Tag Archives: visual-interface

3 Call Center Best Practices from the Consumer’s Perspective

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3 Call Center Best Practices

Over the last few months, I’ve read countless articles related to call centers. All of which repeat the same points when it comes to best practices: determine your goals, hire the right people, train and motivate your staff, understand the metrics (IE. average handle time), etc. While these are all great points to keep in mind, it left me wondering, ‘where does the customer’s point of view fit in?’ It seems many articles reference relationship management, but are contact center managers really listening to their customers’ needs, wants and thoughts?

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Top 5 Takeaways from this Google Hangout: 2013 Call Center Trends

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At the end of 2012, Fonolo hosted a Google Hangout with industry experts to discuss upcoming call center trends for 2013. This fabulous panel was eager to share their expertise and thoughts on 5 hot topics to watch for; cloud-based call centers, mobile customer service, social media, visual IVR and virtual queuing.

The discussion, at times, was heated and while we went over our expected time allowance, the content and conversation is intriguing. To save you some time, we extracted key takeaways from each trend to help prepare your customer service strategy.

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These 7 Charts Show Why Customer Service Needs to Get Smart about the Smartphone

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With the end of the year approaching, the predictions are rolling out! Last week, we were treated to two massive slide decks from respected analysts, Mary Meeker and Henry Blodget. Meeker of Kleiner Perkins released the Internet Trends Year End Update report and Blodget of Business Insider released The Future of Digital. With 250 slides combined, these decks covered every angle of the digital and internet economy, but one area that stood out from both was the momentum of the smartphone revolution.

This past year we also saw powerful studies on the direction of the call center (e.g. the American Express Customer Service study which I wrote about here). When you combine that data with the data from Meeker and Blodget, the picture is clearer than ever: The smartphone is the biggest thing to happen to the call center since the dial tone.

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2013 Call Center Trends: A Live Conversation with Top Industry Analysts

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As we begin to wrap up 2012 we can’t help but think “What does 2013 hold for the call center and customer service industry?”

Let’s fast forward and start the conversation!

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and Join us LIVE on November 29th at 2:00 pm ET as we discuss the 2013 emerging trends that will dominate the call center.  We’ve secured notable industry analysts, Dave Michels, Jon Arnold, and Dan Miller to be a part of this event.  Continue reading →

Webinar Day! You Can’t Afford to Put Callers on Hold

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It’s webinar day!!

This afternoon at 2pm ET, Fonolo will be hosting a free webinar on You Can’t Afford to Put Your Callers on Hold. You don’t want to miss this highly anticipated event.

Waiting on hold sucks. Putting callers on hold hurts customer satisfaction and raises costs.

The obvious alternative to waiting on hold is this: If no agent is immediately available, the company should offer to call back the customer when an agent is ready.

This webinar is now available on-demand, see below for details.
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Hey mobile app: don’t just sit there – connect me!

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As we’ve written here before, the mobile application is a huge opportunity for companies to improve their call center experience. This is a platform that can make callers happier and costs lower.

Sadly, we see this opportunity wasted all too often. I think we will look back at this era and be puzzled that it took so long to connect the dots. I am looking right now at a mobile app from a major US bank that will find the nearest branch, show my balance and transfer money.

But what happens when it comes time to actually talk to the bank? I tap “contact us”. It shows me a phone number.  And then… it just sits there. If I tap to make the call, all the advanced power of this amazing device is thrown away and I might as well be using a phone from 1950.

A tremendous opportunity for the call center

More than anything else, this is a big opportunity for companies with a call center. The incredible power in the smartphone can fix many of the frustrations that currently plague the calling experience: menu navigation, waiting on hold, data entry. But only if that power is used.

For more, see Chris’s excellent post “If your company is releasing a mobile app, don’t miss a key opportunity” and my post from last year “The future of the call center is a visual interface”.

The smartphone will drive the evolution of the call center (cool video)

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The rapid rise of the smartphone is hardly news anymore. But to refocus your attention on just how dramatic it is, here is a video illustrating Android activations over the last few years. (“Activation” is the first time an Android-powered smartphone contacts the network.)

Credits: Android Developer via Android Central.

For more academic view, consider the chart below. It was compiled from data presented by Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker in late 2009:

The unstoppable tide of the smart phone.

For Fonolo, this trend is continues to affirm our belief that smartphone will drive the evolution of the call center experience, and more specifically that “The future of the call center is a visual interface”.

The future of the call center is a visual interface

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We have believed for several years that the rise of the smart phone is driving the call center towards its next major leap forward.

More smartphones, more mobile apps

All the data we’ve seen continues to support this:

All this adds up to support the premise that more and more calls will originate from a smart phone via some form of click-to-call or tap-to-call approach. What does this mean for the call center?

The future of the call center is a visual interface

The smartphone is going to drive the next generation of call center experience and, most notably, will drive it towards a visual interface. To understand why,  consider the context of the customer when he calls in the call center. For the last decade a growing fraction of callers have been in front of a web browser when placing a call. (In talking with a large bank’s retail group recently, we heard that a third of their callers are on the website when they place the call.)

Now combine that with the growing number of callers that are on a smartphone. The sum of those two will soon be, if not already, a majority of callers. And what’s special about those two contexts? In both cases, the caller has an interactive visual interface at his disposal. That interface, if used properly, can vastly improve the calling experience while reducing the cost for the company. Fonolo makes it possible and, more importantly, easy for any company to do just that.

A tremendous opportunity for the call center

More than anything else, this is a big opportunity for companies with a call center. The incredible power in the smartphone can fix many of the frustrations that currently plague the calling experience: menu navigation, waiting on hold, data entry. But only if that power is used.

RBC releases mobile app. Now all the banks are in.

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I wrote a few months ago about a study which stated that nearly three-quarters of online retailers either already have or are developing a mobile strategy. Since then, our conversations with companies have absolutely supported this finding.

For banks, mobile is a must-have

In some verticals, such as banking, mobile apps are already a must-have. With the release this week of RBC’s iPhone App, all 5 of the major Canadian banks have embraced this platform, plus ING Direct and National Bank. (See our whitepaper “Fonolo for financial industry”.)

What does this mean for the call center?

The future of the call center is a visual interface

We see the rise of the smartphone as a force driving the next generation of call center experience, and experience based around a visual interface. To understand why, consider the context of the customer when he calls in the call center. For the last decade a growing fraction of callers have been in front of a web browser when placing a call. (In talking with a large bank’s retail group recently, we heard that a third of their callers are on the website when they place the call.)

In Canada, estimates say that 30% of all wireless users will be on smartphones by the end of the 2010 and 50% by the start of 2014

– Convergence Consulting Inc. as reported in “We’re flocking to smart phones”,
Iain Marlow, January 12, 2010, The Globe and Mail

Now combine that with the growing number of callers that are on a smartphone. The sum of those two will soon be, if not already, a majority of callers. And what’s special about those two contexts? In both cases, the caller has an interactive visual interface at his disposal. That interface, if used properly, can vastly improve the calling experience while reducing the cost for the company. Fonolo makes it possible and, more importantly, easy for any company to do just that.