customer-service

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 →

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 Centers Move to the Cloud in 2020

By Ben Ringshall on January 9, 2020

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Advances in communication technology are forcing rapid change in the contact center.

To accommodate consumers’ growing expectations and provide 24/7 omnichannel customer support, we’re expecting to see a mass exodus, with as many as 70% of contact centers moving ‘to the cloud’ in the next 12-24 months.

Will your contact center be left behind?

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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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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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Checking In: JetBlue and Gladly Partnership Improves Customer Service

By Jordan Maxwell on November 28, 2019

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Airline services have been scrambling to improve their customer service strategies and initiatives, making key investments to elevate the overall customer experience. JetBlue is one of the companies that has been actively looking to add value to its customers, using loyalty programs and other means to draw passengers on an international scale. The company recently partnered with Gladly Inc. in an effort to shave time from its customer service call volumes.

By partnering with the technology startup, JetBlue instantly became more customer-facing, and in doing so differentiated itself from other, less than stellar competitors. The airline introduced its software on flights so that the cabin crew would have a bird’s-eye view of information about customers on-board.

And customers are ‘on board’.

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