customer-experience

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 →

Top 20 Customer Service Blogs You Have to Read in 2020

By Ben Ringshall on January 14, 2020

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Which customer service blog posts helped to shape the last decade for you?

When we look back at the customer support industry in 2010, we see a very different beast to the one we work in today.

Not only has technology changed the way we interact with customers, but it’s also massively changed the way we communicate with our peers within the industry. There are more customer experience management blogs and articles than ever before — not to mention the growing libraries of video and interactive content.

We’ve all come a long way since 2010, but we couldn’t have done it without some of the most prolific influencers to ever lay hands on a keyboard.

Here, we cover the 20 best customer service blogs and influencers to follow in 2020. You’ll recognize many of these names, and we encourage you to check out those that you haven’t come across yet; you won’t be disappointed. And as always: This list appears in no particular order. Continue reading →

Brand Spotlight: How Amazon Won Us All Over

By Janki Lodhia on January 10, 2020

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Ever since the retail industry has gotten a digital facelift, only a handful of brands have experienced unbeatable growth. Today, Amazon is a top-of-mind digital company that consumers are browsing all day long – and has quickly become THE retail giant.

Consumer behavior in the retail industry has changed entirely within the past decade. Most customers choose to make purchases from the within the safe walls of their homes via online retailers such as Amazon. Gone are the days when customers browsed stores relentlessly hoping to find what they’re looking for. While malls still exist (and thrive), every customer is aware of the option to purchase something online – usually at a fraction of the cost.

Online retailers like Amazon have caused the retail industry to shapeshift, now providing instant gratification and convenience to customers. Over the past few years, this has forced many brands to hop onto the e-commerce trend and in some cases, close their physical brick and mortar stores to survive. Here’s how.

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Contact Center Trends 2020: A New Age for the Contact Center

By Fonolo Team on December 17, 2019

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Change is the only constant trend.

Everything from the way we shop to how we listen to music has changed in the last two decades. This includes our experience as customers. Modern consumers are no longer willing to accept poor customer service. In fact, more than 80% of customers now say the experience a company provides is as important as its products.

It’s been a journey: The contact center evolved from the humble call center, as more channels of communication became commonplace. In order to keep up with the demands of modern consumers, the contact center is destined to evolve further, into the ‘Customer Experience Hub’ of the future.

As part of this, many businesses are already moving away from the view of call centers as ‘cost centers’ and towards one that views them as a centers of opportunity for businesses — one where the opportunities the center creates well outweigh the costs of running it.

With this ‘meta-trend’ to give us some context, here are three of our top trend predictions for the call center in 2020. Continue reading →

Phone for the Holidays: Fonolo’s Customer Service Picks for 2020

By Samantha Mehra on December 12, 2019

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A thoughtful human being on the other end of the line when you call for help.

An expertly-tied velvet bow adorning the top of a gift you purchased.

A hand-written note with charming keepsake tucked into a box containing your online purchase.

Empathy. Courtesy. Generosity. Humanity. Artfulness.

Whatever the customer service flourish we encounter on our journeys as consumers, we know when it works. At Fonolo, customer service is top of mind for every employee: Sun up, sun down. We see our customers offering humanity, agency, and choice to their own customers by offering them our patented Call-Backs, responsive widget, and Smart Portal. We see their hold times diminish by years, their customer satisfaction increase by multitides, and their revenue climbing and climbing.

Like many other brands invested in a customer-first approach, they get it.

At this time around the holiday season, on the eve of a new year of possibility, we cast a long, studied glance over the year that was. This year, I turned the microphone on our own Fonolonians to articulate 2019 in terms of customer service. We’re a group hyper-aware of when customer service works in other contexts. So, I asked: “What company, either local or online, was your favourite in terms of customer service in 2019? Who will truly innovate in 2020?”

Here’s what they had to say.

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Who are YOU #OnHoldWith? The Top 10 Worst Companies to Call in 2019

By Ben Ringshall on December 11, 2019

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HOLD IT: If you’ve ever sent a tweet complaining about being on hold, then chances are you’ve been featured on the Fonolo-powered website: onholdwith.com. It collects and curates the millions of Twitter complaints about being put on hold, and it has just released its annual list of hold-time offenders.

The site, launched by Fonolo a few years back, this year collected over a whopping hundreds of thousands of posts mentioning the phrase “on hold with” from Twitter. As we noted last year, Twitter has inreasingly become a go-to customer service platform for those wishing to air out their frustrating customer service experiences.

Tellingly, this year’s list indicates that brands are still leaving their customers hanging by forcing them to wait on hold. Lessening hold times should be a priority, as it will no doubt grow customer loyalty and faith in brands.

This year, some big surprises: Virgin Media, Verizon, and United Airlines are among the top culprits in the annual list of The Worst Companies to Call in 2019.

Did your company make the list?

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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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#CS Lessons: Samsung Sinks, then Swims, with its Customer Service Strategy

By Jordan Maxwell on November 5, 2019

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What do you do when you unveil a new smartphone or app that’s not quite ready to be released, even though you had a firm release date that 100% must meet? This challenging business situation is one Samsung recently found itself in when it botched the launch of its shiny new Samsung Galaxy Fold.

The company designed the Galaxy Fold (a smartphone that uses multiple new technologies and materials to create a display that is flexible enough to fold) and was excitement around it was building up prior to its release. The announcement of its release drew praise from Samsung users and lovers of technologies alike. Due to launch in April 2019, the device was viewed to be one of its potentially greatest products yet.

But a harsh reality set in, and early: Customer feedback delayed the launch and people begun to doubt the product.

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How to Prepare Your Call Center For Spikes in Call Volume: Credit Unions

By Drew Wilkinson on October 31, 2019

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Credit unions’ commitment to serving their members is reflected in their healthy growth: these financial institutions now count more than 110 million people as members and hold deposits totaling $1.1 trillion. When a growing sector builds its reputation on customer service, customers themselves can feel the strain of growth when that reputation is no longer met or exceeded. The bottom line is that keeping customers happy during an expansion is no easy feat.

Credit union call centers face a unique set of challenges beyond brisk growth. Traditionally smaller in size, credit unions often lack the resources to implement “best-in-class” technologies, making it especially tricky to tackle surges in call volume that come from rapid growth. With 76% of customers viewing customer service as the real test of much a company values them, long wait times can leave brand new members (and existing ones) annoyed and frustrated.

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