the full press release

#ContactCenter #CiscoMediaSense #CallRecording #CustomerEngagement

Consider Flexibility in your Contact Center

2017-04-20T10:02:00.001-04:00

This informative article was originally published by Steve Brubaker on Infocision.

As a business owner, you have always maintained a traditional, on-site work environment. As such, your contact center has never granted Work-at-Home privileges, and you prefer to hire local — as opposed to remote — customer service Communicators.

While this policy may have suited your contact center in the past, it’s time to ask whether it’s still aligned with the needs and demands of your workers. The business landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, and workers today — particularly contact center Communicators — are demanding flexible scheduling policies that allow them to work where they want, and in some cases even when they want.

Rest assured, your contact center won’t be the only one changing its strategy to accommodate its Communicators’ needs. Many customer service administrators are now adjusting their policies and allowing Work-at-Home privileges. According to Gallup, 43 percent of Americans spent at least some time working remotely in 2016. This is an increase of four percent from a previous poll conducted in 2012

Soak that in for a moment: Almost 50 percent of the American workforce is experimenting with teleworking....

Read the complete article on the original source

#CustomerExperience, #ContactCenterFlexibility, #RemoteAgents, #Telecommuting

Companies That Invest In Customer Experience Will Destroy Those That Don't...

2017-03-16T15:28:00.000-04:00

This informative article was originally written by customer experience expert Blake Morgan.

We all have good intentions. We wake up, stretch, brush our teeth and think “it’s going to be a great day!” But as the day goes on some of us get off track. We eat the donuts in the office kitchen, surf Facebook instead of working, make impulse purchases on Amazon and when we get home from work — instead of going to the gym we plant ourselves on the couch for a few episodes of reality TV. We started our day with the best of intentions, but got side-tracked and lost sight of the long-term goals.

It’s the same situation with companies. No company sets out and says, “we’re going to just do the bare minimum for the customer so we can increase our profits!”

Read the entire article here and follow Blake on Twitter @BlakeMichelleM

What's UP with the DOWNTIME?

2017-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

Linda, a contact center supervisor for a large BPO, is at her desk on a Monday afternoon when she has an epiphany. “Something is not right”, she says to herself. “Its Monday and the phones are eerily quiet – too quiet for my center”, she thought.

Linda decides to have a look and walk down to the floor. All her agents are all at their desks, with their headsets on, and all of their stations are active and ready. Everybody is where they need to be, there just isn’t any of the usual call volume right now. Things will change soon, for sure, but Linda wonders “What are they doing with their down time?”.

Read the full article here

Customer experience: The newest reason to adopt cloud services

2017-01-31T10:36:00.001-05:00

Saving money is no longer the top reason to implement cloud services, say top CIOs. The use of cloud has evolved so that IT leaders think of it as the tool to help them achieve a wide range of business outcomes.

The number one goal is to provide the best customer experience, especially in the competitive contact center market.

Read the original article on #CustomerExperience and the Cloud

5 Mistakes You Should Avoid with Your Customer Service Scripts

2016-12-29T14:44:00.001-05:00

Somewhere along the line, the customer service industry envisioned that it would be a great idea to start scripting everything. On the surface, it seems as though a script allows little room for error.

Read the full article:
5 Mistakes You Should Avoid with Your #CustomerService Scripts:

Call Center Employees: The Superheroes of Customer Experience

2016-12-19T16:16:00.001-05:00

Call center employees are the secret superheroes of every brand. These agents wield incredible power when it comes to customer experience, with the ability to build long-term brand loyalty and shape the customer journey. Positive outcomes for every customer interaction is critical.

Read the entire article here:
Call Center Employees are the superheroes of #CustomerExperience

5 Amazing Customer Service Lessons From Father Christmas

2016-12-12T14:06:00.001-05:00

Christmas is fast approaching, and it’s one of the busiest times for different sectors all across the world.

Even when you’re rushed off your feet, you can’t afford for your customer service to take a back seat. As a business, the customer is your main reason for existing, and you shouldn’t be afraid to pull out all the stops to keep them happy.

Given the time of year, there’s one person in particular that we can look to for inspiration on giving excellent customer service, and that is Father Christmas. We’ve taken a closer look at the work that Santa does, and chosen five of his best customer service lessons that businesses everywhere should be following.

1. Be friendly

There are certain traits that embody Father Christmas and are as synonymous with the name as the red suit.

While we’re not suggesting that you take a leaf straight out of his book, there’s certainly nothing wrong with injecting a little more friendliness into your customer service.

“Smile while you dial” is a well-known phrase amongst call centre workers, as the smile on your face comes across in your tone of voice. If you’re more customer-facing, be helpful every time you see a customer in need.

They may say no, but at least you’ve acknowledged their presence and shown them that you are willing to help.

2. Have the right team around you

Even the very best at their jobs need support around them; after all, Father Christmas doesn’t do it all alone! Throughout the year he has elves making the toys, and on Christmas Eve it’s up to his reindeer to fly him and all the presents around the globe to make millions of deliveries.

Your employees and co-workers may not have pointy ears or antlers, but they have the exact same value. Providing great customer support is a team effort; it isn’t just down to one single person, and it starts as soon as your customer first comes into contact with your business. From the first “hello” from a receptionist to tweets from a company’s Twitter account, every employee they come into contact with from that moment on should all be pulling in the same direction.

Read the rest of the lessons:
5 Amazing #CustomerService Lessons From Father Christmas

5 Technology Trends That Are Improving Customer Experiences

2016-11-30T12:45:00.001-05:00

Technological trends have set the stage for a new level of customer support and satisfaction. In fact, the way that companies interact with their customers has changed just within the last ten years due to the invention of certain apps, smart phones, and other such things that have made our society and businesses more technologically advanced.

Technological trends have set the stage for a new level of customer support and satisfaction.

Source: 5 trends shaping #CustomerExperience

How 3 Nonprofits Approach Customer Service

2016-11-22T12:52:00.001-05:00

By and large, nonprofit organizations depend on a different set of motivations to stay afloat than those in the private sector do — i.e.

How 3 non-profits approach #CustomerService

Nordstrom's Customer Service Is Legendary

2016-11-21T15:18:00.001-05:00

Have you heard the story about the guy who walked into a Nordstrom store to return four snow tires? In 1975 a man pulled up to a store with four snow tires in the bed of his truck. He had bought the tires at this location several weeks ago and needed to return them.

Legendary #CustomerService

How to Make Customer Experience a Priority for the Whole Company

2016-11-21T12:28:00.001-05:00

In my exclusive column for CustomerThink last month, I shared my “top tips” for creating the right culture to enable an organisation to become genuinely customer centric.

#CustomerExperience an entire company's priority

How to turn customers into brand evangelists: a customer experience guide to the promoter economy

2016-11-18T16:29:00.001-05:00

Can a single tweet topple a great company? It hasn’t happened yet, but a chorus of unhappy tweets from a group of unhappy customers can do a lot of damage to a company that isn’t providing the kind of customer experience that consumers now demand.

#CustomerExperience and Brand Evangelists

5 Ways to Keep the Modern Workforce Engaged

2016-11-18T14:44:00.001-05:00

We're in the midst of a major workplace transformation. For centuries, the focus was on task-oriented laborers, whose primary output came from their hands.

#EmployeeEngagement and Workforce Transformation

Listen Clear Realizes Rapid Return on Investment with Virtual Observer’s Cloud U-wfm solution in Their Growing Five9 Environment

2016-11-17T14:59:00.001-05:00

SMB Cloud #WFM solution from CSI yields fast returns for ListenClear

Facing a challenge due to their surging growth rate, Listen Clear set out to find an affordable and scalable workforce management solution which would handle their spiking staffing numbers and help them field all calls. They were missing 20% of their call volume.

Top 15 Tips for Workforce Optimization at your Contact Center

2016-11-17T14:34:00.001-05:00

For a call center to function properly, you will require trained and competent professionals, the best call center software and implementation of proper protocols and workflows. Now, finding the best software is easy.

#WFO tips for your contact center

3 ways to extend customer service across the enterprise

2016-11-10T13:29:00.001-05:00

When customers deal with your organization, they don’t care which department they are communicating with – they simply want the best possible experience and service.

3 ways to extend #CustomerService across the enterprise

Chick-fil-A is beating every competitor by training workers to say 'please' and 'thank you'

2016-11-09T12:21:00.003-05:00

For comparison, KFC had a "thank you" rate of 84.9%. McDonald's rate was 78.4%, putting it in 14th place out of the 15 chains analyzed. In 2015, Chick-fil-A generated more revenue per restaurant than any other fast-food chain in the US.

Chick-fil-A excels at #CustomerService

Customer Experience Through the Eyes of a Child

2016-11-09T12:21:00.001-05:00

I’ve lived in Oregon for a year now and I can say without a doubt that the summers here are incredible. For those that love the outdoors, it stays green and doesn’t get too hot or humid.
#CustomerExperience through the eyes of a child