Improving Marketing Experiences With Customer Data

Guest Post from Presented By: Amanda Winstead

What’s one practice your 21st-century business can’t do without?

Our answer is data collection.

Gathering customer data, in particular, can help you hone your customer service strategy, better your sales techniques, and improve the marketing experience you’re providing to your customers.

We’ll talk specifically about the connection between customer data and the marketing experience in this article. When you collect data about your customers, you can make huge strides in your marketing strategy.

For example, you can create content that resonates with them and drives conversions. You can tailor your digital channel experiences to guide them to the next step of the customer journey. You can also learn about your repeat customers and create a specific marketing strategy for customer retention. 

Read on for more about improving your customers’ marketing experiences with data. 

Grow What You Know About Your Customers

Better marketing experiences come when you know your customers. In addition, because their needs, wants, and desires will evolve, you must continue learning about your customers to make effective changes to your marketing strategy. 

For instance, let’s say you collected data on your customers’ content consumption today. You learn they’re educating themselves on sustainability more and interacting with brands that highlight this value.

You can then start showcasing your business’s commitments to sustainability in your marketing content. You could also send your customers sustainable marketing swag, sweatshirts made from ethically-sourced materials, or notebooks created from recycled products to show the depth of your sustainability commitments.

Use your analytics tools to collect the following data to learn about your audience continually: 

• What are my target audience’s current values? Have they changed since the last set of data?
• Which digital channels are my target audience using the most?
• How has their engagement on social media evolved?
• Which media and content types are my target audience consuming regularly?
• How many visitors are interacting with my brand for the first time? How many visitors are recurring?
• How does my target audience make purchases today?
• Are there any noteworthy changes to the customer journey?
• Is there any new demographic information about my target audience? 

Customer data can also help you ensure your marketing efforts spread throughout the entire customer journey.

Ensure Your Marketing Efforts Extend to the Entire Customer Journey

Each of your customers will experience their relationship with your business differently. However, generally, they’ll move through the following stages with your business: 

• Connection- how they’re introduced to your business
• Cultivation- the relationship starts to develop between you and the potential customer
• Consideration- they’re considering all solutions to their challenge, including your business 
• Conversion- they choose your business’s product/service as their solution
• Continuation- how the relationship continues after the first purchase  

For your customers to have the best experience with your business, you must ensure your marketing efforts extend to the entire customer journey. By collecting customer data on how various people move through their buyer’s journey with your business, you can learn what’s necessary marketing-wise to aid the journey.

Be sure to implement a data collection strategy that uses artificial intelligence tools. You’ll be able to collect vast data sets better and accurately filter the data. From there, you can analyze the information, extract valuable insights from it, and use those insights to improve how you market to your customers at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

You can also create better content and learn the best ways to share it with your particular audience with customer data.

Create Better Content and Learn Best Practices for Sharing it

One of the best ways to boost your marketing efforts is to create original content and share it with your target audience in their favorite places.

By collecting customer data on the kind of content your customer consumes, the platforms they consume it on, and how they best absorb the information, your content creation and distribution methods will work with your target audience more often.   

Use your data collection tools to gather the following information about your customers and content and improve the content marketing experience: 

• Comments left and the quality of them 
• What content is attracting new customers
• Which CTAs are driving the most conversions
• What content is resonating with current customers
• If re-purposing content is working with your target audience
• If your visuals and videos are a factor in driving conversions
• How often your content is shared over various digital channels
• Which digital channels your customers engage with your content the most on  

Improve Customer Retention

So many marketers focus most of their strategy on attracting new customers. This is a mistake because most of your business will come from current customers. Gathering data on repeat customers can help you create a marketing strategy specific to customer retention efforts.

Use your data analytics tools to collect information on repeat customers, like: 

• Why repeat customers love your brand
• How repeat customers make purchases
• How the buyer’s journey differs for repeat customers
• What the most popular products are among repeat customers
• Demographics that are different from the rest of your customers
• Which marketing strategies and tactics attract repeat customers
• How repeat customers prefer to be rewarded for continuous purchases   

You can create marketing content that speaks directly to your repeat customers with data like the above. You can also make better use of the digital marketing channels they frequent. Furthermore, you can create a loyalty program that rewards customers in the ways you’ve learned they like to be rewarded and use this as an additional platform to drive customer retention.

Conclusion  

The fastest and most efficient way to improve marketing experiences is to collect customer data and use what you learn to make productive adjustments to your strategies, techniques, and tactics. Use the tips above to help you collect accurate data about your customers and modify your marketing to favor them. 

Unearthing the Most Important CX Initiatives for 2021 Requires Going Far Beneath the Surface

It’s always been a tried and true topic for seminars and webcasts to divine the most significant changes and new directions in a specific industry. Until now, when someone set out to predict what the major trends might be in the following year, they could often just look at what was being forecast in the previous year and update the syllabus of such educational offerings by integrating any new ideas that may have been introduced in the interim.

Of course, viewed through the prism of the world we are now living in, that notion seems like a quaint anachronism, as irrelevant as the Jetson’s 1960s vision of a future of flying cars that fold into briefcases. The clichés used to describe the current situation in the CX/contact center world are mounting …the world has been turned upside down, the way we do business has changed forever, we are living in a new normal, etc. But however tired we may be of seeing these aphorisms, they reflect an undeniable reality. Organizations of all types must find and implement innovative methods to address customers’ momentous needs today to build enduring relationships in the era when Covid-19 is just a jarring memory.

Simply stated, the pandemic has triggered a re-evaluation of the meaning and purpose of customer care. Over the past few months, the emphasis on complex examinations of customer journeys and satisfaction metrics have been supplanted by a focus on the gravity of ensuring that consumers can get the information they need when they need it. Consequently, businesses are now changing the way they will measure and deliver the customer experience in 2021. The sudden transition calls for a new perspective that extends beyond familiar metrics, existing processes, and technology silos.

With the disruption in the workforce due to the lockdowns and furloughs, can businesses be counted on to provide service which makes empathy, understanding and concern integral elements of every interaction? Can CX leaders rapidly reposition themselves to react to the likely long-term alterations in consumer behavior that will undoubtedly come about from this crisis? The challenge is to pivot, innovate and transform operations in a way that enables organizations to not only stand out from the competition, but create new standards of service that truly address the evolving needs of the customer.

In this environment, any educational program that attempts to identify the most critical developments in the next year of the customer experience universe must take a totally fresh approach. On Tuesday, August 11th at 1:00 PM ET, CrmXchange offers a complimentary Best Practices Roundtable discussion that will provide an in-depth examination of the elements that have now become front and center in importance. “CX Megatrends to Watch in 2021” will be presented jointly by experts from two solution providers with demonstrated expertise in revamping contact center operations. Steve Chirokas, Director, Product and Channel Marketing, CallMiner, and Laura Bassett, Senior Director, Product Marketing, NICE inContact, will team up and tap their extensive backgrounds in providing guidance and strategic direction to industry leaders.

The topics to be discussed include:

• Why Work-from-Home affects the customers’ perception of a brand and the ways that getting it right can positively influence loyalty
• How to manage remote workers for increases in productivity and enhanced CX
• In what ways can customer insight, using emotional metrics combined with AI agility, aid agents in taking the next best compelling action
• How to build momentum toward in-the-moment voice of your customer insight and ensure that responses make for dynamic personalization
• How to recognize and prioritize digital strategy
• Specific reasons why moving to the cloud decreases uncertainty during a pandemic

Register now for this enlightening roundtable discussion that will give you updated guidance on what lies ahead. If you can’t attend the live presentation, a link to the recorded webcast will be provided 24 hours after it has been completed.

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 Analytics Enable You to Bring Your Company Closer to the Customer than Ever Before

There are divergent opinions in what technologies are most effective in creating a better customer experience, but one thing that just about every expert agrees upon is analytics can be  a real game-changer.

According to a recent Harvard Business Review Analytics Services study, published in Forbes magazine;

• 70% of enterprises have increased their spending on customer analytics solutions over the past year.
• 58% of enterprises are seeing a significant increase in customer retention and loyalty as a result of using customer analytics.
• 60% use real-time customer analytics to improve customer experience across touch points and devices as extremely important today.
• 44% of enterprises are gaining new customers and increasing revenue as a result of adopting and integrating customer analytics into their operations.

The move toward greater use of analytics has been swelled by a wave of converging technologies including artificial intelligence, the internet of things (IoT), and cloud computing. The exceptional speed and precision advanced customer data analytics continue to improve at an exponential rate, making them a must-have for businesses seeking to forge stronger connections with their audience.

As further noted in the Harvard Business Review Analytics Services study, the number of corporate executives who responded to the study indicated that the importance of having the capability to use customer analytics to improve customer experience across all touch points rose from 60% in 2018 to a projected 79% for 2020.

But it’s an oversimplification to just state that analytics can be beneficial to businesses. Analytics tools encompass a broad spectrum of categories and technologies that needs to be understood and evaluated before being implemented and integrated into a company’s CX strategy.

Can text and speech be analyzed in the same way? Why or why not and how should companies be thinking about text analysis vs. speech analysis? Both text and speech analytics enable organizations to optimize customer engagement by looking deeper into interactions its agents have with customers, regardless of channel –phone, email, chat, social media, or surveys as well.

Speech analytics uses speech recognition software to convert spoken words of recorded calls into text where analyses can be performed. When used effectively, it can help identify the reason behind a call, the products mentioned and the caller’s mood. Sophisticated speech analytics software can analyze phrases used by customers to quickly identify their needs, wants and expectations and indicate areas that need improvement for front-line personnel.

Text analytics is the process of transforming unstructured text documents into usable, structured data. It works by deconstructing sentences and phrases into their components, and then examining each part’s role and meaning using complex software rules and machine learning algorithms. One can analogize it to slicing and dicing piles of diverse documents into easy-to- interpret data pieces. By more closely examining communications written by–or about– customers, business can identify patterns and topics of interest, and follow up with practical action based on what has been learned

Desktop analytics offers contact center managers a method of capturing and analyzing user activity at the desktop level. The data gathered about individual application usage and across applications can not only impact the customer experience but ultimately affect the IT resource budget as well. It resides on each individual agent’s desktop, compiling a list of every application, URL, and more the agent accesses during the day. This empowers companies to determine if contact center personnel are adhering to standards and see how well they are relating to customers.

Leading analytics provider Calabrio will take a deeper dive into the constantly growing use of analytics—and examine its specific role in enabling companies to become more customer-centric—in two complementary…and complimentary…webcasts on CrmXchange.

The first of the two presentations –“The Beginner’s Guide to Analytics” –will take place on Thursday, February 20. Presented by Contact Center Analytics Consultant Mark Fagus of Calabrio, it will explore such key topics as:

• The differences between speech, text and desktop analytics
• Analytics technologies, such as LVCSR (Large-Vocabulary Conversational Speech Recognition), Phonetics and STT (speech-to-text)
• The top 10 analytics business use cases

The second webcast –Unlock Customer-Centric Intelligence on Thursday, March 12 will expand on how companies can make the most out of using analytics by empowering themselves to reach higher levels of comprehension by developing new insights to deal with their customers. Brad Snedeker, Director Product Marketing, Calabrio, will delve into features that companies can use to their advantage, including:

• Embedded analytics – learn how analytics have been surfaced throughout the application to provide easy access to key insights without having to go outside everyday workflows
• Unified, self-service dashboards – compelling and personalized insights within dashboards that can double as homepages
• Enterprise KPIs – out-of-the box performance management tools
• Speech-to-text enhancements – find out how to achieve increased accuracy and speed of transcription

Register now for the first or second of these informative Calabrio webcasts….even better, sign up for both! Each will take place at 1:00 pm ET: if you cannot attend the live presentations, you can download each one 24 hours after it is completed.

What New Paths Will Companies Take to Shape the Customer Journey in the Years to Come?

As the time-honored adage puts it, ‘a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.’ These days, the journey a customer takes when engaging with a company may be far more geographically limited but usually starts with a lot more steps. The ever-evolving customer journey incorporates varying interactions and experiences that take place on different touchpoints: a website visit for research, a call with a sales rep or chat with an agent, a conversation on social media or online review site, an inbound call, and even an in-store retail encounter.

It has become more important than ever for a business to take advantage of every possible resource to understand its customers: their wants, needs, and expectations, their thoughts and opinions and feedback and expectations. Building this knowledge will enable companies to deliver the highly personalized customer experiences that are becoming more crucial all the time in an increasingly competitive marketplace where consumers are offered a constantly growing array of options.

Given access to vast resources of data and technology, the customer journey today has morphed dramatically from where it was even five or ten years ago. And every company’s success depends upon combining the right technologies with the agility needed to effectively manage all the interactions that take place on every channel along the way.

Gazing into the future, which often-predicted developments will come to pass? Will the migration to the cloud finally encompass all businesses and make service more responsive? Will messaging ultimately surpass voice as the communication channel that is most compelling for businesses and consumers alike? Will digital transformation extend its reach deeper into the contact center environment to better leverage profile data, more closely examine customer feedback, and measure sentiment? Will customers expect greater availability of agent support that involves the use of screenshots, photos and video? And how will the growing use of AI-powered solutions progress, both in terms of those that provide more effective self-service options and those that support the development of more highly specialized agents?

Of course, no one can foresee every possible path the customer journey will take in the coming years, but CX and contact center executives and managers have an opportunity to get a cogent vision of many of the most important changes in an upcoming complimentary roundtable webcast on CrmXchange. On Thursday, December 5, at 1:00PM ET, NICE Nexidia and RingCentral will team up to explore “Smooth Customer Journey- Predictions for 2020 and Beyond.”

Ken Brisco, Senior Product Marketing Manager, NICE Nexidia, who is responsible for establishing the scope and message as well as the competitive advantages of NICE’s Customer Journey Optimization Solutions within the CX space will be joined by RingCentral’s John Finch, AVP PMM, Customer Engagement, an executive with an extensive background in developing strategy for global customer engagement. Among the topics they will cover are:

• How AI-driven analytics can boost customer loyalty and retention
• The importance of measuring quality across all channels
• In what ways bots are best able to collaborate with humans
• How macro to micro-level journey analysis drives deeper insights into customer engagement

Register now for this insightful look into which near-future developments may change the way your organization helps to orchestrate the customer experience. If you are unable to attend on December 5, you can access the recorded version approximately 24 hours after the live presentation.

 

An Online In-Depth Education Program Without the Cost and Inconvenience of Traditional Live Conferences

While there are numerous quality live conferences in the CX/contact center space that delve into workforce optimization, attending these events often entails a series of complex decisions. First, you must determine if it includes enough seminars that are relevant to your specific needs and exhibitors with the right solutions to advance your program. Then, you need to obtain approval and funding, plan the details of the trip and make sure all your responsibilities are covered while you are away. While some consider traveling to an event a welcome break from routine, others find it a time-consuming, expensive disruption that they simply can’t justify.

The need for ongoing education in this critical operational area continues to grow. Over the past 12 years, an increasing number of workforce planning professionals have found a flexible, no-cost, no-travel alternative in CrmXchange’s annual online Best Practices in Workforce Optimization virtual conference, produced in conjunction with the Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC) and the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP).

Over the past two years, the event has been expanded to provide even more in-depth education. For 2019, it will take place the first two weeks of November, with the first week (November 4-8) focusing on QA and Analytics and the second (November 11-15) examining strategies for Workforce Management and Performance Optimization.

The enhanced conference content reflects the evolution of how contact centers now approach workforce planning responsibilities. It used to be handled in independent groups, with one team handling quality assurance, another conducting training, and yet another developing agent schedules. Supervisors often tried to do coaching with no input from other functional areas, while managers simply ran and reacted to reports. But this disconnected approach no longer works in today’s complex, omnichannel contact center environments. Workforce Optimization is a wide-ranging field that now encompasses all these elements as a unified discipline. And the CrmXchange virtual conference provides WFO professionals with the year’s most convenient and comprehensive opportunity to gain greater insights on the latest technologies, tactics and best practices.

Attendees have the opportunity to meet in real time with industry experts and colleagues who can answer their questions and offer business solutions tailored to their contact centers, without the cost and time away from the office of an on-site conference. Anyone can attend learning sessions the same way they would in an on-site conference.

The format allows entire WFO teams to share newly acquired knowledge throughout an organization. Team members can attend live sessions together or attend different session tracks. All sessions will be recorded and available on demand for one week after the conference – giving those who could not attend the initial presentation the opportunity to view the sessions later.

In addition, attendees can visit the virtual exhibit hall to download product videos, and obtain product information, press releases, white papers, and much more. Sponsors, including Calabrio, CallMiner, NICE, NICE inContact and Verint, are ready to share the latest innovations that may benefit your contact center.

And while you can’t sit down over a drink after hours, you can still chat with presenters and peers in the virtual lounge, a specially designed virtual networking forum for registered members of this online event. Learn what others are doing, meet colleagues, pose questions, and offer your own insight.

The Best Practices in Workforce Optimization virtual conference kicks off on Monday, November 4 at 12 noon ET with a high-interest keynote address Building a Customer Experience Movement which examines the true elements required to create a culture-changing CX program that is built to last. It will be presented by Nate Brown, Co-Founder of CX Accelerator, a virtual community of customer experience professionals.

Join the thousands of industry executives who have already benefited from this powerful complimentary two week online conference Register now and check out the broad ranging agenda.

New CX Metrics for Today’s Digital World

Consumers want omnichannel but conversations and measurements haven’t kept pace by Ted Hunting, Bright Pattern

The customer experience (CX) is increasingly digital with over 95% of customer interactions starting on websites. Forrester research shows that customers are using and hopping between an increasing number of media channels, such as chat, text, messengers, and of course, traditional channels like email and voice calls. Even though “omnichannel” is still an industry buzzword and there has been a dramatic shift to new channels, fewer than 20% of companies offer a seamless, continuous conversation across channels. Ninety percent of consumers want this type of effortless customer experience without friction or silos, but companies are failing to deliver.

Similar to the gap between customers’ expectation for omnichannel and companies’ ability to offer it, metrics for customer experience have also remained siloed and focused all too often on voice. Traditional CX metrics like Average Handle Time are still valid but today’s digital world requires new metrics. In this blog, I will discuss and propose some new metrics as well as some keys to measuring them.

Key #1: To improve the journey, you must see and measure the journey.

Recent metrics that attempt to move beyond siloed metrics for the voice-only world include Reichheld’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Sentiment, which rate overall how customers feel about a company and their customer experience.

To improve the customer experience, I recommend using NPS, CSAT, and Sentiment as guiding lights for three new metrics: NPS^JT,  and CSAT^JT, and Sentiment^JT . These metrics measure NPS, CSAT, and Sentiment by journey type (JT). For example, banks may want to measure CSAT, NPS, or Sentiment by journey type—think mortgages, credit cards, or home equity line of credit. Likewise, retailers may want to measure NPS by journey types like TV sales versus refrigerator sales. By measuring at the journey level, you can improve the quality of each journey type.

CSAT is typically obtained by a simple survey (e.g., rate your experience by giving 1–5 stars) at the end of the given customer’s journey. Sentiment can be measured by an average sentiment score or ending sentiment score for each journey using AI measurements.

Tip: Add new metrics for omnichannel digital CX: NPS^JT , CSAT^JT , and Sentiment^JT .

Key #2: To improve channel CX and customer segment CX, institute quality measurements at the channel level and measure at the customer level.

It is also important to measure CSAT, NPS, and Sentiment at the channel level and customer level. To do that, I propose using these new metrics for channel type (C): NPS^C, CSAT^C, and Sentiment^C . These new metrics measure the CSAT, NPS or sentiment on each channel, letting you see which channels are performing well or poorly. They require a simple survey at the end of all interactions within the larger customer journey. If you can see which channel is performing poorly (e.g., chatbots), you can improve the channels and smooth out any points of friction in the customer’s journey. A Bright Pattern survey of consumers showed that NPS scores for bots, text messaging, IVRs, email, and social interactions ranked low, showing common areas along the customer journey that companies should improve.

To measure CX at the customer level, I propose these new metrics for key customer segments (CS): NPS^CS, CSAT^CS, and Sentiment^CS. Similarly you can look at CSAT, NPS or Sentiment by customer segment, such as gold customers, bronze customers, and new prospects. This provides you with the opportunity to provide specialized care to your best customers by personalizing their experience.

Tip: Add new metrics needed for Digital Omnichannel CX? NPS^C and CSAT^C and Sentiment^C for channel and NPS^CS and CSAT^CS and and Sentiment^CS for customer segment

Key #3: Enable omnichannel conversations and omnichannel quality assurance measurements via a platform approach.

So how to get started? First and foremost, to offer a seamless conversation across channels while measuring these omnichannel conversations to improve quality requires that you take a platform approach. All channels must be native in the platform so that a single conversation can be offered to your customers and all interactions can be measured from a quality management standpoint. An end-to-end omnichannel CX platform with omnichannel conversation capability and omnichannel quality management embedded within the platform is the key to easily creating and measuring great omnichannel customer journeys. Contrast this to bolt-on systems that are expensive and time-consuming to implement with siloed conversations and data.

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’.

5 Strategies for an Enhanced Customer Experience

Customers don’t hesitate to talk about a negative experience with a brand ­– they tell their friends and, more importantly, post critiques online for the rest of your customers to see. Even one bad experience can spoil a customer to a company forever. Customer experience has to be a top priority for contact centers in order to promote satisfaction and loyalty.

1. Treat all interactions with the same care.

There isn’t one type of feedback that’s more important than another ­– they’re all valuable and important. If you’re going to have various communication paths set up – Twitter, email surveys, live chat – you need to be available and responsive on all of them with the same amount of attention. Otherwise, consider if that channel is important enough to keep.

2. Invest in cognitive computing.

Cognitive computing technology takes natural language processing a step further ­– it can tell how a person is feeling by analyzing the sentiment behind what they’re saying. The agent can then adjust their responses in order to improve the customer’s mood to either neutral or happy before the call is over.

3. Allow all employees to make decisions.

Unless there’s a legitimate reason why an employee can’t resolve a situation on their own, give your agents the power to make key decisions. For example, if discounts or refunds are usually offered to customers who meet certain criteria, allow your agents to present the offer without having to transfer the customer to a supervisor.

4. Offer excellent advice for the individual customer.

If you have advice to give, give it! The customer experience is largely based on building relationships. Customers will trust you if you give them valuable advice even when it’s not directly promoting one of your products or services. Creating a loyal customer can be more important than getting another sale right this second.

5. Make self-service obvious and easy.

You can build a solid relationship with a customer without speaking with them one-on-one. Remember, the company overall is developing the relationship; the relationship isn’t between the agent and the customer, necessarily. Many customers want the option of self-service. Knowing they can accomplish a task on their own can boost the sentiment they have for your company.

When you put customers at the center of your business goals, you’ll be in a better position to deliver the quality experiences they demand.

5 Important Contact Center Metrics for Agent Productivity

As a contact center manager, you can’t just wing it. You have to know which metrics to measure and how to use them. Here are 5 contact center metrics related to agent productivity that may be critical for you to track.

1. Average Call Abandonment Rate. This metric refers to how many calling customers hang up before reaching an agent in order to give the customer a great experience, they need to actually stay on the phone! The issue could be that agents aren’t getting to the call in time or that the IVR has too complex a queue.

2. Average Time in Queue. This metric takes the total time callers are waiting in the queue and divides it by the number of calls that are answered. If customers are waiting for too long, you can find a way to make agents more efficient (like gamification) or consider adding a callback service.

3. Inbound Contacts per Agent. This metric measures the inbound contacts an agent handles, which isn’t limited to calls but also includes chat, email, social media and texts. You’ll be able to see how efficient your agents are and also figure out where they can make improvements. It’s possible they need help handling a certain type of interaction, like live chats, but are adept at all others.

4. Average After-Call Work Time. There’s going to be some amount of after-call work for the agent to perform, but if this is eating up too much time, you need to know about it. Yes, your agents have to do thorough, accurate work, but taking extra time cuts into time they could be spending with another customer. Monitoring this metric could tell you if the paperwork is too complicated, if the agent needs additional training or if there’s a lack of motivation.

5. Occupancy Rate. Occupancy rate gives you a bird’s eye view of an agent’s productivity. It includes all duties related to customer contact, including the contact itself and after-contact work. This metric is pretty straightforward: if the occupancy rate is too low, that means the agent is spending work time doing something non-work related or something for work that doesn’t involve customer contact (like training or another type of duty).

Other important contact center metrics for productivity include average speed of answer, average handle time, first call resolution and service level.