Customer service and customer experience blog for call center professionals
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
Here’s an obvious statement for you, “Make sure customers are 100% happy with their experiences”. This truth goes without saying, since happy customers – those who actually like doing business with your brand – are also more likely to be loyal to your brand. And as you know, a happy customer is the result of having positive experiences with your business, which leads to increased customer satisfaction and ultimately revenue generation.
In a recent whitepaper we highlight some notable statistics around the importance of Customer Satisfaction (CSat), Customer Effort Scores (CES), and Net Promoter Score (NPS). While CSat tells you how happy customers are, NPS measures customer loyalty, and CES helps you understand where grievances lie. CSat, NPS, and CES are best used together to achieve an accurate understanding of your customers and predict long-term business needs.
If you want to improve your customer satisfaction strategy, boost customer retention, and impact the bottom-line, then it’s worth considering how these statistics can help you.
We’ve been chatting a lot about customer satisfaction (CSat) recently, but for very good reason; measuring the degree to which your product / service meets customer expectations is critical to the success of your brand, regardless of the vertical or size. In our most recent whitepaper, we provide a playbook for contact centers to use as a guide to improving customer satisfaction. Here, we’re going to discuss 6 secrets your call center can adopt to ensure high caller satisfaction.
A recent report discussing the 2017 customer service benchmark researched 500 companies across the globe. It stated that 41% of companies did not respond to a customer service request, 90% of companies did not acknowledge an email had been received (An automated email confirming receipt of an inquiry.) and, 99% of companies did not follow up with customers (Post service follow up to ensure customer satisfaction). Yet, 56% of global consumers say they have higher expectations for customer service now than just one year ago, and that number jumps to 68% for 18 – 34 year-olds. So to sum up, customers have higher expectations and companies are not delivering.
When everyone’s battling to win the same customers, leaders should be scrambling to think of new and improved ways of delivering service. Here are 6 approaches that will add value to the service you deliver.
As a call center manager, have you ever talked about deploying a call-back solution? If so, you have likely discussed the types of call-back options available to you. Some have the feature built in to their existing call center platform, or can have it added through their software provider while others – who are looking for a more robust solution – typically turn to a third-party vendor. Regardless of the approach, there are two types of call-back methodologies in the market, and oftentimes the call center manager doesn’t realize the vast differences between the two. Before we get into that, let’s talk a bit about call-backs for those of you who are new to the idea.
