Anyone who’s ever worked in customer service this time of year can understand the madness that looms ahead. Customers compete with each other to be the first ones out of the gate to score the best deals of the year. Consequently, if your company’s customer experience journey somehow interferes with providing a seamless transaction – resulting in a lost deal – there will be hell to pay. And it’s no secret that customer service agents bear the brunt of any customer experience catastrophe. This is why it’s so important to implement solutions that can alleviate the stress for both the customer and the service agent. Continue reading
Tag Archives: web-call-back
Travel is the single largest e-commerce category. Last year, in the US alone, online travel spending exceeded $100 billion! So it’s no surprise that these companies are embracing new technologies in an effort to attract more customers and differentiate themselves from the competition.
“How” you say? Finding solutions that are geared at improving the call center experience resonate particularly well with this strategy. Fonolo, call-back software for the call center, has a number of customers in the travel sector taking this approach with our web call-back solution.
Contact center managers have a dizzying array of technologies to choose from today: speech analytics, mobile apps, chat, voice biometrics, virtual queuing, visual IVR, web call-back, etc. How do they prioritize what’s best for their call center?
As a guiding principle, it’s useful to remember that live conversations between your agents and customers have the biggest impact in determining customer satisfaction. As I’ve said many times on this blog: “The Voice Channel is King”. (See here and here.)
Over the last year, I have presented data from several different surveys, in several different formats, to support this claim. But I think I’ve finally boiled it down to one chart that says it all.
Last week’s webinar drew record crowds, and for good reason: it was focused on a very compelling case study. Fonolo was recently deployed by 1st United Services Credit Union across three channels (mobile, web and direct dial) with terrific results. How terrific? The improved calling experience delivered enough incremental revenue in the first 60 days to cover the annual Fonolo license!
So you can see now why this would be a crowd-pleaser: Multi-channel communication, improved customer experience, revenue lift, visual IVR, virtual queuing, mobile customer service, iPhone and Android apps… basically every hot trend in the industry today.
During the webinar, I talked about an “API vs. Component” approach and that drew quite a few questions. Since we didn’t have time to answer them all, I’ll expand on that topic here.
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Mobile apps have become must-have components for companies in the financial space. Most large and mid-size banks already have very full-featured mobile apps. But, sadly, many of them drop the ball when it comes to connecting with a live agent. Their “Contact Us” page does nothing more than display a phone number. This forces a customer who needs to speak to an agent to start over. What if that customer was about to apply for a loan? Chances are, he’ll put his phone back in his pocket and that revenue opportunity is gone. That risk can be remedied by having a smarter connection to the call center.
That’s exactly what 1st United Services Credit Union did with the latest update of its iPhone app. The app’s “Contact Us” section, powered by Fonolo, lets their customers reach an agent with one tap — no phone menus, no waiting on hold.
Calling tech support – or any call center, is never fun. As a matter of fact, it can be one of the most stressful and frustrating tasks to do. The staff at Huffington Post Live, along with the rest of the world is wondering – why hasn’t anything changed?
On January 28th, our esteemed CEO, Shai Berger was asked to participate and share his expertise on a subject that is very near and dear to our heart. Long hold times.
