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Agile Queue Management – How to manage queues more effectively

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By Kirsty Ferguson, Enterprise Engagement Lead, Premier CX

N.B. This article was originally published in The Good CX Guide, an e-book on the topic of caller experience best practice.  To download the guide, packed with practical advice for contact centre professionals, please click here.

In most articles I have read about managing call queues, one piece of advice that always pops up is to be “dynamic”. However, what does that really mean? And how can you possibly even think about being agile and dynamic when you have a giant board of lights above your head with queue times rising above SLA and several callers waiting that you know aren’t going to get through before the lines cut off at the end of the day?

In reality, the answer is simple. USE THE QUEUE. Literally, use all you have available to you to manage your peaks and keep those boards at bay. In this brief article, I’m going to suggest how you can get started.

Step One – What You Can Use

Think about your arsenal. Do you have live chat? Do you have comfort messaging? Maybe you can publish your wait times. Whatever it is, use it in context. Being dynamic is about knowing what to use and when to use it. Furthermore, if you have enough agility to turn things on and off as you need to in real-time, then even better.

For example, if you have long queues and your live chat is switched off, switch it on and put a message in the queue telling the caller it’s now available. If you can stream, then chances are you can set parameters to automatically drop this message in when queue lengths hit a specific timeframe. Do you have the ability to stream in queue experiences? Can you publish your wait times? You may think you can’t utilise some of this stuff without IT’s help, but clever messaging can open a whole world of deflection that can help you manage your queues.

Step Two – Why Are the Queues There?

What has caused your queue? Is it external communication that’s resulted in a sudden influx of calls? Is it a forecasted spike or is it just an unknown? What is the most likely thing the caller is going to be talking to your agents about? Once you know the cause, you can account for how long the peak is likely to last and switch on helpful messaging in the queue when needed.

For example, suppose you have a power outage that affects a particular postcode. A simple CLI lookup will enable you to only advise callers from the appropriate geographical area of the outage and how long electricity is likely to be down. If you are receiving spikes for several reasons when queueing hits a certain threshold, why not introduce a more empathetic level of music/voice and tone into your queue. You could also add a message to advise that live chat is available or that non-urgent queries can be dealt with online.

Step Three – Get Your Caller Agent Ready

Is the caller ready? Think about what you need the caller to know, or have at their fingertips, when they get connected to help the agent assist them more efficiently. Things like delivery details, order numbers, account numbers, and so on. And if they don’t have this info, and you can’t talk to them without it, let them know (nicely, of course) before they get to an agent. Then when they call back, recognise the fact they are a repeat caller. You can use dynamic IVR to show you know they are a repeat caller and give them a message along the lines of:

“Thanks for calling back. We’ll put you straight through to someone who can help with deliveries, but if you want to talk to us about something else, press ‘1’ to go to the main menu”.

This will help prioritise your callers that are in the queue.

These are just a few ways that the queue and IVR can help you manage demand, keep you agile, and enable you to be dynamic when under the pressure of mounting call queues. Of course, some queues are just inevitable, but there is always something else that can be done by using what you have. You just have to look hard enough.

N.B. This article was originally published in The Good CX Guide, an e-book on the topic of caller experience best practice.  To download the guide, packed with practical advice for contact centre professionals, please click here.

EBOOK DOWNLOAD: Unlocking the potential of your #1 asset – Your people

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By Sabio Group

Are you in danger of leaving your people behind?

Despite the upheaval caused by Covid-19, the annual rate of attrition among UK contact centre advisors remained at around 15% to 20% in 2020. However, we are now starting to see a crisis in the industry, with attrition rates soaring.

With the estimated cost to replace and train advisors in a 500-seat contact centre each year said to be over £1m, many businesses are looking at new ways to bring down attrition rates – and improve customer experience as a result.

Digital and automation initiatives may transform contact centre efficiency, but they’re also fundamentally changing the nature of today’s contact centre advisor role. With your people left handling only the most urgent, complex and emotional interactions, this workload is placing huge pressures on your contact centre teams.

That’s why it’s time to turn your technology focus inwards – backing your advisors with the same innovative solutions that you’re already using to support your customer journeys. At Sabio we call this Human Service.

Our latest eBook explains how adopting such a Human Service approach can help unlock the true potential of your #1 asset – your people. We also identify how effectively supporting contact centre teams with the right technology and solutions can play a key role in starting to address worryingly high advisor attrition rates across our industry.

We also highlight the importance of monitoring advisor wellbeing, and discuss how delivering focused customer journey support can play a key role in reducing advisor frustration.

Download now to find out how you can support your advisors as they adapt to world of longer and more demanding interactions.

WEBINAR: A digital-first strategy for customer engagement

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Thursday, Nov. 4, 10 a.m. BST | 11 a.m. CET

Click Here To Register

Customers are increasingly opting to engage digitally with the companies they do business with. This has as much to do with the continuing demographic shift to predominantly digitally native consumers as it does with changing communications preferences.

In light of these changes, businesses need to reevaluate their contact center strategies, specifically the role digital transformation will play in allowing them to offer a digital-first option for customers to engage.

Join Talkdesk and Salesforce experts in an insightful conversation moderated by Blake Morgan, on driving customer engagement through digital transformation.

Join us to learn more about:

  • How can you empower your customers through digital channels and automation.
  • Tips for supporting the growing volume of digital engagement interactions.
  • How to tie all your CX interactions together with context by leveraging omnichannel.

Click Here To Register

INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT: Service advisor mental health and wellbeing

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By Sabio Group

Why it’s time to look inwards and unlock the potential of your number one asset in a post-Covid world – your contact centre staff.

The growth of automation and self-service technology is helping organisations serve their customers in the way they want to engage. But have we stopped to consider the impact this is having on our contact centre agents?

Instead of handling a mix of interactions throughout a typical day, your contact centre team is being left to field only the more complex, urgent and emotional customer journeys. And this sustained workload is placing huge pressures on your advisors. There’s a real risk that you could be leaving your people behind

Contact centre agents have the most monitored role that exists. It’s time to turn the tracking of agents into a positive, it’s time to reinstill the human touch. It’s time to really care.

To find out more, download Sabio’s latest eBook which explains how adopting such a Human Service approach can help unlock the true potential of your #1 asset – your people.

Why CRM (still) fails

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CRM is a core component of the operational toolkit – even SME adoption levels have now reached 79%, according to a recent survey from Workbooks. And yet, CRM success rates are still too low. For every business achieving phenomenal business transformation, another will have wasted resources and seen zero return.

As a mature market, there are countless CRM solutions now available, many of which are loaded with fantastic features and functionality. So what makes the difference between CRM failure and CRM success? As John Cheney, CEO of cloud-based CRM vendor Workbooks, explains, it isn’t the technology that delivers success – success can only be achieved if companies set clear business outcomes at the point of purchase…

Pressure to Change

In a post lockdown economy, businesses in every sector are adjusting to change. Staff turnover has reached unprecedented heights as individuals rethink priorities. Customers have not just moved online but radically raised their expectations of the quality of experience at the same time. New markets have opened; others have been mothballed. It is little wonder that businesses are reassessing their existing CRM solutions and asking: why didn’t it help?

Done well, CRM provides a framework that can transform operational performance in many areas. And, as some companies discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic, a well-designed and well implemented CRM can support rapid changes in business direction – such as the company selling window shutters direct to the consumer that moved 100% online within days, as soon as measuring up visits to the customer’s home were prohibited. And yet, the risk associated with implementing CRM is widely recognised: in the Workbooks survey and report, The State of the CRM Market: An SME Perspective, 50% of SMEs confirm they are already on their second CRM platform. Too many companies are still buying CRM, only to discover it has failed to deliver.

What’s going wrong? According to the survey, the primary reason for failure is that the CRM solution is a poor fit for the firm’s needs (53%) – yet features and functions (62%) remain the most important factor when choosing a CRM. If a business has spent time ensuring the technology is a great match, why is it still a poor fit? This is a significant investment – so why are companies making such a hash of buying such a vital tool in the business armoury, something that can utterly transform performance, profitability and customer experience?

Outcomes not Features

Taking a technology first approach to finding the right CRM solution is a fast track to failure. Forget the features and functions – they come later. Companies need first to understand the business outcomes required from the investment. Driving revenue growth? Enhancing the customer experience? Reducing operational costs? Improving decision making? Without clearly defined business objectives, companies will struggle to achieve any value from the CRM investment, whatever product they choose.

It is only once business outcomes have been defined – and prioritised – that companies can truly understand the requirements of the CRM solution and set clear expectations for its implementation.  For example, many companies are looking to CRM to deliver a 360-degree view of all customers. Fine, most systems can offer to pull data together, but why? How is that information going to be used? And where, specifically, will the value be derived?

If the desired business outcome is to improve cross-selling, then pulling all data into one place will allow the business to improve segmentation and fine tune marketing. But will the sales team be automatically informed when customers click through a marketing email? Will these leads be scored to help sales people prioritise their response? Taking the time to truly investigate how CRM could support a priority business outcome turns the project on its head.

Technology Sell

Few SMEs, however, have the business analysis skills to undertake this process – and, unfortunately, the CRM industry on the whole is not set up to provide that support. For most CRM vendors, the product sell is typically features and functions focused. Then, once the deal is signed, the implementation project is handed over to an integration partner – a team that wasn’t involved in the original sales process or any discussions about the customer’s business needs.

The model is disjointed as a result: reinforcing the emphasis on ‘bells and whistles’ differentiation during the product assessment phase and offering little to no alignment with business goals or priorities – all of which can extend time to value for the customer.

Unique Business

The honest fact is that while there are some differences between CRM applications – most notably in the ease of integration, with those using open APIs making it far easier – the software is approaching commodity status. Business needs, however, are unique. Every company has its own structure, its own customer base and engagement model.

A CRM investment is about achieving a competitive edge, about being better than the competition – and actively looking to explore, capture and use business goals to define the CRM deployment makes the difference between failure and success.

Which is why SMEs need to take a different approach to buying CRM – one that starts with the business outcomes they want to achieve and, only once they have been prioritised, applies this insight to determine the functional CRM goals. Companies should look for vendors who can help them to define these business outcomes at the outset, in addition to offering implementation support. Delivering that end-to-end engagement, all the way from the initial outcome definition workshop to full implementation, ensures consistent product focus and maximises time to value.

Conclusion

When CRM projects work the business looks quite different. When projects fail, the business looks exactly the same – just financially worse off. And too many businesses, having been there before, are increasingly nervous of making the same mistakes. Faced with navigating a rapidly changing commercial landscape, companies are in a dilemma: they need CRM, they know it can work and deliver real value. But can they take the risk? Can they afford not to?

It is time to stop repeating the CRM mistakes of the past. Step away from product sell, the sparkly features and functions: it is businesses that prioritise outcomes and look beyond the technology – to what additional value a supplier can offer – that will be best placed to maximise ROI and achieve successful business change, fast.

Reinventing failure demand to revitalise contact centres

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By Suzette Meadows, Lead Consultant, Contact Centre/Unified Communications, Exponential-e

Contact centres aren’t averse to a challenge. For years the familiar phone call has seen its role in customer service challenged by other modes of automated communication promising fast, first-time resolutions and tangible cost savings. The reality is that right now, many of these platforms lack the automation and access to real-time customer data needed to deliver seamless, autonomous customer interactions. They will form an integral part of omnichannel communication going forward, but their integration will take time.

For that reason, contact centres remain as important as ever within customer service. They’re evolving at breakneck speed too, with cutting-edge technology increasingly powering efficient, resilient processes. Throw in the fact most contact centre agents now work remotely, and points of customer contact are spread across multiple channels, and the speed of their evolution becomes clear.

All these simultaneous changes can be difficult to navigate though, and have the potential to negatively impact customer journeys, a punishing financial and reputational prospect. That’s what makes the study of failure demand so critical to contact centres, and I want to explain why.

Studying how you fail in order to succeed

There’s been some discussion in recent years about the value of assessing failure demand in contact centres, with certain voices including IBM arguing businesses need to start focusing on engaging customers across all channels. That approach belies the unique role of failure demand in enhancing the customer experiences. It allows you to create a culture of feedback where you identify potential weaknesses in current processes and customer journeys, and then take positive, proactive action to mitigate them. Its study is a critical ingredient in ensuring the longevity and continued success of your business for as long as you are operating a contact centre model.

In practice, failure demand can typically be divided into four categories:

  • Speed: When a customer had to wait longer than anticipated for a response, or didn’t receive one quickly enough.
  • Accuracy: When the information provided was inaccurate or incomplete, meaning follow-up communications were required.
  • Simplicity: When the customer journey was too complex, involving multiple processes, departments, or channels of communication.
  • Clarity: When the response delivered was unnecessarily technical or confused the customer, and required further explanation

Prioritising performance assessment

With this understanding of how to categorise failures, contact centres can begin assessing their performance, and the potential root causes of any recurring problems.

But where should you start? That’s simple – with your agents. They will have a better idea than anyone where there are issues with your tools or processes, so speak to them to identify potential issues in everyday workflows.

Each agent won’t have a full picture of performance across your operation, though. That’s why interaction data is so valuable. Capturing data which details all instances of repeat contact, and reviewing it to identify any common trends within complaints, produces valuable insights into where customer service can be streamlined to deliver better outcomes.

This process can be made even more sophisticated if you categorise the specific details of each customer contact once you’ve captured details of the interaction. Previously this would have been fairly time-intensive, but various systems are now available that automatically capture and categorise both customer complaints and agent feedback for you. When used correctly, they provide a far more holistic and qualitative view of each customer’s experience and agent’s performance, helping establish specific patterns of performance, and producing insights into potential factors contributing to failures.

All of these steps are crucial to assessing performance, but they’ll prove futile unless you have innate knowledge of the journeys customers are taking within your organisation. That’s why it’s so important to map out your projected customer journeys; doing so means you can compare the outcomes you want to drive against actual current journeys, measure whether expectation meets reality, and act accordingly if there is any discrepancy between the two.

Developing a clear strategy to minimise failure demand

So now you’ve established the contributing factors to failure in your call centre. Of course, the contributing factors in each case will differ greatly, but the ideal strategy to mitigate them will typically comprise four key steps:

  • Equipping agents with the tools they need: Giving agents the tools and information needed to deliver first-time resolutions at their fingertips, wherever they are connecting from, should be the basis of any strategy. A lack of appropriate resource is one of the most common contributors to failure demand, but equally one of the most straight forward to identify and fix
  • Automating simple tasks to free up agent capacity: Automating routine tasks that do not require their specific expertise, such as identification and verification, ensure customers are connected to the agent best placed to help them with minimal waiting time, ensuring queries are resolved more quickly.
  • Consolidating and streamlining internal processes: Bouncing between different departments and channels of communication often causes customer communications to break down. Adopting an omnichannel approach to communication should allow you to provide effortless support and consultation to customers on the channel of their choice, without compromising their experiences
  • Analyse your data to draw your insights: Once you’ve captured, consolidated and stored all your data securely, then it’s time to start driving value from it. Make it instantly accessible to those managing customer service channels so they can run analytics against it and generate insights that they can use to proactively address and improve processes in their teams.

Contact centres are constantly evolving in response to shifting customer expectations and changing business priorities, meaning there is no set blueprint for how a contact centre should be run, or specific level of performance that it should aim to reach. Each one operates in its own unique way.

That said, every successful contact centre should aspire to match best in class CX with efficient and effective customer interactions. Ingraining awareness of failure demand across teams, and putting the right tools and strategy in place to mitigate it, will ensure contact centres continue to play an important role in surprising and delighting customers on a daily basis.

Text messaging is changing the way we communicate

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By mGage

Long ago, when streets still had pay phones, and every home had a landline, software programmer Neil Papworth sent the first text message. The date was December 3, 1992. Two decades later, around 23 billion SMS messages are sent daily around the world[1], both from person to person and through mobile engagement providers.

In 20 years, text messaging has become our primary method of communication. It has grown from being a simple way for secretaries to page their managers to the backbone of many applications that rely on text messaging – voting on reality shows, tracking packages, and confirming appointments, just to name a few.

Conversation Changers

The way we consume information and how we communicate is ever-changing. We’re more visually orientated than ever and have shorter attention spans due to most people being time-poor. The humble ‘like’ now suffices as a full response in most scenarios, and the word “emoji” even made it onto the approved list in Scrabble.

We saw emerging trends like contactless payments and curbside pickup accelerate in 2020 with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. These changes were facilitated by mobile phones and, in many cases, text messaging. In fact, 34% of businesses surveyed adopted SMS because of the pandemic[2] — many brands invested in text messaging to maintain a close relationship with customers and facilitate safe shopping. While many of these brands were slow to try text messaging before the pandemic forced their hands, they most certainly saw the benefits. 77% of the businesses that adopted text messaging this year say they’ll continue post-COVID[3].

This tide of change has been in progress for many years, but COVID-19 added fuel to the fire. The influence of trends, including social integration, social media sharing, and group messaging, has massively impacted how we communicate. Many enterprise companies are taking note and trying to understand how to adopt SMS for customer service, marketing, and operations.

The Rise of the Messenger App

Messenger apps (also called OTT Messaging Apps) are arguably the most popular smartphone apps. The 10 biggest collectively boast more than three billion accounts. WhatsApp, the leader, has 700m, and the number of WhatsApp messages sent every day now exceeds the number of standard texts. Last year it handled more than seven trillion messages – that’s about 1,000 per person.

These mobile-first social messaging apps create a new ecosystem for communication, but despite the growing popularity of instant messaging among consumers, OTT messaging apps have downsides for businesses. So, what is the best platform for marketers to communicate with their customers?

SMS Messaging Making a Comeback

SMS messaging is one of the most reliable and immediate ways to reach people. Whether the consumer has a smartphone or a basic mobile phone, they can receive SMS text messages. 95% of texts will be read within 3 minutes of being sent, with the average response time for a text being a mere 90 seconds[4].

Marketing channels many brands previously relied on are quickly becoming oversaturated. Around 98% of all SMS messages are opened, compared to just 20% of emails[5]. The average organic Facebook post only reaches 5.2% of the brand’s followers[6].

With text messaging, on the other hand, consumers are much more likely not only to read your message but appreciate it. Consumers opt into mobile programs and make a careful decision on which text campaigns they choose, meaning they’re a much more engaged audience. Because users limit themselves to brands they truly care about when opting into SMS promotions, brands can market more directly to a captive and loyal target audience.

SMS also allows consumers to reply instantaneously to a promotion and engage with the brand through two-way dialogue. By opening the doors of conversation between brand and consumer and creating customer engagement, marketers ultimately create a stronger relationship and build brand trust.

The Effectiveness of SMS as a Marketing Strategy

With more than 5 billion people who own a mobile device, the SMS marketing audience is vast and underserved. Customers want simplicity, and SMS is one form of digital communication that makes their lives easier, not more overwhelming. SMS text messaging is a simple, cost-effective way to retain customers, deliver excellent customer service and is proven to be a very effective method.

If you’re ready to try text messaging for your business, contact us today.

[1] TechJury

[2] ZipWhip The State of Texting 2021

[3] ZipWhip The State of Texting 2021

[4] Worldwide Texting Statistics

[5] Worldwide Texting Statistics

[6] How the Facebook Algorithm Works in 2021

DOWNLOAD: 2021 Talkdesk global contact centre KPI benchmarking report

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By Talkdesk

At Talkdesk, we know the importance of benchmarking in driving strategic business decisions. Featuring our proprietary data, the brand new Talkdesk KPI benchmarking report analyzes the impact of the turbulence of 2020 on contact centre performance across five operational metrics applicable to every industry.

What you will learn:

– The importance and benefits of benchmarking.
– How contact centre metrics changed during 2020 compared to 2019.
– How your contact centre performance stacks up against peers across industries, regions and company sizes.
– Tips to optimize your contact centre and improve CX.

Click here To Download

INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT: Stella Connect customer service feedback, coaching & QA

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In an ultra-competitive market, how do brands deliver great customer experiences that set them apart from their competition? It all boils down to human touch. Today’s front-line teams have become a major driver of customer loyalty and retention. That’s why we’ve built a platform to help you empower your front-line team to deliver great exceptional experiences.

Stella Connect offers service teams a humanized, real-time agent-level feedback platform, integrated quality assurance, and coaching that brings all of the relevant data points together. Get visibility into agent performance, and empower your team to deliver exceptional customer experiences with Stella Connect.

Click here to book your demo.

Empower Agents to Deliver Exceptional Experiences

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By Medallia

Create a motivated and engaged work-from-anywhere team that brings a human touch to every customer interaction. Get visibility into agent performance, identify coaching opportunities, and streamline your QA program with Stella Connect by Medallia. Start using the CX management tool your team actually likes, today.

Click here to find out more.