Video Archives - Page 12 of 12 - Customer Experience Strategy and Tactics

PACE and Change in Contact Centers is Moving Quickly

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What if your ability to improve the customer experience was taken away? Do you think your customers would give you a break because you were restricted from doing the right thing? And are you breaking any laws while trying to engage with customers?

“Are you breaking any laws while trying to engage with customers?” Click to Tweet

So many thoughts ran through my head as I attended the PACE Association Annual Conference in Tampa. PACE (Professional Association for Customer Engagement) changed their name from the ATA (American Teleservices Association) in 2012. They changed their name (and focus) to make the shift to address the rapid rate of changes in the contact center industry.

Since most of my operational experience has been in inbound customer service and inbound sales, I rarely participated in ATA (now PACE) events in the past twenty years. Traditionally, most of their members were outbound focused contact centers.

The Contact Center World is Changing…Fast

Over the past few years the lines between outbound and inbound contact centers has been blurred. The rapid increase in customer contact channels and new business models has caused more of a blend of outbound and inbound in contact centers – for the phone and other interaction channels. And this applies to sales, service and support organizations, not just telemarketers.

For contact centers that are most skilled in outbound they know there are requirements and regulations they must follow. For those that are planning to build outbound into their strategy, they must make themselves aware of and comply with the rules and regulations of outbound contacts. And for many industries, the rules are unique and must be complied with otherwise the penalties can be severe.

Are you breaking the law now

This fact became very unsettling to me because I know of several contact centers right now that are probably violating some regulations and don’t even know it. Just like you needing to comply with the notification requirements when you are recording customer interactions, you need to comply with regulatory laws for engaging with customers.

PACE is the place to make sure you get it right. A core mission of PACE is to proactively balance industry best practices with current regulatory concerns around engaging customers. PACE is the only Association that has a complete Regulatory Guide that has become the industry standard when you want to know about Federal and State regulations.

The digital transformation has forever changed the way in which contact centers engage with their customers. But if we’re not careful we’ll be restricted from engaging with customers due to overzealous and vote seeking politicians answering media-hyped drama of failed customer experiences.

Protect the good people

Sure, there are always going to be unethical organizations operating in the marketplace. But it’s important to make sure that we are not penalized as an industry for the doings of some bad characters.

PACE is the only contact center industry association that acts as an industry advocate and that monitors federal and state legislative, regulatory and case law developments on an ongoing basis. They provide tools and education to help contact centers comply and to defend the industry when it’s needed. I came to the conclusion that they have been looking out for our livelihood, even when we didn’t realize it. Thank you!

PACE Association Leadership

The board of directors is the governing body of the association, responsible for the ultimate direction of the management of the affairs of the organization. The board is responsible for policy making, while management team is responsible for executing day-to-day management to implement board-made policy.

Watch my interview with chairman of the board, Stuart Discount at the conference to learn more about PACE.

Become a Member

Beyond their annual conference and other events PACE has several different regional chapters across the United States. Like many associations PACE has different membership levels meeting the needs of everyone. Learn more at: http://www.paceassociation.org/assoc_subscribe.asp.

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Jim Rembach

Jim Rembach is the Editor in Chief of the Customer Service Weekly and it’s Podcast host. He is President of CX Global Media and the creator of the Call Center Coach Virtual Leaders Academy. As the host of the Fast Leader Show Podcast, he has interviewed hundreds of experts, authors, academics, researchers, and practitioners on various angles, viewpoints, and perspectives for improving the customer experience. He has held positions in retail operations, contact centers, customer support, customer success, sales, and measured the customer experience. He is a certified Emotional Intelligence practitioner, Employee Retention Specialist, and recipient of numerous industry awards.

www.influencetoaction.com

Bob Webb Talks Workforce Management

by Jim Rembach

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Labor has always been one of the largest costs to manage in a contact center. And for all contact centers over 50 agents having a Workforce Management solution needs to be part of their contact center operations stack of tools.

For executives, labor costs are more real-time and a bigger worry in their minds than even sales or customer satisfaction ratings. If it weren’t than you would never need to battle for staffing resources.

So being able to manage your over-staffing is critical for you serve the needs of your bosses. And managing under-staffing is critical for you to be able to manage the needs of your customers (which your bosses will pay attention to eventually). So you must do both.

And Bob Webb of Pipkins shared at Call Center Week Winter that there are three things of special interest that leaders have to know about.

Inter-level Requirements: knowing what your forecast staffing requirements are for a period of time within the day versus for the entire day. These could be intervals of 15-minutes, 30-minutes, or 60-minute blocks of time. As volume shift throughout your day you’ll have to manage the peaks and valleys and properly staff and actively manage the workload.
Real-time Adherence: creating schedules in contact centers has little value if the schedules are not followed. In Workforce Management, schedule adherence is where planning meet execution. You need real-time proactive monitoring of agent adherence that compares the agents’ scheduled activities with their actual activities. And when things do not match you are notified to take action.
Self-scheduling: the use of at-home and part-time agents continues to grow. And there has always been a need for the workforce to be flexible in their work availability. Self-scheduling for at-home and part-time agents enables employees to feel more in control of their work lives. Their work-life balance win can be your operational efficiency win. You can increase staff engagement, reduce administrative costs and reduce supervisory time spent on scheduling.

In the contact center industry, like all personnel-intensive industries, Workforce Management has become more complex. And as organizations continue to add customer interaction channels to the mix the complexity only increase. You must manage staffing needs (and adherence to schedules) for every channel you offer.

Watch Bob Webb of Pipkins talk Workforce Management at Call Center Week Winter with Jim Rembach Click to Tweet

What Pipkins Does

Pipkins, Inc. was incorporated in 1983. Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, Pipkins has become the leading supplier of workforce management software and services to the contact center industry, providing sophisticated forecasting and scheduling technology for both the front and back office. For over thirty years, Pipkins has consistently created and delivered superior workforce management products for contact centers of all sizes. Pipkins’ boasts thirteen industry-first applications with solutions that are three to five years ahead of the curve. Source: www.pipkins.com

The Pitfalls of Workforce Management

As we all know technology is not as simple as it seems. Your greatest success with Workforce Management solutions will come by finding a balance between company needs and employee needs.

Because of the peak and valley aspects of call center work volumes and the costs of having full-time employees call centers may push to increase part-time staff that is very flexible. The thought is that you can then schedule people whenever you need them and at anytime you need them.

If only it was only that simple.

Adding to burnout

In an a report titled Irregular Work Scheduling and Its Consequences by Lonnie Golden a professor of economics and labor-employment relations at Pennsylvania State University, Abington College for the Economic Policy Institute he states that generally, fluctuation in workloads or job demands tends to negatively affect workers’ well-being, all else constant, both when it is routine or transient (Wood, Michaelides, and Totterdell 2013).

This is mainly because fluctuation creates interference of work with non-work activity and undermines the effort-recovery process, time needed for rest in between shifts in order to perform effectively. Even when work hours are positively related to indicators of well-being, variability of work diminishes well-being significantly (Wood, Michaelides, and Totterdell 2013; Golden et al. 2013; Golden and Okulicz-Kozaryn 2015).

Thus, reducing or minimizing instability in work hours, schedules, and workloads may improve workers’ well-being, for a given level of daily or weekly hours and income.

So make sure you’re smarter than your Workforce Management tool. Try to limit fluctuations in worker schedules and increase their ownership and choice as Bob mentioned. Or else burnout and turnover could be the thing you wish you didn’t know more about.

Join me on the Fast Leader Show Podcast

Listen to the Fast Leader Show now. It’s an energizing docuedutainment (don’t look it up I made it up) podcast released each Wednesday and hosted by Jim Rembach. Each week, Jim introduces you to real folks (from the call center industry and beyond) with real stories of how they were able to get over the hump and lead themselves or others better…faster. You’ll learn how to become a better leader (faster) through their stories by improving your employee and customer engagement through the power of improving your emotional intelligence. Get more human-centric and move onward and upward…faster.

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Jim Rembach

www.influencetoaction.com

John Pisarek Talks Artificial Intelligence

by Jim Rembach

As organizations plan their customer strategies they foresee an onslaught of customer interactions coming their way. The fallacy of believing that adding self-service options will decrease customer requests is now known. When your organization opens channels for customer to interact with you, even with self-service options, customers will interact with you more. This engagement is a good thing. But the only way to handle all of your volume – in an effective manner without adding more staff – is by leveraging Artificial Intelligence.

Listening to John Pisarek of Interactions at Call Center Week Winter the scenario of about projecting more customer interaction volume and not getting additional staff to handle it is a common reality for many contact center leaders.

And it’s a worry and issue across the industry. In the 2016 Global Contact Center Benchmark Report by Dimension Data 67.8% of contact center leaders project an increase in overall interaction volume. How many of those 67.8% do you think have been provided an increase in staffing in order to handle that increased volume?

Even though a lot of that increased volume is coming via digital channels, an increase in staffing levels in often needed to handle customer interactions that opt into different channels whether it’s another digital channel or voice channel.

This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) could greatly assist in this common dilemma. But not all AI is built alike. Learning and understanding your needs is the best way to determine the solution you seek.

Watch John Pisarek of Interactions talk Artificial Intelligence at Call Center Week Winter with Jim Rembach Click to Tweet

What Interactions Does

Interactions is a leading provider of speech and natural language technology that enables businesses and consumers to engage in productive conversations. With flexible products and solutions designed to meet the growing demand for unified, multichannel customer care, Interactions is delivering significant cost savings and unprecedented customer experience for some of the largest brands in the world. Founded in 2004, Interactions is headquartered in Franklin, Massachusetts with additional offices in Indiana, Texas, New Jersey and New York. Source: www.interactions.com.

You don’t need any agents

Total disruption and massive job losses are headed for the contact center industry. The robo agent will take over customer service and the call center agent will be a relic from the past just like rotary dial telephone.

That’s a bunch of foolishness, don’t fall victim to that type of hysteria. What will happen as we continue with advances in AI and natural language capabilities is a shifting in the work conducted by agents.

As the lower level requests are handled by better technology the more complex requests will make their way to the live agent queue. A Frost & Sullivan study claims that by 2022 the number of high-skilled outsourcing jobs could almost double. You can probably expect the same for non-outsourced agent jobs.

The global economy continues to grow. As economies grow there is most often and increase in the need for jobs. Global growth in in 2017 is projected to rise to 2.7 percent according to World Bank. And the world population is on the rise. More people – more (customer) service required.

What’s the quality of your AI?

As we see this shift in the work of the contact center agent, we should also see a shift in the work of quality assurance. What types of channels do you support?:

Voice
Chat
SMS
IVR
Email
Website
Social Media
Mobile Applications
Kiosks
Video Chat

What else? Are you measuring quality in each of these channels? We know that customers may opt out into your agent assisted channel from another channel. But you can’t just measure the quality of the voice interaction and expect improvements in the customer experience.

It’s actually an unjust burden to put on agents to only quality monitor their interactions. Agent assisted or not, the quality in each channel is vital to understand your risk of losing a customer and controlling your costs.

Visibility into the quality of your Artificial Intelligence solutions (as well as your other channels) must be part of your strategic planning process. If it’s not your expected savings in staffing won’t be real either.

Join me on the Fast Leader Show Podcast

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Jim Rembach

www.influencetoaction.com

Aleisha McKeeby Talks AI-rich Chatbots

by Jim Rembach

Aleisha McKeeby Talks AI-rich Chatbots

A focused effort is underway for many organizations. They want to create an integrated and tailored customer experience. But they must work quickly. Omni-channel interactions and multiple generations in the marketplace, and competition leave no time for delay. AI-rich chatbots just might be your saving grace.

After my interview with Aleisha McKeeby of Kore at Call Center Week Winter I felt a little insecure. I like to know what’s going on in our industry. And this AI-rich chatbot (bot) space has blossomed so fast that I’ve been challenged to keep up. I bet you have too.

Lucky for us the initial adoption of bots has focused on the customer. Bots provide a faster way for customers and agents to gain instant access to content, knowledge, products and services. The technology can be used for delivering more effective and more efficient customer interactions while also delivering more on-demand customer service.

Watch Aleisha McKeeby of Kore talk AI-rich chatbots at Call Center Week Winter with Jim Rembach Click to Tweet

What Kore Does

Kore, created to help people work and engage in a simpler and more conversational way across all channels, is a pioneer in shaping how bots interact with the modern workforce and customer. Kore’s enterprise grade Bots Platform enables developers to create and share customized, speech-enabled bots for use on any conversational interface including text, e-mail, and voice, as well as popular messaging platforms such as Facebook, Skype, Slack and Kore’s own Messaging Platform. With its latest addition of the Kore Smart Bot™ for commerce, Kore’s out-of-the-box solutions equip industry leaders to meet the dual challenges of ever-increasing customer expectations and non-integrated legacy IT and systems head on. With a rapid implementation, organizations can recognize a short time to market and begin recognizing ROI faster than traditional models. Source: https://kore.com/

When Artificial Intelligence is added to bots

In an article titled A short history of chatbots and artificial intelligence by Nico Bayerque, he states that Artificial Intelligence (AI), by definition, is intelligence exhibited by machines to display them as rational agents that can perceive their surroundings and make decisions. A rational agent defined by humans would be a computer that can realistically simulate human communication.

Chatbots that take advantage of AI (AI-rich Chatbots) to carry on intelligent conversations with customers can help make the interaction between customers and companies more positive and responsive.

Artificial Intelligence and natural language processing can make for a very engaging customer experience. Users may not have to exit their messaging app to open their mobile browser and plug in a URL. They could chat with family, then chat with a stores bot in the same digital space to get mom’s birthday present, uniting what was once multiple interactions into one conversation.

What’s your company Voice?

In an article by Mike Egan titled The dark side of the coming chatbot revolution he shares that messaging chatbots also come with risks. Because human beings are complex creatures plagued by cognitive biases, irrational thinking and emotional needs, the line between messaging with a friend and messaging with AI will be fine to nonexistent for some people.

This presents an entirely new construct for your brands personality. What will your AI brand voice be like? Will it be congruent with your agents? Will it be genuine and seamless to customers?

Bots are going to change our industry faster than we could ever image. You best get ready.

Join me on the Fast Leader Show Podcast

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Jim Rembach

www.influencetoaction.com

Emma Skygebjerg Talks Workforce Management

by Jim Rembach

Ease of use is one of the top drivers of customer retention for software developers. For Emma Skygebjerg of Loxysoft she highlights the ease of use and user-friendly aspects of their ProScheduler tool several times during our interview at Call Center Week Winter.

The shop talk or internal talk for developers as they focus on customer retention is “stickiness”. How do we make our products more sticky? How do we make it irreplaceable?

Stickiness is important to product developers because customers are more reluctant to switch products. When customers use software products and rely on them, the products’ stickiness is high. Developers can grow faster when their customers stay longer.

But developers can increase stickiness in more ways than one. The most positive direction is a great experience for customers. They want to continue using the product.

For software developers, when stickiness is positive, they experience lower client acquisition costs due the higher client retention and fewer customer complaints and bad reputations to manage. This is a win-win.

Watch Emma Skygebjerg of Loxy Soft talk Workforce Management at Call Center Week Winter with Jim Rembach Click to Tweet

What Loxysoft Does

Loxysoft Group is the largest full-service provider of support systems for contact centers and other contact-intensive organizations in Scandinavia. The group has over 100 employees spread out over five locations: Stockholm, Gothenburg, Oslo, Bracke, and Ostersund where Headquarters is located.

Loxysoft Group consists of Loxysoft AB, Loxysoft AS, Loxysoft Workforce Management AB and Loxytel AB. Together, these companies can deliver everything a state of the art contact center needs. Telephone services with Loxytel AB, staffing system with Loxysoft WFM AB, outbound dialer system and CRM systems with Loxysoft AB and inbound contact center systems with Loxysoft AS. In addition, Loxysoft Group also provide everything from lead lists to advanced consulting and support.

Loxysoft Group’s customers need only one single point of contact but can, if needed, utilize all the capacity and competence of the entire Loxysoft Group. Customers are today mainly located within the Nordic countries but Loxysoft Group also has customers in other parts of Europe, Asia and North America.

Source: https://www.loxysoft.com/en/

When Workforce Management tools don’t work

My good friend Dan Rickwalder of Proactive Planning Group shared in an article titled Seven Call Routing Decisions that Make Planning Hard that as an expert in Workforce Management he often hears, “the forecast was off.”

He shares that call data is the cornerstone of the planning process. You cannot generate a good forecast if the call data is wrong. And without a good forecast, the rest of the planning process falls apart. Being able to count calls is so important that it is the first thing he looks at with a new client.

And when he finds call data issues, it’s usually one of these seven “deadly sins” of call routing.

Overflow Routing – Agents too busy, wait 30 seconds then send the call somewhere else. This is an attempt to keep calls with the best agents. But in reality it just holds calls where they will not be answered and then it affects call counting.
Voice Mail – Is it handled? Is it abandoned? Is it RONA (Ring On No Answer)? Typically voicemail calls are counted as handled calls. That poses the issue of a handled call that will then need to be worked in a “not ready” state. It also messes up handle time, since typically the call is handled in only the ring time (5-10 seconds).
Second Line – Allowing agents to have customers call them back directly. This poses several issues and not just for call counting. Generally second line calls are counted as direct extension volume along with calls to supervisors and others. This means these calls will not be officially counted until you add them in.
Call Back in Queue – This functionality has many names and works differently depending on your communications platform vendor. But the result is the same; customers get called back when their turn to be answered comes up. While this is great for customers, it poses challenges from a workforce planning perspective.
Reserve Agent – This functionality combines with rollover routing to send calls elsewhere if there is not a minimum number of agents available. This preserves service performance for the reserved agent group, but also causes that group to have artificially low occupancy.
Auto After Call Work (ACW) – This functionality doesn’t actually effect call counting, but it does affect handle time. In essence, agents are given a set number of seconds of ACW between calls. This artificially inflates handle times.
Multiple IDs – Many communication platforms come with automated skill setting tools these days. However many centers still use multiple agent log ins for different tasks. There are good reasons to do this, including client billing and complex setup on skill changes. And while this also does not cause call counting issues, it does cause people counting and lost time. And many WFM systems cannot accommodate multiple IDs.

So as Dan says, “there you have ‘em…your seven sins or signs of the apocalypse, or things that will just make my head hurt when I visit your center.”

If these sins are experienced in your call center, the Workforce Management tool you use not be easy to use. But it’s would not be the developers fault. You must be aware of how your sins affect call counting and you must minimize them.

Join me on the Fast Leader Show Podcast

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Jim Rembach

www.influencetoaction.com

Scott Pawloski Talks Intelligent Mobile Messaging

by Jim Rembach

Does intelligent mobile messaging sound glamorous to you? What about smart messaging? Do you remember those commercials by Staples about the Easy Button®? After spending time with Scott Pawloski of Pypestream and getting an opportunity to see a demo of what their solution can do I started getting Easy Button® type thoughts running into my head.

But we are not their yet. Intelligent mobile messaging and smart messaging all falls under the discussions we are seeing now about bots. Bots or chatbots really just mean automatic processing. And many bots right now are just simple automation that can help customers complete desired self-service tasks.

So don’t be misled in thinking that bots can answer anything and everything. But I think we are headed in that direction. For now, we are not able to freely automate unstructured conversations or chats in a way that can be of great value for customers (or companies).

The reality is the highest performing and most effective bots are purpose-built to solve very specific problems for customers. They are very structured yet have flexibility in that structure that is customer experience minded.

Nonetheless, even in their current iteration, bots can add a lot of value to organizations trying to remove mundane and lower-level intelligence tasks away from agents.

At Call Center Week Winter there was a lot of discussion about bots. And look for this to continue for the next several years.

Watch Scott Pawloski of Pypestream talk Intelligent Mobile Messaging at Call Center Week Winter with Jim Rembach Click to Tweet

What Pypestream Does

Pypestream is a well-funded early-stage company with a proprietary enterprise mobile messaging solution for businesses that leverages Intelligent Automation and chatbots. The company was founded by Richard Smullen in April 2015 after a frustrating experience with an airline’s customer service department.

Since then, Pypestream has grown rapidly and evolved into a fully-fledged technology company that provides enterprise businesses with custom-built, secure and flexible messaging solutions. Source: https://www.pypestream.com/about/

Agent interactions are getting more complex

A Five9/ICMI study found that 73% of contact centers have cited a noticeable increase in the complexity of customer-agent interactions. The study findings suggest that this is due to a combination of transactions taking place across numerous and various channels.

It also shares that there is a shift to more people choosing self-service methods. Hence, picking up the phone becomes a last resort. So by shear nature of the customer preference and journey, the interactions that do end up in the call center are more complex.

This cause and effect is creating a significant shift for executives in their contact center operations. They must continue to increase their self-service options and quality and they must improve the quality and skills of their contact center agents.

Bots are driving human quality

I wonder if self-serve technology providers ever thought about the need for human quality being an outcome of building better self-service technologies. But it is a realistic outcome.

Self-service solutions get better – more complex inquiries make it to agents – agents need higher skills sets in order to support the complex requests.

Greater retention efforts

Who ever thought that bots would cause a greater focus on employee engagement and retention. But that is the natural progression of better self-service.

Let’s finish the thought chain:

Self-service solutions get better – more complex inquiries make it to agents – agents need higher skills sets in order to support the complex requests – organizations need to retain those agents.

So as you are looking at improving your self-service are you also looking at your coaching, retention and engagement strategy? That sure seems like it needs to be part of the same discussion. Don’t wait until its too late.

Join me on the Fast Leader Show Podcast

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Jim Rembach

www.influencetoaction.com

Steve Kraus Talks Real-time Emotional Intelligence

by Jim Rembach

People skills, soft skills, and empathy all fall into the scientific study of Emotional Intelligence. As a certified Emotional Intelligence practitioner when Steve Kraus of Cogito was talking about supporting agents in real-time with their speaking behavior to build better rapport with customers I was thrilled.

This is the first time I have seen an artificial intelligence solution be used as a proactive tool to analyze non-verbal behaviors and provide real-time feedback to agents to augment their emotional intelligence and help them to communicate in a more productive manner.

Needless to say, Cogito was the only solution in expo hall at Call Center Week Winter offering such a tool. But this is a space that I expect will see more competition in the near future.

Watch Steve Kraus of Cogito talk real-time Emotional Intelligence at Call Center Week Winter with Jim Rembach Click to Tweet

What Cogito Does

Cogito Corporation enhances the emotional intelligence of phone professionals through behavioral change software. By applying validated behavioral science through artificial intelligence and machine learning, Cogito’s in-call guidance helps the world’s most successful enterprises improve sales results, deliver amazing customer experiences and enhance quality of care. Source: http://www.cogitocorp.com/

Emotional Intelligence is the New Battleground

Customer experience is all about emotion. Both positive and negative emotions will be shared and remembered and influence our subconscious mind. Design the customer experience using emotions and you’ll be way ahead of your competition.

The use of Emotional Intelligence in customer experience design is rapidly increasing in number as organizations approach the differentiation through experience era. “In just a few years 89% of businesses will compete mainly on customer experience.” -Gartner

Organizations can no longer use postmortem information to make adjustments to the customer experience and expect to win. They have to make adjustments in real-time and work to evoke the desired customer outcome using positive emotion.

In an article titled The Essence of Emotional Intelligence for Customer Experience by Kate Nasser she shares that in product design, web site usage, mobile access, and customer service interaction, customers are consciously and subconsciously deciding if it’s positive for them. Emotional intelligence about their needs and views feeds business success.

Emotional Connections Generate Revenue

Having a human connection with customers is your goal. Why? When cosmetics giant L’Oreal wanted to make a dramatic shift in their sales force, they decided to recruit and higher agents that had exceptionally high emotional intelligence levels. The resulting increase in profits exceeded 2.5 million dollars.

Creating an emotional connection with a customer drives higher customer experience ratings. “Some of the industry leaders include JetBlue in the airline industry, USAA in financial services, Apple in PC manufacturers and Lexus in automotive. A ‘happy customer’ does not correlate with brand loyalty. The top three drivers for loyalty are making customers feel valued, appreciated and confident.” Forbes, July 2016.

Customers feeling valued, appreciated, and confident (or trust in you) is a result of effectively applying emotional intelligence. And in contact centers the opportunity to leverage emotional intelligence in 50 to 150 customer interactions per day represents an opportunity for millions in annual revenue gains.

Use your IQ and engage your EQ

This might not be mainstream to our industry – but think about the opportunity.

You don’t want to be Blockbuster and miss the opportunity to transform into Netflix. You don’t want to be that cab company that didn’t make their own Uber App. You don’t want to be that company that failed to leverage the power of emotional intelligence and lost to your competition.

The power of emotional intelligence is proven. There are hundreds of case studies reporting positive results. Now the next evolution of EQ is here. We now have technology that can help to effectively foster emotional intelligence and deliver it at scale.

Join me on the Fast Leader Show Podcast

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Jim Rembach

www.influencetoaction.com

Brian LaRoche Talks Customer Engagement Analytics

by Jim Rembach

During my interview with Brian LaRoche from CallMiner he didn’t even mention ‘Customer Engagement Analytics’. Like a true former call center manager like me, he tried to speak to you in real-world scenarios and situations. And he was great at it.

I loved talking with Brian. Both on and off camera. He is a very engaging person and gave me a perception of the CallMiner brand that I had never experienced. Kudos Brian! I’m a fan.

There’s something that’s really special about having former call center managers being able to understand you and help you find the right solutions. If you are like me, you love to have that connection and common bond.

Brian was my first expo hall interview at Call Center Week Winter. I met up with Brian after I interviewed Debbi Fields of Mrs. Fields Cookies, who was the opening keynote for the event.

I loved her message. She was not what I expected. I actually broadcast her interview on Facebook Live and you can watch a recording of it here.

Watch Brian LaRoche of CallMiner talk contact center Customer Engagement Analytics at Call Center Week Winter with Jim Rembach Click to Tweet

What CallMiner Does

CallMiner helps businesses and organizations improve contact center performance and gather key business intelligence by automating their ability to listen to every customer interaction. CallMiner’s market leading cloud-based voice of the customer analytics platform automatically analyzes contacts across all communication channels: calls, chats, emails, SMS, surveys and social. Source: http://callminer.com/

You must ‘see’ to navigate the customer journey

In today’s multi-channel digital landscape, the question isn’t just, “Which channels are my customers using?” but, “How many different channels are customer using and how do they move around?”

You must be able to see where they were, where they went and how they got there. You must go beyond knowing what they did and for how long. Having visibility into what, where and how helps you to build deeper relationships with them and understand the why.

In an article titled Mapping the Multi-Channel Customer Journey by Kevin Novak he shares that a customer can research your products online, compare them to others, talk to their friends and family, go into a physical store, talk to your staff, decide to purchase that product then go home and contact customer service.

All of those new ways to interact can be described as multi-channel where a “channel” can represents the telephone call center, the online support center, the website, the mobile site or app, the physical store.

Previously, each of those channels were possibly used by silos of customers and managed by a silo within the company or organization. Today one customer uses all of those different channels to interact with your business or organization.

Customers presume a bad experience

He also shares that a recent Harris Interactive study shows that 63 percent of consumers who encounter a bad mobile experience from an organization also believe that organization will not meet their expectations across all channels beyond mobile such as Web and bricks and mortar.

Having data visibility into your customers’ interaction behavior can enable you to improve the experience with every channel so customers do not lose hope of their expectations not being met.

Novak states that acting or reacting to the single channel performance, without consideration of all of the channels, is only giving you a small amount of information on your customers or members interactions with you.

Without data on the all the channels in the customer journey you’ll fall into the trap of believing you know what the customer wants or sees.

Don’t be blinded

Today’s markets and environments are moving very rapidly. The proliferation of digital and technology has enabled a high risk for many organizations. The risk of not being able to see and measure how customers behave and interact with your various channels. If you’re blind, you may not have the time to recover before your competitors win out.

But does CallMiner have what you need? That is where you need to see.

Join me on the Fast Leader Show Podcast

The Fast Leader Show is a docuedutainment (don’t look it up I made it up) podcast released each Wednesday and hosted by Jim Rembach. Each week, Jim introduces you to real folks (from the call center industry and beyond) with real stories of how they were able to get over the hump and lead themselves or others better…faster. You’ll learn how to become a better leader (faster) through their stories by improving your employee and customer engagement through the power of improving your emotional intelligence. Get more human-centric and move onward and upward…faster.

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Jim Rembach