Customer service and customer experience blog for call center professionals
By every measure, the tech scene in Toronto is exploding. Venture capital (VC) investment is hitting new records. The pace of start-up activity is very high. Lately, it seems like all the major tech companies have announced a new office or a major investment in the city.
While we all cheer for our city to succeed, this ramp-up does have a downside. And, for start-ups and smaller tech companies, it can be a mixed blessing.
Summer may be over, but the sun is rising on a busy 2018 fall trade show season. Fonolo has many events on the horizon, but is especially excited to be a first-time exhibitor at SOCAP’s REIMAGINE Customer Care Conference, October 21-24, 2018, at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Produced by SOCAP International, a collaborative community of leading customer care experts from diverse industries, the Re-Imagine Customer Care Conference will bring together renowned brands and solution providers to engage in meaningful conversations on the role of customer care and how it can adapt to meet the growing needs of future consumers.
The conference will host more than 500 attendees, feature over 35 speakers, and offer multiple breakout sessions on a range of relevant subjects including customer care design, gamification, automation, and culture-building. Fonolo‘s CEO Shai Berger said:
This conference allows us the opportunity to connect with forward-thinking industry leaders who are also deeply invested and interested in the future of customer service and customer care. We’re excited to showcase how our modern call-back solutions can improve the customer experience, and share our client success stories with other attendees.
Conference attendees can learn more about Fonolo’s cloud-based call-back solutions by visiting booth #207.
More information about this event can be found at https://reimaginecc.org.
For live updates and insights from the show, follow @fonolo on Twitter, as well as the event’s hashtag: #ReimagineCC.
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Big news in the call center world broke last week: NewVoiceMedia (NVM) was acquired by Vonage for $350M. What does it mean? Well, the obvious take-away is that cloud-based call centers continue to be a hot space and a great way to build value for investors.
Some commentators talk about a “wave of consolidation” as if it’s a time-limited event, but as I look back at the last decade, it seems more like a constant rhythm in the industry. As long as I’ve been following the space, this acquisition pattern has been ticking along reliably. The exits get the headlines but innovative new entrants are continuing to launch.
There are other takeaways, too: Vonage’s big plan, the Salesforce angle, the Twilio angle…
Nothing says summertime like lounging by the pool and reading contact center industry reports, amirite? Seriously though: If you slack off with your reading during the summer months, you’ll be too far behind in the autumn to ever catch up. Make sure you have already looked through the reports in our last report round-up post, too.
So, here are 5 more reports worth your time. As always, I’m grateful to all the smart folks in our industry that produce such excellent content.
Last 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?
Stop 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.
10 months ago, Avaya filed for chapter 11 protection kicking off the largest bankruptcy event in the history of the call center industry. Avaya faced a tough challenge to reach a restructuring agreement with their many debt holders, and to have it done quickly in order to minimize the damage to the brand, and the slow bleed of customers to competitors. Most of the process happened out of the public view, but in the last month, three announcements have revealed the status.
It looks like Avaya met their challenge successfully and will be exiting bankruptcy soon. More importantly, they managed to shake off a large portion of their debt, and set their sights on an IPO in early 2018.
The customer experience has grown to be one of the leading determinants of customer satisfaction in the contact center. A recent study by Dimension Data shows that 82% of companies recognize the customer experience as a competitive differentiator, and 77.5% recognize it as the most important strategic performance measure.
With the sheer number of individuals talking about the customer experience, it can be hard to find great thought leaders, and as a CX manager it’s important for you to know who the most influential people in the space are. That’s why each year Fonolo sets out to determine the top thought leaders in the industry, so companies can learn from the best.
Congratulations to these 15 analysts who were selected because of their highly regarded knowledge of the customer experience. Continue reading
If you’ve ever tweeted about waiting on hold with a call center your frustrations have likely been cataloged on onholdwith.com. The site scans Twitter for complaints about being on hold with customer service and categorizes them in real-time by company and industry name. Fonolo launched onholdwith.com as a public service so that people could vent about being on hold while organizations can see how much goodwill they were losing from customers.
For many, simply knowing that they are not alone provides comfort during an otherwise anxiety ridden experience. The larger purpose of the site is to bring greater awareness to the problem of long hold times and help companies benefit from Fonolo’s call-back solutions. If you head on over to the site, you’ll see that we’ve done a complete overhaul in hopes of giving customers and companies a better chance to share their stories and correct this problem. Continue reading
Fonolo is proud to be a part of The Future Contact Center Summit, January 29-30, 2015 at the Omni Orlando resort at ChampionsGate, Florida!
This is the only customer care event that synthesizes emerging trends, customer needs, disruptive technologies and business imperatives, into a clear vision for advancing business strategy. Call centers will learn how future success will be determined by the ability to meet customer expectations better and faster than competitors. Continue reading
