Customer service and customer experience blog for call center professionals
Every time a customer comes in contact with your brand, whether it’s in-store or online, each interaction is a touch point that contributes to the customer experience. Consumers are demanding more, and their choices are ever expanding, which means that better service will lead to greater customer loyalty.
Here are 5 customer service mistakes that are negatively effecting your support operations.
What’s driving the enormous interest in chat bots right now? A year after Facebook’s launch of its bot platform (which TechCunch called “the new app store”) it now has 33,000 bots. Competing platforms have high numbers too: 19,000 for Kik and 10,000 for Line.
Most impressive – to me, at least – is the number of companies that have invested in bots as a new channel for customer service. This early adoption is uncharacteristic. I certainly applaud the willingness to experiment with an unproven new channel. But I’m puzzled by the eagerness, especially compared to the slow uptake we saw with social media, chat and other channels by the same companies. Have they learned from those experiences and decided to be more aggressive this time? Or is something else going on? Continue reading
Today, the customer experience is arguably the number one determinant of an organization’s success. Aberdeen reports that companies with strong omni-channel strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak omni-channel strategies. And according to Deloitte, 62% of companies view customer experience delivered by the contact center as a competitive differentiator. There are plenty of numbers we can throw around about the customer experience, but not everyone understands what great customer experiences include, or perhaps, what they don’t include?
Let’s discuss some of the worst advice we’ve been given – or heard others been given – when it comes to the customer experience, and how the numbers prove them wrong. Continue reading
According to Twitter, in the past two years the number of Tweets directed at leading brands’ customer service usernames has grown by 2.5x and that number is rising exponentially every year (50% to be exact). In the same report, Twitter found that 85% of customers who have a satisfactory social interaction are likely to recommend the brand to others. So, when a customer turns to social to contact you, it’s important to do your best to resolve issues as timely and accurately as possible. However, if your company is doing a great job responding to customers, but you’re still seeing a plethora of angry tweets directed at you, maybe the problem is how you’re handling callers. Social customer service should work in tandem with phone, chat, mobile, web etc. – you shouldn’t have to choose to be good at one thing or another. Continue reading
You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back towards the technology, not the other way around. – Steve Jobs
The invention of brand new experiences that your customers can fall in love with is no easy task, I mean, even the greatest of visionaries struggle. Sometimes we need a little help in the inspiration department to get our creative juices flowing. That’s why we’ve scoured the interwebs to find out where you can find visually and verbally stimulating content for some serious CX brainstorming. From quizzes, to infographics, to motivational quotes, here’s our list of places to find your CX inspiration and bring them to life. Continue reading
Ambitious companies that want to thrive in today’s marketplace must focus on delivering exceptional customer service. To win and retain customers, businesses must differentiate themselves from the competition, and customer service is playing a dominant role in achieving this. In fact, 89%of marketing leaders expect to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience by 2016, as compared with 36% four years ago. This seems fitting since even a 10% improvement in CX scores can translate into more than $1 billion in revenue.
Each year it’s essential to know which trends will affect your industry, your employees, and your customers. Here’s what customer service leaders should be focussed on this year.
Is social customer service a critical part of your call center? If so, how do you provide excellent support using social media? So many call centers managers ask themselves these questions and wonder how they can guide their agents to successfully deliver support over these channels.
Social networks provide businesses with the opportunity to respond to customer comments and rectify their complaints instantly. Because of this, it’s important for customer service agents to be present, active and alert on these channels.
If you’re looking for ways to improve customer support on social media, look no further. In our latest video we cover 3 foolproof ways to set your agents up for success.
Take a look… Continue reading
Millennials (those aged 18 to 30) aka Generation Y, are the next generation of customers that businesses need to attract in order to succeed. This generation is set to overtake baby boomers on spending power, and will surpass Generation X soon after that. The challenge is they are so different from past generations that businesses must adapt to a new style of customer service.
Here are a few key strategies to wooing Millennials and growing your business. Continue reading
The customer experience is integral to the success of any business, but with competition stacking up across every industry, improving CX has become more important today than ever before.
Let’s start off by defining what exactly the “customer experience” is and why you should care about it. According to SAS, the customer experience is “…your customers’ perceptions – both conscious and subconscious – of their relationship with your brand resulting from all their interactions with your brand during the customer life cycle.”
So, why should you care? Well, here are some important stats to consider: Continue reading
In this digital age, consumers are more empowered today through the use of technology and social media. Companies are starting to implement social media strategies for call centers in order to keep up with today’s market and authentically connect with customers.
The customer’s social media experience is just as important as the telephone experience. While there are some challenges involved in delivering large-scale customer service in an unstructured, public and emotional channel, here are 7 ways that social media can be used to promote your call center operations. Continue reading
