Category Archives: Customer Service

WhatsApp and Twitter: You Need to Pay Us to Use Our Platform for Customer Service

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WhatsApp and Twitter: You Need to Pay Us to Use Our Platform for Customer ServiceLast week, Facebook announced that WhatsApp could now be used as a customer service platform. We now have an interesting race between Apple’s “Apple Business Chat”, Facebook’s own “Messenger for Business”, and Twitter. The goal is to grab a vital piece of the eCommerce landscape: The channel for customer service communication.

What caught my eye is that WhatsApp is asking companies to pay in order to use its platform for customer service. Twitter quietly made this move a few months ago, too. What does it mean? Are these fee structures really there to earn revenue or to incent certain behavior? Will Apple follow suit?

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#EverydayHeroes: Introducing the Humans of Customer Service

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Humans of Customer ServiceStop me if you’ve heard this one: What a world we live in.

Speaking as a seasoned, schooled, marginally flawed member of the human race, I have of late been watching the movements of humanity with worried, widened eyes. This was not by choice, really. Recent, domain-shifting global crises and changes in our behavior as a people have demanded some navel-gazing.

What I noticed with this increased scrutiny was dizzying: Contemporary humanity is grizzled, tenuously held together. We are infighting at maximum volume. Violence persists. Epidemics once thought dead have effortlessly risen from the grave. The concept of acceptance has been gradually eclipsed by intolerance. “Social media” has ironically mutated into the most anti-social of spaces: Once lauded as a magical tool of globalism and the sharing of ideas, it has bred bullying and divisiveness, and has seen humanity fire out sharp-tongued words so devastating and massive in volume that it can no longer be measured, or contained.

 

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How Gender Expectations Impact Customer Service

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How Gender Expectations Impact Customer ServiceWhether we’re talking about relationships, leisure, or work, gender differences play a significant role in the way we interact with the spaces and places around us. It is, after all, a marker of identity that helps us make sense of ourselves, and the world. The way we engage with or provide customer service is no exception to that.

The hard truth is: Perceptions and gender, and gendered consumer habits, are real. Select service industries are traditionally dominated by either male or female service staff. For example, the flight attendant workforce today is predominantly female, a legacy lingering from the 1930s when nurses replaced young boys who had previously filled the role. Women were considered to be able to best care for customers and ‘promote a female presence’, one that would increase the perceived comforts and safety of flying (a decision thoroughly based on gender and its related consumer perceptions).

Currently, if you haven’t noticed already, the global economy is shifting at an accelerated rate. For those of us interested in overall consumer habits in the customer service game, it begs the question: Will gender biases in customer service transform as well?

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Why You Should Read these Contact Center Books

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Why You Should Read these Contact Center BooksIf you’re like me, you love to lose yourself in a good story. Whether they’re long or short, impactful books have a profound way of reaching readers on a deeply personal level. Inspiring the reader to escape into her own imagination, compelling stories bring much needed pauses in otherwise hectic lives – something we all appreciate.

The personal gratification we experience from a good book applies to most any genre or style of novel: Self-help books, poetry anthologies, historical epics, and professional development books are all fair game. In honor of #BookLoversDay, we’re focussing on some inspirational reads for those folks working in the contact center world. To avoid bombarding you with a dozen or so to chose from, we decided to focus on three solid reads.

Get ready for these riveting reads…

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Stay Safe: How to Protect Your Contact Center Under GDPR

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Stay Safe: How to Protect Your Contact Center Under GDPR*Phew* Can we sit down for a brief moment? We’re a little tired these days, a fatigue borne of constantly staying in the know.

For those of us toiling away in the world of contact centers, staying educated and adapting our practices are our greatest and most crucial challenges. Not only are we clinging to the fast-moving coattails of technological shifts that send shock waves through our industry, we are also scrambling to keep ourselves modern, current, and meeting the evolving needs of consumers. All the while, we’re working to become industry experts in (and make sense of) the standards, agreements, and laws which impact our customers, our contact centers, and our businesses.

Recently, we’ve all been trying to merrily roll alongside the Big Wheel of modern privacy laws: The General Data Protection Regulation (or as we’ve come to know and love it, GDPR). Our gift to you in these busy times is a breakdown of the whos, the hows, and the whats of this important new regulatory shift in data pprotection.

You’re welcome.

 

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Customer Care vs. Customer Satisfaction

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Customer Care vs. Customer SatisfactionWe deal with a lot of buzzwords and phrases that saturate the customer service industry, some of which have become a little bit tired. One in particular that we really detest here at Fonolo is “Delight your customer”. Personally, when I hear that phrase, I experience a range of emotions. It seems to be healthy balance between shock (Why in the world would one use that phrase?) and sheer irritation (sort of akin to nails on a chalkboard!).

But, hey, who am I to judge? These things are all just a matter of opinion, right? We all have go-to vocabulary that we either love or loathe. Still, there are two words in particular that I feel everyone should pay attention to. These words hold true sustenance and can dramatically impact the success of your contact center team: customer care and customer satisfaction. The problem is that some companies, while familiar with these terms, really don’t connect with them on a deeper level. How you attend to your customers’ happiness levels and overall satisfaction requires critical thinking.

Let’s spend some time deciphering what these words mean and why they should be top of mind.

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Are You Measuring the Right CX Metrics? [Slideshare]

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Are You Measuring the Right CX Metrics? Is your immediate response, yes? Well, think again. Research has shown that many contact centers are focusing on internal metrics only and, as a result, they are losing valuable insights into their CX programs. Most businesses will claim that meeting customer expectations through a profound experience is a top priority. But achieving this is no small task.

We all know that customers are the lifeblood of any business and unless their perception of your brand is optimal, your business will not succeed. Companies that focus on providing an outstanding customer service experience ultimately reap the benefits – more loyalty, better acquisition, increased spend.

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The Benefits of Gamification for Call Center Managers

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The Benefits of Gamification for Call Center Managers

Attention all call center managers: It’s time to talk about you.

Picture it: You are the fearless leader of a call center team in 2018. Much like the call centers of old, your agents are grappling with 1) surges in call volume (both expected and unexpected); 2) evolving technologies; 3) increasingly complex customer cases; and perhaps most important of all, 4) the latent human desire to be appreciated, acknowledged, and active in the work environment.

Especially during crisis moments where we see spikes in call volume (and demanding customers), agents become taxed and frustrated when they feel the infrastructure doesn’t support them, or when they feel there is no overall incentive to stick around (even from a culture perspective). Keeping them engaged is one thing, but keeping them as employees is another.

 

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What Are the Top CX Metrics for Improving Your Contact Center? [Webinar]

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What Are the Top CX Metrics for Improving Your Contact CenterThe ability to resolve an inquiry in one contact, regardless of the contact channel used by customers, is a major challenge for organizations, and critical in providing a great customer experience (CX). In fact, SQM’s research shows that 93% of customers using the call center channel, and 72% of customers using the website channel, expect that they will be able to resolve their inquiry in one contact.

There is much debate around what the right metrics are for measuring a customer’s experience when using single or multiple contact channels to resolve an inquiry or problem.  Unfortunately, research has shown that many contact centers are focusing on internal metrics only and, as a result, they are losing valuable insights into their CX programs.

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See the Winners of Fonolo’s 2018 Customer Experience Excellence Awards

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See the Winners of Fonolo’s 2018 Customer Experience Excellence AwardsIt’s that special time of year. Put your hands together and give it up for the 2018 winners of Fonolo’s Customer Experience Excellence Awards!

Each year, Fonolo takes pause and looks at the big CX picture, studying the work of the best and brightest contact centers across all industries and regions. It awards those that shoot for the stars by significantly reducing hold times and thus winning the hearts of clients. We are honored to acknowledge two amazing businesses for their outstanding achievement in improving their customers’ experiences through the offering of call-backs. The recognized companies have optimized their agent experiences, reduced abandon rates, and made award-winning experiences for their customers. We are proud of them.

Read on as we roll out the carpet and pay homage to the 2018 Customer Experience Excellence Award Winners (#CXAwards):

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