By Mila D'Antonio, Principal Analyst, Customer Engagement, Omdia (formerly Ovum), see the original here

A survey by Harris Interactive found that a quarter of U.S. adults don’t feel loyalty toward any type of brand. And, 56% of those surveyed said they’d be at least somewhat likely to switch brands based on new customer service options.

Get your Agent’s Perspective

Get your Customer’s Perspective 

By: Laura Krajewski, Sharpen, see the original here

Utilizing performance management software can be a major competitive advantage for your call center. Here’s five reasons why:

1. Your call center will save time, effort and money.

In the instantaneous, Instagram world we live in, manual spreadsheets, canned reports and pivot tables are slowing businesses down. Spreadsheet capabilities are limited and undynamic. The modern solution to this is performance management software that can:

• Automate and centralize all your raw data from multiple sources
• Produce all reports on the same platform in customizable formats
• Provide user-friendly dashboards that highlight the data, modules and metrics you want to see

   

2. Your agent engagement will increase, and your turnover will decrease.

Turnover can be expensive. According to Gallup 2019, the cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary. In order to reduce turnover, it’s important to keep your employees engaged and satisfied. Performance management software can help your agents remain satisfied with:

• Individualized performance tracking and feedback
• Motivational wallboards that display rankings, achievements and company messages
• Incentivized, custom rewards that align with the KPIs and metrics most important to the organization
• Gamification that motivates agents to improve behavior with challenges and awards

   

3. Your operational efficiency will improve.

Think of last time you were backed-up in a traffic jam. It probably put you in a bad mood because it caused a delay in your day. When there is a delay or lag in your reports, that same grumpiness ensues – but in the form of operational inefficiency! Without real-time performance visibility, supervisors can’t solve problems efficiently and agents become unmotivated. Effective performance management software should:

• Allow access to real-time and historical data
• Show agents how they match up against their peers in real-time
• Offer schedule-based report subscriptions and metric monitoring alerts that can be utilized to identify an issue in real-time and alert the necessary parties to take corrective action

   

4. You’ll be able to provide direct solutions to data-driven concerns.

Managing a consistent, effective coaching strategy in a call center can be overwhelming. That’s why a lot of companies are coupling performance management with quality management to harness the power of coaching by:

• Automatically generating coaching sessions triggered by performance thresholds
• Filling a supervisor’s task list with coaching sessions they need to perform based on business rules and metric triggers
• Documenting all coaching sessions, measuring progress and noting any outliers

  Learn more about how coaching can be the best medicine for the contact center here.

5. You’ll have enterprise-wide visibility.

If you want to run a robust contact center, every employee needs to have access to data and information relevant to their work. Performance management software should create enterprise-wide visibility by offering:

• Dashboard sharing and subscriptions
• Role-based dashboards from agent to executive level
• Metrics generated for all organizational levels — from agent, team, or floor to site and company-wide levels
• Multi-slide wallboards broadcasted across the call centers

If you follow these 5 steps, you’ll be on your way to having an engaged, productive workforce. 

by Lauren Comer, NICE InContact, see the original here

Business leaders understand that having happy and loyal advocates is the result of a thriving customer experience practice. Looking from the outside-in, how do you cultivate an employee experience that creates happy, productive and loyal team members? That’s the $11 billion question.

Over the last several years, there’s one thing many executives and CEOs will tell you: Employees matter and there’s an indisputable link between a company’s employee experience and the experience they deliver to their customers. Just like the focus on customer experience, employee experience has become a buzzworthy cause. But behind the buzz, there are practical applications to help move the experience needle for your employees and your customers. And, ultimately, this helps your bottom line. Like developing a customer experience practice, your employee experience practice isn’t a siloed function of one department. Rather, it’s shouldered by the entire organization.

Your best customer experience starts with your employees. Here are three elements that, when executed properly, have a positive impact on the experiences your customers have with your brand.

Hire Right: Alignment

This seems like a no-brainer. But often, we get caught up in the keywords and focus too hard on certain task competencies for a role. That often leads to overlooking hiring for the right behaviors. All things being equal, it’s expected for your potential new employee to have the job competencies. But they also must demonstrate the right behaviors to complement your company’s customer-centric culture.

It’s important for your employees to be aligned with your brand’s mission and core corporate values. They demonstrate that alignment in how they behave and how they show up. If being customer-centric is a core corporate value, define what that looks like. Being able to connect the dots of an employee’s behavior and daily work to the outcome will inspire them to strive for higher levels of performance.

Train Right: Enablement

Today’s customer needs and demands are constantly changing and evolving. Employees must be ready with the skills and training to meet and exceed those customer expectations. How are you able to deliver the right help to a customer at the right time? Not only is it about the technology being able to detect, alert, and route; it’s about ensuring your employees are equipped with the opportunity and access to continually develop their talents. Ensure your learning and development initiatives are hyper-focused and personalized – both in content and delivery.

Lead Right: Empowerment

A Gallup research on workforce engagement found that companies must have a 4-to-1 ratio of engaged employees to disengaged employees to counteract the negative impact from the disengaged group. A core factor to engaged employees is having leaders who empower them. Leadership that empowers their employees recognizes them for achievements and let’s each team member know they have their back.

As humans, we strive to do the right thing. When leadership gives the power to an employee to do that for their customers, they move the needle on not only an employee’s satisfaction but also on the customer’s experience.

Be Human In Design

Just like your customer experience practice needs to be designed, so does your employee experience. As you map your customer’s journey, overlay it with your employee’s journey. You’ll most likely find that there are critical moments of overlap. For example, a customer’s difficulty in doing business with your company can be correlated to employees being stuck in an internal operational process that’s delaying their ability to deliver a service to the customer. At the end of the day, regardless of technology, we work together with humans. Make sure that both your customer experience and employee experience practices keep the human at the center of everything you do.

Omnichannel is all about keeping the interaction and content flowing through different channels. Web, phone and social interactions are not siloed anymore. They are linked in the same way the pages of a book are put together to tell a story. In that same way, omnichannel connects user applications to create customer dialogues and experiences that flow naturally.

Because of the almighty integration, nothing is lost and consumers can pick up from where they left off. Besides saving the customer’s time, brands will also convey the feeling that every interaction matters and every customer’s problems and queries are acknowledged and kept on file for future reference.

This is generally true for brands which also have physical locations. Even as our customers leave the virtual space for face-to-face interactions, it is important to feel that, however they choose to interact with their chosen brand, they receive a personalized experience. If you purchased that nice sweater online, but you decide to return it in store, you would expect in-store staff to be able to access online channels and replace, exchange or even make recommendations.

As consumers, we all like that Starbucks cup of coffee with our name on it, or are more prone to open that email with our name in the subject line. That’s because we see ourselves as unique individuals with distinct needs. And we expect that same treatment from the brands we choose. Omnichannel equips organizations with the right tools to offer customers personalized experiences and, more importantly, reinforces their individuality.

It takes two to tango: brands and customers. As soon as the customers choose your brand, you know you have to wow them to retain them. Everything from the systems and technology you use, to the agents who pick up the phone, all must be level pro. And providing an omnichannel experience - beyond offering customers all of the above - helps your workforce to be more effective, efficient and engaged. It’s almost like going to an exam and being prepared. You feel confident and you know you’ll do well. It’s exactly the same for your employees. No matter if they are online or offline, being equipped with the right tools that deliver information about the customer in a seamless way makes the process enjoyable for everyone involved.

By: Andra Marin, Marketing Programs Manager - EMEA, Five9. See the article here