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The Top Customer Service Conferences to Attend in 2020

By Ben Ringshall on January 22, 2020

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Wondering what customer service or contact center conference to attend in 2020? We’ve got you covered.

Whatever anyone says, attending live events is essential if you want to keep up and keep involved with the industry around.

Not only is it a chance to find out what everyone is working on — and hopefully pick up some tips — but it’s also a chance to meet with our peers. And you shouldn’t underestimate how important that part is.

Particularly in an industry like customer support, it’s so important to be around people who are working on the same things and can understand what it’s like to be in our shoes. It’s fun, educational, and a great opportunity to build new relationships.

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Introducing The Crunch: Putting Out Big Customer Service Fires in 2020

By Samantha Mehra on January 20, 2020

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Happy 2020, Fonolo Followers!

Welcome to The Crunch, our *new* biweekly news roundup, where we give you the latest and greatest in customer service technology, news, and views. If you want to see these saying ‘Hello’ in your inbox this year, you can subscribe here. No fear. Let’s stop rhyming now and turn to the news at hand.

As always, the customer service space reads like a riveting novel, full of conflict, drama, beauty, disappointment, hope, taxes, unanswered phonecalls, and robots.

This week, we’ve noted some storylines that we think you should note, too. Continue reading →

Beware False Scorecards for B2C Chat

By Shai Berger on January 8, 2020

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There’s an interesting and high-stakes battle taking place right now in the world of customer service: What will be the dominant text-based channel for B2C communications? SMS remains the most ubiquitous channel, but least flexible. Competing against it are the big corporate-owned messaging platforms: Messenger and WhatsApp (both from Facebook), Apple’s Business Chat, and Google’s offering called (for now) Google My Business Chat.

I recently gave a talk at the TADSummit conference on this battle and the challenges in measuring the progress. Slides are available here and video here.

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2020 Vision: What Customer Service Looked Like in 2019

By Jordan Maxwell on December 4, 2019

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Good customer service can be hard to find. Conversely, bad customer service is easy to spot and, when especially ugly, it can go viral. With social media becoming a worldwide connector and a general display of the way modern generations communicate, the performance of customer service agents is increasingly hitting the internet as a result.

Whether it was good, bad, or ugly, 2019 was a heck of a year on social channels. From outbursts in restaurants, to caring agents looking after customers in airports, to racial incidents between customers that agents have to diffuse — all have had a place on the world stage, serving as instructive examples.

In this article, we round up some of the good, the bad, and the ugly customer-service interactions of 2019, and detail what people and companies can learn about the incidents to do better in 2020.

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5 Brand Websites Doing Customer Service Right

By Ben Ringshall on November 21, 2019

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Zappos. Apple. Wistia. Netflix. Whatever your business or its size, the first place your customers go when seeking help is your website. And if they can’t find the information they need there, you’re going to lose them.

You don’t have to be reachable by phone 24/7, but you do have to give your customers a way to solve their problems or get in touch when they can’t help themselves.

Here, we look at some major brands that are doing customer service in all the right ways, but most especially on their websites. We take a magnifying glass to these websites and give you the means to up your website game, too.

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Eco-Friendly Sustainability: Give your Customer Service the Competitive Advantage

By Jordan Maxwell on November 14, 2019

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Where does your brand sit on the green-o-meter?

It’s worth asking yourself this, as more and more millennial customers are starting to pay attention to the environment, and holding businesses accountable for their services, company vision, and strategy to cut waste, pollution, and plastics. Customers seem to care about it – so perhaps you should, too.

For the food service and hospitality industry, this is definitely the case. Many governments and global companies are making moves to eliminate single-use plastic items from their inventory and are appealing to their customer base in doing so. The need for environmental sustainability is adding a new element of customer service demand to its customers in the industry and companies are developing strategies to not only keep customers, but also draw in a new labor force that is vital to a sector with a millennial audience.

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RingCentral Gives Avaya the Gift of Focus

By Shai Berger on October 9, 2019

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The RingCentral-Avaya announcement from last week had a lot of industry watchers scratching their heads. The benefits to RingCentral were clear: They just bought an exclusive position for their UC offering with the world’s largest reseller ecosystem. But what is Avaya’s main benefit? Obviously, the cash component was a key to it. (Although I don’t fully understand the inner-workings of that cash-crunch.) But was hobbling their UC business too high a price to pay?

I think the real benefit here is that the deal frees Avaya to focus fully on its crown jewel, the contact center business. A Mitel merger, or any merger for that matter, was going to add confusion in that area. All the moves in the last few years make sense if you think of it in terms of clearing away distractions from a focus on contact center.

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Cleaning Up a Customer Relationship Mess: Going Back to Basics

By Drew Wilkinson on September 5, 2019

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People like shiny new things.

The same cannot always be said about pesky new software updates and releases to the platforms and apps that have become fixtures in both our personal and professional lives.

Good-natured developers and designers may have the best of intentions, arguing that their changes take us to a new, higher state of being where everything and everyone is better.

The problem is that these changes are often unpopular, sometimes to comedic levels – except that for the customer, it is no laughing matter.

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20/20 Vision: The Best Advice for Contact Centers in 2020 – The Experts Weigh In

By Samantha Mehra on August 29, 2019

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Every year we ask: What can contact centers do to bolster their productivity, efficiency, and customer service offerings in the future? How can they survive and thrive in the face of so many variables? Well, it’s that time once again: We invited some of the top contact center experts from Ada, J Arnold and Associates, The Belding Group, Callzilla, Expivia, and other vibrant CX and CS avenues to offer us and you, our dear readership, their best pieces of advice for contact centers in this increasingly complex customer age.

As you read on, you’ll notice some pertinent themes arising for the coming year, some established, and some brand-spanking new: Leveraging AI and self-service in an increasingly competitive contact center space; optimizing training and education for employees; keeping the ‘human’ element of customer service in mind when incorporating new channels; being strategic with automation; and more. This year’s soundbites are rich with well-researched insights that a) act as a warning; and b) can help your contact center win.

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Industry Voices on Avaya’s Next Move

By Shai Berger on August 28, 2019

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It was hard to turn anywhere last week and not see news or commentary about Avaya. Their CEO announced that Avaya is in “advanced discussions with multiple parties” for a “strategic transaction” and that the process will be concluded in 30 days. As the behemoth of the call center industry, with $3B in revenue and 150,000 customers, whatever this move will be, it will have broad repercussions. We wrote about it last week.

While we wait for the shoe to drop, here’s a quick summary of comments from around the industry.

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