Here’s a sad (but true) story: The dog days of summer are almost at an end. As customers and clientele begin to re-emerge from their sun-soaked vacations, and step firmly back into reality and back-to-school or back-to-work shopping, contact centers in the retail industry and beyond will no doubt see a sharp influx in customer inquiries, emails, messages, and phone calls. Their volume will rise on every channel, and callers will be expecting exquisite and timely customer service regardless of the demands of the busy season. And, too, the numbers don’t lie: Last year, Black Friday yielded over $6 billion online, with Cyber Monday surpassing that number at $7.8 billion. (To say that customers are active during these shopping days is a gross understatement.) As we mentioned in a recent article, “calls to businesses rose more than 375% over the past two holiday seasons.” Continue reading
Tag Archives: call-back-solution
![Are You Prepared for Unpredicted Spikes in Call Volume [Webinar]](https://fonolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Are-You-Prepared-for-Unpredicted-Spikes-in-Call-Volume-Webinar-450.jpg "Are You Prepared for Unpredicted Spikes in Call Volume [Webinar]")
While today’s tech-savvy consumers are using more non-voice channels to connect with businesses, the act of picking up the phone to quickly and verbally resolve an issue (complex or otherwise) isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The problem with this? According to an Accenture study, consumers’ top two complaints were:
- Having to contact customer service multiple times; and
- Being kept on hold for too long.
This consumer pet peeve is exacerbated by the fact that contact centers routinely face expected, and unexpected, spikes in call volume. Expected spikes can be a result of seasonality and promotional events, and unexpected spikes can stem from product recalls or natural disasters.
Customer service is a serious business.
We know this better than anyone else: On a daily basis, we witness our customers working tirelessly to provide exceptional journeys for their own customer base. They are able to achieve greatness because of one important thing: They take service seriously, and in the long-run, this worldview results in success. Today, we bring are pleased to present you with one particularly inspiring success story, featuring a Canadian HVAC, plumbing, and water-heating service provider (and beloved Fonolo customer): Reliance Home Comfort.
Trusted by 1.8 million homeowners and businesses, Reliance Home Comfort is one of Canada’s largest and full-service providers of heating, cooling, water heaters, water purification, plumbing, and protection plans.
More and more call centers are offering a call-back option as an alternative to putting customers on hold. At Fonolo, we see this trend through the increased demand of our own call-back solution. We also see it in survey results such as this one from Contact Babel last year. We just received an early copy of a new report, by Ryan Strategic Advisory, that surveyed 491 enterprise executives who had decision-making authority of their company’s contact centers. The data results show impressive growth.
In our business, we are privileged enough to watch as our clients go above and beyond in providing a great customer service by putting an end to long hold times via our call-back solutions. Of the many success stories we observe every day, we’re particularly excited to share this one, featuring First Service Credit Union (FSCU). Many lessons regarding upping the customer experience game can be gleaned from their successes.
Sometimes call centers have to call a “Code Blue!”
In the best of all possible worlds, a call center is a healthy hub of open communication, brimming with competent agents and dynamic managers who diagnose and fix client problems using the best tools available. Their victories are endless, and the loyalty of their clients is palpable. For many support teams, however, this ideal scenario remains unrealized: Poor infrastructure, employee malaise, and overall lack of vision each contribute to an insufferable call center team environment that sets everyone, and everything, up for failure.
But fear not: No support team is too far-gone; there is always room for improvement, and ways of curing the worst of ills. Keep the following broad strokes in mind if you’re aiming to breathe new life back into your call center. The secret to reviving it? Focus on the heart of the matter: People and platforms.
We’re excited to share with you our most recent success story featuring The General Automobile Insurance Services!
The General is a licensed insurance agency headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, with offices across the US. Its call center handles 170,000 customer service calls per month – and experiences regular spikes in call volume. During these unexpected call surges, the company has seen an increase in hold times, abandon rates, and, accordingly, customer frustration levels. Continue reading
Fonolo is excited to return as a sponsor for this year’s Customer Contact Week (CCW), January 22-25th, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans, Louisiana. CCW will provide delegates with the tools and insight to deliver world-class service.
Started in 1999 as Call Center Week, CCW is the world’s largest customer contact event series. This is the place where customer care, CX, and contact center leaders come together! In 2018 they introduced a new brand, Customer Contact Week. Continue reading
Velocity Credit Union is based in Austin and has served the area since 1947. It is one of the largest financial institutions in the state of Texas with over $840 million in assets, and provides personalized banking to more than 84,000 members across six local branches.
Velocity takes pride in making its members feel valued, and in creating a positive customer experience, however their current service offering was not meeting these goals. Velocity was struggling with long hold times and a high number of abandoned calls. They thought they had to replace their legacy call center system to correct this problem – which would be costly and time consuming. Continue reading
In a perfect world, your contact center would never put callers on hold. If hold time is unavoidable, the next best thing to do is offer a call-back option. Removing the frustration of hold time will lead to happier callers. For many contact centers, this improvement in the customer experience is the primary, or even sole, motivation for adding call-backs. (If you need a reminder of how much callers dislike waiting on hold, just take a moment to scan the tweets at onholdwith.com.) But there’s another angle to this story.
When deployed correctly, call-backs can deliver concrete ROI through several paths: lowered abandon rates, shorter handle time, reduced telco cost and more consistent call volume. In this new eBook, we’ll present these paths to ROI one-by-one, and walk through the calculation needed to build a business case for your organization. To make the math easier to follow, this document will use a fictitious company “ExampleCo” for all the calculations. It will draw from our experiences deploying Fonolo’s cloud-based call-backs, but the concepts are equally applicable to any call-back solution. Continue reading
