Customer Satisfaction Starts from Within

Contributed Article by Renaud Charvet, CEO of cloud calling Ringover

Customer satisfaction starts from within 

~ Keeping customers happy starts with employee experience ~

Anybody working in sales will have been told “the customer is always right”, probably several times, throughout their career. Keep them happy, and everything else will fall into place. But ensuring customer happiness requires a domino effect — starting with employee satisfaction. Here, Renaud Charvet, CEO of cloud calling Ringover explains how having access to the right business technology can enhance the employee experience and generate business value. 

Keeping customers happy has always been important, but with constantly evolving expectations, it’s increasingly becoming a challenge. The premise behind ensuring customer satisfaction hasn’t faltered — a prompt, complete service delivery on the first try. But the reality of how to meet this expectation has changed.

Previously, being served promptly meant a few days of back-and-forth email communication, or a couple of long-winded phone calls to resolve a query. But now, with the rise of chatbots and a culture of instantaneity, people want, and expect, service now. Nowadays, 60 per cent of customers expect a response within ten minutes to regard it as ‘immediate’, according to Hubspot. Keeping customers happy is the cornerstone of any successful business. But to ensure outward satisfaction, it’s important to first look within, at employee experience.

Happy employees, happy customers 

Fulfilled, driven and content employees are the first piece of the pie in ensuring customer satisfaction. In order to have a sincere, pleasant demeanor and deliver a more attentive level of service, employees have to be genuinely happy to do their job. It’s not something that can be faked. And as the face of the business from a customer perspective, the demeanor of front-line staff has a direct impact on customer experience, and ultimately satisfaction.

It’s backed by data too. Combined analysis of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) and a survey by company review site Glassdoor revealed that across all industry, customer and employee satisfaction are positively linked. In particular, across retail, food service and healthcare, a one-star improvement in Glassdoor company rating on average resulted in a 3.2-point increase in ACSI score.  

So, for businesses where front-line employees are closely linked with customer experience, the impact of employees’ mood and attitude on customer satisfaction is glaringly clear. After all, customer satisfaction is intrinsically linked to customer loyalty. And loyal customers directly benefit business profitability, with a five per cent increase in customer retention rates increasing profile by between 25 and 95 per cent, according to Bain and Company. So, to keep customers happy, it’s crucial to first look at the employee experience.

Elevating employee experience 

To improve employee experience, it’s first important to define what it looks like. And for the majority of America, the future looks hybrid. According to Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trend Index, 38 per cent of Americans have adopted a hybrid blend of working from home and the office, with 53 per cent considering making the switch from their current practice in the next 12 months.

More and more interactions are happening virtually — whether those are internal collaborative conversations or front-line customer service delivery. As such, technology is now a central part of the employee experience. In fact, the two are virtually synonymous, with some people’s entire work experience taking place through, and relying upon technology and workplace tools.

With this in mind, ensuring employees have a seamless set up and are equipped with the right tools to do their job is crucial. According to research conducted by Qualtrics, just 30 per cent of employees say their experience with company technology exceeds expectations. That leaves 70 per cent whose expectations are either just met or go unmet. And unmet expectations ultimately result in a negative employee experience.

Technology for the future 

The customer service landscape is shaping up to be increasingly digital, and so it’s crucial for businesses to implement technology that’s capable of meeting growing needs. A simple desk phone is no longer sufficient — to meet the needs of the modern-day customer, companies need to be adopting a multichannel customer service platform designed to work with the new employee experience, not against it.

Platforms that can be integrated with modules backed by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) abilities not only provide a more intuitive, seamless user experience, but they also open up new opportunities to automate simple tasks. By alleviating some of the workload from typically high-pressure customer service positions, automating in this way will improve employee experience and provide employees with more time and energy to focus on delivering excellent customer service to those that need it.

While employee incentives like gift cards are a nicety, they certainly aren’t the deciding factor in determining employee satisfaction. Listening to feedback and providing the tools required for employees to do their job is far more valuable for both employers and employees. A well-equipped workforce that can perform is likely to be happier, delivering quality service to a more satisfied customer base.

Make Sure that Customers, Agents and Managers Can Navigate the New Normal… and Beyond

At first, it seemed like a sudden squall, roiling every channel in which companies do business. Customer service leaders hung on to the till for dear life to weather what they thought to be a temporary tempest that would soon take them to calmer waters. As time continues to go by, some elements have stabilized a bit, but it is clear we are dealing with a sea change in the way businesses of all sizes need to deliver a consistently superior customer experience.

While successful organizations will navigate the wave of transformation in the workplace, those that continue to do business as usual will flounder along the way. But what defines the demarcation line between simply treading water and charting an informed course? It involves leveraging strategies and CX solutions that enable their workforce to adapt, their customers to have their needs met, and their businesses to thrive.

It has become more critical than ever to listen more carefully to what customers are saying. Updating the contact center by taking advantage of AI and automation capabilities which provide a powerful resource to uncover insights and opportunities for optimizing customer service. Intelligent use of these technologies enables on-the-fly research to better comprehend changing dynamics and new pain points as well as determine innovative approaches to address them. CX leaders who effectively apply AI and automation will create value for consumers. Companies that can create seamless   interactions between assisted self-service and a hybrid workforce will have a distinct competitive   advantage in an environment where customers often struggle to reach businesses.

A study last year in the Harvard Business Review found that the average American consumer spends 13 hours a year stuck on hold trying to resolve problems. The study also revealed that disgruntled customers who need to make two or more calls to resolve their issue, often simply just give up. More than three-quarters of consumers come away “less than satisfied” with a company’s customer service. In many cases, companies set up their customer service operations to make it more difficult for irate customers to gain satisfaction.

One vital way to diminish growing frustration levels is to ensure that front-line personnel are fully engaged and empowered to effectively answer customer calls. This entails both giving them the right knowledge management tools to do their jobs as well as providing employees and supplemental remote workers the real-time assistance necessary to collaborate with each other from multiple locations.

Maintaining compliance in the face of rapidly changing regulations and diverse team locations is also an important element in staying afloat. But how can managers ensure the proper procedures are being followed in a time when they have far less oversight into the daily activities of their agents?

Improved capabilities to listen to customer conversations via AI and automation…engaging and empowering the workforce to optimize productivity and responsiveness…being vigilant about keeping compliance with a staff situated in diverse locations These are the three cornerstones of navigating the new normal and thriving in the time beyond the pandemic.  Customer engagement and cyber intelligence specialists Verint will present a series of three in-depth webcasts on these crucial areas spaced over a one-month period on CrmXchange.

Entitled “Modern Solutions and Best Practices to Make Life Easier for Agents, Managers, and Customers,” the series will kick off on Tuesday, September 29^th at 1:00 PM ET with a session on “AI Powered Analytics Drive Exceptional CX with Human and Digital Channels” which will examine such vital issues as:

• Determining what types of issues cause the most customer frustration, and how to fix them
• How businesses can see a unified view of their customer service across channels
• How can you understand your customer and user intents to drive a successful self-service strategy?

It will be presented by Daniel Ziv, VP, Speech and Text Analytics – Global Product Strategy, Verint and Tracy Malingo, SVP of Product Strategy, Verint.  Daniel has extensive expertise in helping companies achieve significant ROI by improving performance and quality, while enhancing customer engagement. Tracy has an extensive background in strategic and operational vision on conversational AI, having also served as president of NextAI, where she was instrumental in guiding the technology into the mainstream. Register now

The second presentation, “Empowering the Workforce and Maximizing Productivity” will take place on Tuesday, October 13 at 1:oo PM ET. It will focus on making sure that both remote and in-person representatives have everything they need to fulfill their roles as the face of an organization. Among the topics covered will be

• How to keep employees engaged by giving them the right tools to effectively do their jobs
• Ensuring that employees have the opportunity to collaborate with each other from multiple locations
• Providing real-time assistance to help the growing number of work-from-home agents answer customer calls effectively.

The speakers are consummate professionals: John Chmaj, Sr. Practice Director, Knowledge Management, Verint Global Consulting Services, is a seasoned veteran in the KM field. He has worked in all phases of the customer support process, including telephone and online support, technical writing, applications development, and worldwide knowledge systems design. He will be joined by Jon Allen, VP & GM, Communities & Web Self-Service, Verint. Register now for this session.

The final webcast in the series “Ensuring Compliance in the New Normal” is set for Tuesday, October 27 at 1:00PM ET. It will examine the emerging disciplines involved in effectively maintaining compliance with teams now scattered across diverse locations where it is often more difficult to keep track of what agents are doing on a day-to-day basis. Attendees will learn how to:

• Take a proactive approach by making it easy for a company’s agents to consistently follow the correct processes
• Monitor employees’ activities and productivity even when they are working remotely
• Ensure the company can capture, store, and analyze the interaction data necessary to prove compliance and investigate issues

This important how-to presentation will be delivered by Verint’s Directors of Content Marketing, Kelly Koellicker and Iain Dawes. Kelly’s focus on contact center workforce engagement solutions, coupled with Iain’s extensive expertise on compliance and ability to tell comprehensible, engaging stories covering a wider variety of subject matter will make for an entertaining and informative session. Register now for this session

Register for all three for this transformational webcast series. If you are unable to attend any of the live webcasts, a link to the recording will be posted within 24 hours after the presentation.

Meeting the New Challenges of Employee Training, Coaching and Engagement

Since the contact center agent is the face and voice that often defines a company in the eyes of existing and potential customers, workforce recruiting must focus on identifying vital traits, skills, and abilities in individuals. But even when those who meet the highest qualifications are put in place, they must be trained, continuously coached, and kept actively engaged to be successful.

Companies which can recruit and retain qualified and motivated front-line personnel are positioned to operate more efficiently while building customer loyalty. According to a McKinsey report, “Failure to keep talented employees can have significant repercussions… attrition can erode customer satisfaction while increasing operating costs. Each new agent hire is estimated to cost the contact center $10,000 to $20,000 in training, direct recruiting costs, and lost productivity during ramp up.”

Taking every step to keep top performers onboard is now more critical than ever. Although many consumers have become comfortable with online self-service tools, once they decide to call into the contact center the issues are almost always more complicated to resolve. Since people are already frustrated at being unable to find answers on other channels, they are on edge from the moment when an agent picks up the call.

This dilemma has only grown more acute during a crisis in which many customers are already panicked. According to a recent blog on CrmXchange by Uniphore, 60% of consumers said they were given different or conflicting information on current conditions from the news, leaving more questions than answers. Adding more fuel to the fire is that customers are often faced with longer wait times as companies adapt to a new wave of work-at-home agents. Nearly 40% who were put on hold with a company after calling about crisis-related issues stated that they were annoyed or frustrated.

Further McKinsey research suggests a need for companies to take a proactive stance when interacting with their contact-center employees by focusing on engagement and finding ways to increase their comfort and happiness wherever they are working. They found a startling difference in outcomes. Engaged and satisfied call-center employees are:

• 8.5x more likely to stay than leave within a year
• 4x more likely to stay than dissatisfied colleagues
• 16x more likely to refer friends to their company
• 3.3x more likely to feel extremely empowered to resolve customer issues

So how does a company ensure that these valuable assets are happier and more productive? Actions in three areas can have a major impact– targeted coaching, employment of updated training techniques and applying proven strategies to enhance employee engagement —and they are available for all contact centers to take.

A focused educational alternative now makes it possible for a business’s entire workforce planning team to benefit from the latest innovative thinking without ever having to take so much as a step away from their home offices.

CrmXchange is presenting a premier online virtual conference: Techniques for Training, Coaching and Employee Engagement, to be held from June 15-19. The event is being produced in conjunction with the Quality Assurance and Training Connection, (QATC), a membership association created specifically for quality assurance and training professionals in the contact center environment.

The web conference is structured to benefit contact center leaders at all levels – supervisors, managers, directors, and VPS. The fully interactive event enables attendees to meet with industry experts and colleagues who will answer questions in real time while providing updated strategies and techniques. The schedule is designed to provide direction to meet the changing needs of businesses transitioning to a greater percentage of work-at-home agents but will also provide guidance for companies still maintaining on-premise employees.

Among the topics to be covered in-depth are:

• Learning how to work in a remote world
• Best methods for coaching and training remote and on-premise agents
• How to optimize agent performance in the new reality
• Developing an effective instructor competency program

The event will kick off on Monday, June 15 with a focused keynote address entitled “Do Better Work – Finding Clarity and Camaraderie in a Remote World.” It will be presented by Max Yoder, CEO and Co-Founder, Lessonly who will offer stories of the best ways for businesses to navigate the path to working from home, providing specific examples of how to foster understanding, accountability, and progress from disparate teams.

Other areas to be explored in this targeted, complimentary virtual conference include:

• How to Foster Agent Engagement and Human Connection Through Coaching Your Remote Contact Center Team in a Post-Pandemic World
• Nurturing Employees to Become Ambassadors and High Performers
• Agent Coaching and Engagement for Remote Service Excellence
• Creating a Solid Gamification Strategy to Engage Employees Near and Far

In addition to the educational sessions, attendees can visit the booths of leading suppliers in the online exhibit hall. They can then download white papers, videos, product data sheets and other vital content from leading solution providers and organizations such as CallMiner, NICE inContact, Calabrio, NICE, Lessonly, C3 Software and Sharpen.

Register now at no cost for the complete four-day event: there is no limit on how many people a company can sign up. For those who cannot attend the live presentations or have the time to visit the exhibits during the event, links to all sessions and the exhibit hall will remain open for one full week after the event is completed.

Meaningful Agent Training For Meaningful Customer Experiences

How important is agent experience when delivering exceptional customer experience? Eighty-six percent of CX executives believe it is the #1 factor. When it comes to customer satisfaction, agent satisfaction is the key. In the live Virtual Conference webcast, Lauren Comer from NICE InContact walks us through a comprehensive worksheet to help us better understand how to conduct meaningful agent training for more meaningful customer experiences.

It’s simple: satisfied and engaged agents are more likely to stay in their jobs and to have a positive impact on the overall customer experience. But how do we make sure we keep our employees satisfied and engaged? After all, the types of problems agents are handling are increasingly complex, and they need to solve these problems in a way that is efficient and satisfactory for the customer. The answer lies in training: creating more time for it and adding in higher-value skills.

We know what you’re thinking: creating time is easier said than done. After all, you cannot simply add time to your day. When we think about how we can gain more time for training, it is not about adding time, it’s about being more efficient with our time. We can do this by focusing on three things: accelerating new agent onboarding, training smarter with analytics, and pushing miniature bite-sized learning packages.

When accelerating new agent onboarding, it’s not about cutting onboarding time shorter. You’ll want to keep that duration the same while focusing on the activities and skills that really matter to the customer experience. Today, the majority of onboarding time is spent on contact center processes, technology used to service customers, and learning to use the knowledge base. The solution is an all-in-one intuitive agent interface. It’s simple: less complicated technology leads to less training required on systems. Instead, your agents can spend more time on service and use freed onboarding time on value-added training.

Many businesses have a one-size-fits-all approach to ongoing training. This is too manual to identify agent-specific skill sets, and too time consuming to be prescriptive in training. By using analytics to pinpoint agent-specific skill gaps, businesses may evaluate agent interactions based on experience through customer sentiment, customer complaints, specific words and phrases, as well as feedback from customer surveys.

In general, businesses do not prioritize setting aside time for ongoing training and development. The perception is that there is not enough time because of the typical contact center training mold. These training sessions tend to be formal, classroom style training that last at least one hour and require the presence of every employee. Instead, push “just-in-time” bite sized training. These are short, custom learning packages that are accessible from contact handling surfaces. Pushing bite-sized training packages can transform idle time into training time.

Creating time for training will transform how your agents develop and adapt overtime, becoming better equipped to handle the increasingly complex problems being thrown at them. Meanwhile, focusing that training to include higher-value skills such as problem solving, multi-tasking, and emotional intelligence will hand them the toolkit to success.

In the last 12 months, forty-three percent of contact centers experienced an increase in contact complexity. Prepare your agents by modeling what effective problem-solving looks like, identifying common problems in your contact center, ensuring all agents understand all of the problem-solving resources available to them, and allowing room for hands-on role play.

In fifty percent of contact centers, contact volume has increased in the past twelve months. Meanwhile, sixty-seven percent of agents indicated a number of channels as a factor contributing to stress. Today’s digital omnichannel world requires new juggling skills from agents. Get ahead of potential stress by providing your agents with hands on exercises for multitasking practice, sharing best practices across peers, and incorporating screen recordings into QM practices.

Just as well, emotional intelligence is key to successful customer interactions. When your agents have superior emotional intelligence, they are better at managing their emotions as well as the emotions of others. Teaching emotional intelligence is tricky. You cannot just teach the agent the empathy piece, but you also have to teach them to cultivate that emotion into effective problem solving. Do this by creating a list of recommended words and phrases by incoming sentiment /scenarios and provide hands-on exercises with your agents using active role play.

To reiterate, the keys to meaningful agent training is time and value. Creating more time for training, maximizing time with the right tools, and rethinking the training model will set you up for success. Focusing on higher-value skills like problem solving, multitasking, and emotional Intelligence will better prepare your agents for the evolving and increasingly complex contact center. You can listen to the full webcast here: https://bit.ly/3dOPln9

 

Finding an Easy Formula to Do the Math is a Challenge for Contact Centers

When you google “contact center metrics,” there’s no shortage of suggestions to peruse. Lists of varying numbers of suggested metrics to be monitored pop up on the screen: 7, 13, 20, 27.  But which are the right ones for a company’s specific environment? The across-the-board metric cited is First Contact Resolution (FCR), which is a standard that just about every contact center views as critical to maintain and improve.  Similarly, Customer Satisfaction ratings, while not always quite as simple to define, are also a universal target to be monitored.

But it gets murkier from there. Many other commonly cited metrics, such as service level or average handle time, are not always directly comparable across channels; and evaluating teams that share some — but not all — queues is not always a precise process.  An ICMI study revealed that 39% of contact center leaders struggle to identify and measure key performance indicators.

A deeper understanding of metrics and how to calculate them helps a business set the right targets and reach goals to support its mission and vision. Each measure used to help determine how teams are performing needs to be understandable and actionable to individual agents, supervisors and management alike.  When all parties agree on what is important, a company can consistently track performance and see where to improve processes and training to help its agents do better.

Having this level of clarity on goals and metrics and knowing how they’re tracking towards those goals, creates employees who are more engaged with their work and empowered in their roles. A Dale Carnegie infographic shows that companies with more engaged employees outperform companies without engaged employees by 202%, and have customer retention rates that are 18% higher, according to loyalty strategy research by Colloquy.

Setting goals to measure performance can be somewhat tricky. Targets should not be so difficult to attain as to make them daunting for agents. There must be flexibility and compromise in determining how to balance between goals that appear to compete with one another, such as average handle time – where saving and time and reducing cost is paramount – and customer satisfaction, especially in cases that involve more complex interactions. When creating scoreboards to measure agent performance, businesses need to ensure that goals are instantly comprehensible and ready to act upon. They also need to make sense mathematically in tracking drivers across all contact channels including traditional, social, and mobile.  It’s helpful to use the same classification system across all interactions and equip agents to use it consistently.

Of course, simply knowing which metrics to use and how to score them is not the be-all, end-all for optimizing agent happiness. Going back to Google, one would find an astounding 147,000+ results for “benefits of a happy contact center agent”. The major areas of focus in these listings range from the obvious: “why agent satisfaction is important,” to the ubiquitous “fun things to do to keep agents happy” and the more specific evaluations of software and services to promote agent satisfaction.

Companies must be proactive in their approach to building models that are consistently accurate in predicting probabilities and outcomes in their contact centers. Models that are less than precise lead to failure to maintain desired service levels and result in cost overages. Businesses need to find innovative but proven methods to calculate the proper variables and the right things to look for in developing analyses that result in accurate forecasts.

Data abundance and complex operations make it challenging to develop, implement, and present clean, clear reports and on-target analyses. Over the next several months, agent-first solution provider Sharpen Technologies, developers of an always-on contact center platform built for the enterprise, will present a comprehensive series of complimentary webcasts on CrmXchange.

The four sessions are designed to demystify the process of determining the right metrics, show businesses how to measure and accurately analyzing contact center performance, and to implement those analyses across the operation so the entire organization stays focused on excellence. It will culminate in a discussion of how to put together the most efficacious math models for contact center executives and managers to glean actionable insights.

The first webcast in the series, “Attributes of Solid Contact Center Performance Metrics – and Attributes of Poor Ones”  will take place on Thursday, March 5.

The second,” Learn How to be Great: Helping Agents, Supervisors, and Execs Perform,” will be presented on Tuesday April 21.

The third session, “Setting Performance Goals and Scorecards,” comes up on Thursday, August 13.

The final presentation “Building Great “What-If” Models and the Resulting Analyses for the CEO” will be delivered on Tuesday, October 20.

All webcasts will be jointly presented by Ric Kosiba, Chief Data Scientist and Adam Settle. Chief Product Officer, Sharpen Technologies. Ric’s vast background of expertise goes back two decades to Bay Bridge Decisions Technologies which he co-founded in 2000. In that role, he developed the contact center industry’s first “what if” decision engine, a complex set of algorithms designed to forecast proper staffing levels. Adam is an experienced education professional skilled in Sales, Coaching, Team Building, and Training. He combines his extensive knowledge with hands-on experience as a trainer at Apple and Angie’s List.

Register now at no cost for the individual presentations or the complete series. Each webcast is at 1:00PM ET. If you cannot attend the live presentation, a link to the recorded session will be available within 24 hours.

How Does Employee Engagement Help Companies Deliver on the Marketing Promises Made to Customers?

Businesses spend enormous amounts of time, effort and capital building a brand to which people can relate. They use terminologies such as “dependable,” “on your side,” “you’ve got a friend,” “like a good neighbor,” “we treat you like you’d treat you,” “you can count on us,” and too many others to mention. But applying such warm human attributes to a company is a double-edged sword that can cut quick and deep when a customer’s experience with front-line personnel doesn’t live up to the expectations created by marketing.

A recent Aberdeen study revealed that successful customer interactions have more influence on customer satisfaction than any other factor—including product features and pricing. The challenge faced by every organization is to motivate its people to keep these marketing promises.

In a 2016 report the research firm The Temkin Group (since acquired by Qualtrics) noted the correlation between employee engagement and delivering a consistently superior customer experience. It found that 77% of employees are highly or moderately engaged in companies that are better financial performers than their peers, compared with only 49% of employees in companies which are not doing as well– a 60% difference. It also found that highly engaged employees are more than four times as likely to recommend the company’s products and services and do something good for the company that is not expected of them. These employees spread their enthusiasm to customers and are more dedicated to providing the best possible service. One significant example of this is reported by the Bain Group, stating the “key ingredient” to JetBlue’s high customer ratings is that “JetBlue employees treat customers’ problems as their own.”

As noted in an article in Forbes, ‘engagement comes from feeling good, from passion for the company, from believing that the work that one does is meaningful and from attaching part of one’s identity with their job.” But research indicates that employees in in customer-facing roles are often less engaged due to the non-stop, day-to-day pressures of their jobs. One important way companies can inspire higher levels of engagement is to provide employees with the technology they need to improve communication and collaboration. When the right support is in place, employees tend to become more invested in the organization, which can double customer satisfaction rates when compared to others in their industry.

While improving employee engagement is critical to bottom-line success, taking a “one-size-fits-all” approach does not work. “Employee Engagement – The Hidden Secret to Customer Engagement,” a CRMXchange webcast scheduled for Tuesday, September 24, sponsored by business communication and contact center technology provider RingCentral will start you in the right direction. Omer Minkara, VP & Principal Analyst, Contact Center & Customer Experience Management, Aberdeen will delve into the key components in building a successful program. These include

• Top drivers of employee engagement
• The solutions best-in-class firms use to improve employee engagement
• How emerging technologies, such as AI, influence employee engagement and CX results
• Real-life success stories from firms that transformed their CX results through employee engagement

The webcast is complimentary and those unable to attend it live can download it approximately 24 hours after it is completed. Register now.

Building a Case for Knowledge Management: Information is Everywhere, But Not Always Available When You Need It

“Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.” Martin H. Fischer, German-born American physician and author

We’ve all experienced it: you’re frantically searching for a certain bit of important information, which you can’t locate in the FAQs or find anywhere else on a company’s website. So, you call into the contact center or initiate an online chat. You want to believe that the agent you encounter has the knowledge and experience to provide the answer to resolve your issue quickly and accurately. Sadly, that is not always a realistic expectation.

In a recent survey, Forrester Research asked 5000 customers “What creates the greatest pain when you contact a business for customer service?” The response was resoundingly clear: the lack of knowledge and consistency of information on the part of agents, followed by the difficulty of finding relevant answers on company websites. The feedback read like a litany of customer discontent:

• Different customer service agents give different answers (41%)
• Customer service agents don’t know the answer (34%)
• Can’t find correct answers on website (31%)

This disconnect has contributed to a 3-year decline in the perception of customer service. In reviewing the Forrester CX Index for 2016, 2017, and 2018, no single company offered “excellent” customer service in 2017 and 2018, and the number of companies offering “good” customer service declined from 17% in 2016 to 15% in 2018.

While this seems like a dismal picture, it is certainly far from hopeless. Most businesses have no shortage of information, but have so much content scattered in different places that it is often nearly impossible to find what is needed in the moment. The” magic bullet” to make information immediately accessible to agents has been around for years, but for some reason, knowledge Management (KM) systems have not yet been adapted by the majority of companies.

By capturing, organizing, and analyzing data for shared intelligence and improved performance through best practice implementation, effective contact center KM solutions can dramatically enhance customer support and agent productivity while reducing training time and customer frustration. Having the right KM system in place enables wider sharing of information across the entire organization, spurs operational efficiencies in rapidly communicating accurate intelligence, and helps ensure consistency across an omnichannel implementation.

But building, implementing and maintaining a successful KM program can be a daunting process. A business needs to determine the right procedures to setting up a single source of the truth for all users across all channels and institute a reliable method of measuring its effectiveness at every stage.

Discover how your company can take the right approach to get the ball rolling and put your program on a trajectory to success. Listen to “The 10 Steps to Building a KM Program that Works” presented by Verint on Thursday, September 12, 2019 on CRMXchange. If you can’t attend the live webcast, you can download it 24 hours after it is completed.

 

It’s So Random: Changing the Culture of ‘Who’s Up Next’ with Intelligent Call Routing

With comprehensive information at everyone’s fingertips, few people now book a hotel room in a far-off location, make a reservation in an unfamiliar restaurant or hire an unknown contractor without carefully reviewing all relevant feedback. For the most part, businesses are even more cautious about making moves, industriously uncovering everything about prospective employees during the hiring process, and thoroughly investigating every angle of any potential partnership, investment strategy or technology purchase.

Yet, with all the rich data resources available to them, most organizations leave one crucial business process almost entirely to chance: which front-line representative takes the lead in customer interactions. Startlingly, 95 – 99% of companies still randomly route customer calls to the next available agent. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way. Intelligent routing systems—with the capability to identify the caller and the reason for the call to assign the customer to the agent best skilled to handle the specific inquiry— have been around for years and are constantly becoming more efficient and affordable.

Rather than adhering to the circuitous procedure of using interactive voice recording (IVR) to send the customer to the most appropriate department or to an initial operator who will forward the call, intelligent call routing totally streamlines the process. It taps directly into customer records to retrieve information about the caller based on previous interactions and instantly directs the call to whom it judges to be the most qualified agent to handle the issue. In making split-second routing determinations, such systems not only take into account an agent’s track record, training and skills, but also consider caller priority, long-term customer value and more. Sometimes, the best responder for a specific call may already be engaged in another ongoing conversation that started only a few minutes earlier. Depending on how long the caller may have to wait, how wait time impacts that individual’s satisfaction and the skill level of others available, intelligent call routing decides to either have the caller wait or assign them to the next best agent.

With the increasing volume of available data on customer history and improved knowledge of agent capabilities, the traditional legacy routing strategy is evolving to become more intelligent, personalized, and able to effect specific improvements in a company’s metrics. Integrations now enable the use of data gleaned from previous interactions to provide insight into a customer’s personality and behavioral characteristics. By applying this knowledge, companies can gauge their customer’s communication preferences–intelligent routing can go beyond calls, helping to shape better outcomes on email, chat or messaging channels– and deliver the optimal experience.

Learn how your company can use this vital and improving technology to both reduce customer effort and create more personalized connections. Listen to a complimentary webcast “How Intelligent Call Routing Can Deliver Business Results,” presented by NICE Nexidia.

Agent churn: It’s not you, it’s your employee engagement strategy

Jeff Gallino, CTO and founder of CallMiner

It’s no secret that contact centers are infamous for their high turnover rates, which average 45 percent year-over-year—more than double the average for all U.S. occupations. What most companies don’t realize, however, is that this doesn’t have to be the status quo. Identifying the signs an agent is about to check out and having solutions in place to change the outcome can dramatically reduce agent churn well before they decide to give their notice.

If retention isn’t motivation enough, research shows that an astonishing 77 percent of employees worldwide are not engaged, which, according to Gallup, can cost upwards of $605 billion in lost productivity per year. There’s incredible value in spotting non-engagement signs and addressing the lack of productivity that often lead to agent turnover early. This can ensure strong employee engagement and stop the turnover cycle. Not only will it save billions in lost revenue, it will promote better customer experiences through an organization’s No. 1 advocate—its employees.

Warning Sign 1: They go into silent mode

One of the primary indicators of an unengaged employee is silence. Silence is commonly caused by a lack of agent training, but this isn’t only applicable immediately after onboarding. Agents require extensive knowledge of your company’s products and services; however, many employees miss out on new product information because organizations neglect to offer continual education programs.

Employee silence can also happen outside of customer interactions, as managers of unengaged agents tend to notice an increase in the amount of time between each call. Although this doesn’t usually stem from a lack of company knowledge, it’s a telltale sign an employee is experiencing a lack of motivation. Distant employees are comfortable with doing the bare minimum to get by and will likely keep their heads down, and calls quietly recording, to purposely limit the number of customers they interact with.

Warning Sign 2: Under (but not terrible) performance

Decreased performance in areas such as average handle time (AHT), call volume, and following a script could all point to a lack of engagement that, if not fairly addressed, can lead to lower NPS scores, turnover, and even compliance risks.

Sometimes, however, quantifiable performance metrics aren’t the sole indicator of an agent’s performance—as agents aren’t at-fault for many of the disruptions that happen during the call. Companies need to take training, tools and technical factors into consideration when it comes to gaps in an agent’s performance and use contextualized scoring methods to accurately and thoroughly understand where performance issues are occurring and the root cause.
Warning Sign 3: Inconsistent feedback on their work

According to research by Gallup, less than 21 percent of employees strongly agree their employee implements fair evaluation processes. Contact center agents handle dozens of calls per day, but many outbound surveys and manual quality management reviews only account for three to five percent of an agent’s interactions—leading to ill-informed assessments of their overall performance.

In addition to being inaccurate and irregular, many legacy feedback systems are impersonal. Call center feedback usually only involves reprimanding, despite the employee’s desire to be recognized for exceptional service. The lack of effort put into celebrating successes usually causes agents to feel unappreciated and less likely to advocate for the business.

How to Stop the Cycle

Proper training—during and after onboarding: Before sending your agent out on their own, how do you know you’ve given them the proper training to handle the influx of problems they’ll face out on the floor? To keep up with the fast-paced environment of the contact center, they need to stay informed, especially if your products and services are constantly evolving. Each one of your employees is unique and despite what’s suggested by legacy employee education programs—their training processes should be as well. Speech analytics data can help managers offer personalized training programs in accordance with agents’ specific needs, even after onboarding.

Tools to optimize performance: Aside from training, contact center operators need to ask themselves whether their agents have the resources they need to succeed. While two-thirds of customers dial in with a problem, some caused by lack of self-serving options on other channels, they expect your agent to be able to solve, lack of resources is one of the biggest factors leading to job-related stress. It’s impossible to guide each of your representatives through every single interaction—but tools and customer engagement analytics software can take information in real time and apply historical data to provide your agent with better insight and guide them through the call based on the context of the conversation.

Real-time feedback: Agents should always know where they stand when it comes to their performance. A discussion a week, a month, or a year later about a specific interaction with a customer will not help anyone succeed. Having an analytics tool removes any sense of unfairness that’s usually associated with random selection by providing an inclusive and holistic view of your caller engagement data, ensuring a stronger voice of your employee. It also helps with coaching by automatically scoring 100 percent of your agents’ customer interactions to pinpoint the exact areas they need to both improve customer experiences in real-time and add business value in the long run.

While employee turnover is one of the biggest problems companies face today, employee engagement is just as impactful to your business’s bottom line, as those with highly-engaged workforces outperform their peers by nearly 150 percent. All problems associated with the warning signs of an unengaged employee point to a similar source—the company’s inability to fully understand the needs of their employees from both a personal and professional perspective. Similar to how analytics and artificial intelligence work to strengthen customer loyalty, these tools and concepts can help personalize your organization’s approach to agent management—offering a fully-developed employee engagement strategy that involves critical coaching and feedback procedures. In doing so, companies can foster a positive work culture and keep employees from feeling as though they are ‘just another number’.

Why Your Contact Center Needs Remote Agents

When agents are twiddling their thumbs because calls aren’t coming in, it costs the contact center money. When a barrage of calls come in and wait times skyrocket, the customer experience drops. Having the correct capacity of agents without over-staffing is a tug-of-war that every contact center has had to play.

Even with insightful analytics, you can’t perfectly predict how much activity your contact center is going to have. There will be unexpected lulls and spikes in activity regardless of what the numbers prepare you for.

The goal of flexible WFM is to increase the contact center’s agility while maintaining a high level of customer service.

Traditional vs. Flexible Workforces

One way to increase workforce flexibility is to have a number of remote agents who are able to work from home. Here’s how that can help:

Hold Times

Agents in a traditional contact center can easily get overloaded with calls, leaving a lot of customers on hold. Call abandon rates increase while service quality decreases. Remote agents are often able to deliver quicker call resolution.

Ramp-Up Time

Ramp-up time in a traditional contact center can take weeks, but on-demand remote agents are able to ramp up in just a few hours.

Scalability

If there’s an unexpected rush of communication or a shift has to be covered in an emergency, the resources at a traditional contact center can’t always scale as quickly as needed. With the support of a remote workforce, though, agents can cover gaps in even a non-standard schedule at the last minute.

Encourage Customers to Use Other Channels

Unexpected spikes are going to happen. As you continue managing spikes, particularly the ones you can predict, create a contingency plan for the spikes you don’t see coming. One way to do this is to encourage customers to use other channels, like chat, email, SMS and social media.

This can limit the number of incoming calls and may also lower the number of times a customer reaches out to customer service before being helped. For example, if you have a team of agents providing social media support, they can connect with a customer after the first complaint and possibly solve the issue before is escalates.

Even contact centers that have always had rigid staffing measures can see the benefits of a flexible model, which saves resources during downtime and allows for adjustments on-the-fly.