Tag Archives: messaging

The New Customer Service Lexicon, Part 1

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The New Customer Service LexiconThe world of customer service is ever expanding, making it a complicated and dynamic space to navigate. With new communication channels appearing and evolving every year, it’s a challenge to understand how they relate to each other, and how they should work together. New terminology can help our thought process, if  we all agree on the meaning. Conversely, ambiguity about words like “digital” or “chat” or “call” makes the navigation harder.

In this series, we will discuss terms that are either new to the customer service space or have a recently changed meaning. We’re not going to do a simple dictionary-style listing of common terms (you can find that in many other places). We’re just tackling the stuff that is still hot out of the oven! Continue reading →

Chat vs. Messaging Comes Down to Who Owns the Channel

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Chat vs. Messaging Comes Down to Who Owns the ChannelCustomers increasingly prefer chat over other communication channels, but chat suffers from an uptake problem, particularly on mobile.

On the other hand, messaging offers basically the same experience – asynchronous text-based communication –­ but has no problem with uptake. In fact, it’s burning up the charts: Messaging apps occupy 6 of the 10 top slots on App Store (the top 4 have 3 billion users). Granted, that popularity is driven by person-to-person rather than person-to-business communication, but many companies are betting on messaging making that transition.

So we’re at a crossroads: Will chat find a way to increase uptake rates or will messaging find a way to become a B2C channel?

That’s the topic for this webinar which you can watch on demand at any time. Continue reading →

Customer Service at a Crossroads: Is Chat or Messaging the Path Forward?

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Customer Service at a CrossroadsCustomer service is arguably the single most important aspect of any organization. With that, support departments have to understand how customers wish to communicate in order to be successful.

As we all know, the options for support are endless, phone, email, social media, etc. But there are two platforms that are starting to compete head to head – chat and instant messaging (IM). These tools both offer short messages sent and read in real time, allowing you to converse more quickly and easily – but there are some obvious pros and cons to each. Continue reading →

[Webinar] Chat vs. Messaging: A Customer Service Battle

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Chat vs. Messaging - A Customer Service Battle

Traditionally, delivering great customer service requires striking a balance between a good experience and affordability. Chat breaks that mold. Customers increasingly prefer it over other communication channels AND companies are seeing a much lower cost-per-contact. Hallelujah!

But now the industry is at a crossroad. Chat has a close cousin called “Messaging” that has similar strengths and is growing with impressive speed. These options may seem similar on the surface, but there are important differences if you look a bit deeper. This year we will see a dramatic showdown between the two – chat and messaging – and the winner will influence how customer service is delivered for decades to come.

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Will the WeChat Model Work in the West?

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Will the WeChat Model Work in the West?Messaging is growing at a breathtaking pace. The top 4 messaging apps have almost 3 billion users. In particular, China-based WeChat has been the center of attention both for rapid growth and for pushing the “messaging-as-interface” model further than anyone else.

For WeChat’s 600 million users, it is not just a way to chat with friends, it’s also their primary gateway for interacting with, and buying from, companies. WeChat has leveraged popularity in person-to-person (P2P) interactions for expansion into business-to-consumer (B2C) interactions. So much so, that it’s more important for a new company in China to have a WeChat account than a stand-alone website.

Naturally, many people are asking, “Who will be the WeChat of the West?” You can find variations on that headline in articles from Re/Code, Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch and GigaOm. But is that even the right question? Continue reading →

Is Messaging the Messiah for Customer Service?

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Is Messaging the Messiah for Customer Service?The eternal conflict in customer service is between delivering a good experience and keeping costs low. For example, pushing callers to self-serve IVR lowers cost, but customers hate dealing with phone menus and “talking to the machine”. The industry has always sought a way for customers and companies to interact that is enjoyable for the former and cost effective for the latter. Hopes are high that “messaging” is that messiah.

“Messaging” differs from “chat”, which companies have offered via their website for over a decade. We’ll discuss the distinction shortly, but let’s start by looking at where chat has fallen short so that the upside potential of messaging is clear.

Web-based chat has been around for over a decade. Its effectiveness is well-established: Cost-per-contact is substantially lower than phone calls, and customer satisfaction is generally high. Its shortcoming is uptake: Chat deployments rarely resulted in a significant reduction in phone calls. For many people, the default action of picking up and dialing the phone was too hard a habit to break.

Then came the smartphone era. This should have been a boon for chat-based customer service, but instead uptake has been hampered by an inadequate user experience. The hope is that messaging will solve chat’s “mobile UX” problem. Continue reading →

Working at a Startup: The Ins and Outs of Human Resources

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Working At A StartupThe recruitment dynamics at a start up company can be a precarious affair if it isn’t handled with a certain level of professionalism and discretion. Internally, your boss could very well be your HR contact. From an HR perspective, you want to attract great talent, avoid high turn over and offer dynamic compensation packages that can compete with larger organizations. 

With regards to job seekers, chances are, your resume will be scrutinized and put under a microscope – how do you measure up? I reached out to Jason Bigue, Fonolo’s COO and our ‘HR Dept’ whose insight can be found after each section.

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Working at a Startup: How To Master the Art of Collaboration

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Working At A Startup

Think tank. Brainstorm. Conference. Powwow. Group huddle. Call it whatever you want but our new method to rewriting our content worked like a charm.  For weeks we’ve been struggling with different ways to tackle our ‘new messaging’ project, which runs parallel with the web redesign.

Continue reading →