Tag: Client Reviews

Desktop Support

Field Techs are Driving the Customer Experience

November 7, 2017

“Customer experience” is in vogue again. Everywhere you look, there are articles and posts covering how companies can ramp up customer experience to generate more revenue.

And, to be fair, customer experience should always be in focus. As the economy swings back into hyperdrive, consumers are being bombarded with new and exciting offers – the kind that can get otherwise loyal customers to jump ship.

Retaining customers makes sound financial sense – acquiring a new one is five times more expensive than wowing an existing customer away from the noisy competitors and their splashy ads.

Improving the customer experience is a great way to retain your best customers.

Hands down, the best way to retain your customers is by finding ways to make their experience with your products and services hassle-free and completely satisfying. In the world of technology, customers always remember when things go wrong.

Customer disappointments can become a customer experience highlight reel.

Everyone understands that technology likes to act up from time-to-time. How many times has your laptop suddenly run out of charge right before an important presentation, or a 6-hour flight?

For telecoms, the stakes are even higher. Right before a huge pay-per-view fight, the node goes down – and everyone on the block is left without cable. Or a misguided neighbor decides to try their luck at edging their lawn – right next to where the buried cable lines are.

The way to win, in these moments, is to deliver fast, competent help. From the moment your customer service center gets the call, there’s a timer running. Your customer will judge you based on how quickly you respond. And an appointment sometime between next week and next month isn’t going to cut it.

New platforms can provide on-demand, highly-skilled help

Companies can leverage technology to deliver better experiences. For instance, FieldEngineer is one platform that tech companies are using to help shorten the gap between problem and solution. By allowing companies to access on-demand talent, with the skills and experience necessary to complete technical assignments, telecoms and other tech players are dramatically improving customer experience, without the overhead of a traditional (old school) global support team.

The ability to choose assignments dramatically improves the employee experience as well. And, it turns out, happy team members help to deliver an even better customer experience. It’s service with a smile for the digital age.

Freelancing Field Techs solve more than a budget challenge.

There’s a real shortage in the industry. Fifty-five percent of telecoms report that they are struggling to fill open positions. This means that customer service is directly impacted, as in-house tech teams are stretched to the breaking point.

As large firms continue to engage contract firms to help solve customer-facing issues, there are still times when the sheer need of customers facing service outages is overwhelming. Add into this a labor shortage and a disconnected customer service process, and you have a perfect storm for customer disappoints.

It’s exciting to see the gig economy expand into the tech sector. Yes, technology has always supported the gig economy – if you think Uber is a cab company, guess again. But, it’s only in recent years that the freelance marketplace is expanding into more skilled arenas – the kinds of jobs that keep the technology running and evolving.

Having platforms find ways to provide quality service contracts, on-demand talent that’s available locally on a nationwide basis, and who are fully connected to the rest of the business deserves some serious applause. For telecoms, it means a better customer experience and a real opportunity to hold the competitors at bay.

 

Source: Salesforce

Average Handle Time

Can you reduce AHT without damaging customer satisfaction?

June 22, 2017

It is obvious that metrics have an important role in the growth of any call center. Perhaps none more so, regardless of the communication media, than the Average Handle Time (AHT), which is importantly a management tool to assess how quickly employees are serving the customers.

This metric measures the average length of time it takes the call center agent to solve the customer’s problem, and factors in the complete duration of the interaction, including total talk time, hold time and all of the follow-ups or admin tasks related to the call. The formula can be derived as:

AHT formula

While AHT goals vary between businesses and departments, truly understanding what Average Handle Time is and how to utilize this metric for specific organizational needs is critical for optimizing its results, including improving the customer service experience and providing long-term profitable growth.

Benefits of Measuring Average Handle Time

Through establishing clear-cut benchmarks for current productivity levels, companies can analyze AHT metrics and identify actionable steps for both immediate improvement and future growth. The most apparent benefit a call center will experience when measuring AHT is an increase in agent productivity. Quite simply, when the call center agents know they are being measured for efficiency, they naturally are more motivated to handle more customers. More customers being handled means less frustrated customers waiting in the queue. On the other hand, those agents with an AHT which is still higher than the established benchmark enables managers to easily identify agents not helping callers as quickly as they should. As a result, knowing the average amount of time it takes for employees to complete tasks helps companies determine staffing needs. If numerous employees are taking longer than anticipated, that might mean that many other customers are left waiting, and consequently, more staff members are needed to help them, or the more AHT is lowered, the less staff may be needed.

Limitations of Relying on Average Handle Time

It’s important to realize, however, that while AHT and the emphasis on speed is an important and necessary call center metric, a lower AHT isn’t always an indication of success. This is because AHT doesn’t distinguish simple cases from more involved, in-depth ones. While agents handling a large volume of basic customer issues may be spending an average of 5 minutes per call, on the other hand, other agents within companies or departments handling more difficult or involved cases would likely assume higher AHTs with the goal of connecting more with customers and offering a more personalized experience. Therefore, it’s important not to solely rely on AHT as the end-all be-all metric, and to make sure that you are also monitoring calls for quality. Another problem is that call center agent trying to keep their AHT score down can be very tempted to rush the customer of the conversation, while the customer just ends up confused and having to call back again. This is the reason that companies that depend solely on AHT are often plagued by repeat calls, and customers having to make repeat calls is one of the biggest drivers of customer disloyalty, so while emphasizing AHT may look great in regards to speed of service, it’s very likely that the Customer Satisfaction metric will suffer. Finally, AHT also doesn’t measure customer retention, growth or any other meaningful key performance indicator.

Tips for Reducing AHT without Damaging Customer Satisfaction:

    1. Agent Training: Refining your training program will enable call center agents to help customers more efficiently and better prepare them to more quickly resolve even the most challenging cases.
    2. Call routing: Call routing technology saves time for both customers and agents by quickly forwarding incoming customer cases to the agent who is most qualified to resolve them.
    3. Knowledge Database: Equipping call center agents with all the information they need at their fingertips is crucial for reducing AHT, so that they don’t have to waste valuable time searching for information in separate databases and software programs.

Self-Service:

    Reduce call time by sending customers to the references that already exist online, including articles, guides, and videos. Over time, this also trains people to look for help online first instead of reaching for the phone.
  1. Big Data Analytics: By leveraging big data analytics, brands can identify customer pain and passion points more effectively, while even anticipating what customers will ask for in advance to quickly resolve each customer interaction.

Today, the metrics a call center emphasizes have an effect on the customer experience that can’t be ignored. While AHT remains a valuable efficiency metric for any call center, only by balancing it with other customer satisfaction metrics will enable your business to keep customer satisfaction and brand loyalty high, while also enabling your call center to be a profitable, high-performing business entity!

In an upcoming blog article, we will investigate other useful metrics that organizations use to assess the performance of a call center.

Source: Jacada

Customer Reviews

The Gift of Negative Customer Feedback

May 9, 2017

Every company loves positive feedback, but the truth is it’s the negative feedback that really drives the company’s long-term success. How so? Just like any real and important relationship, only when customers complain, do companies truly discover, and hopefully solve, customer problems as they arise.

It’s tried, true (and free) data about what goes wrong and what can be improved, about what customers like and dislike, enabling a brand to grow and evolve. However, customers are not always prone to share with a company the experiences they may have had with their products or services. For every customer who bothers to complain, 26 other customers remain silent! And the ones who do share, usually they will complain about social media sites rather than contact the company directly. Therefore, every complaint is really a precious opportunity. As Bill Gates once said, Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. Let’s look at some of the practical benefits:

Fueling Innovation

What drives innovation in your business? Are you truly listening to the wants and needs of your customers and working to improve your product to meet their expectations? These are questions every brand needs to ask themselves, yet today many companies overlook their most engaged, creative and cost effective source of innovation — their customers! These customers who use their products and services. You might have the best expertise in the industry, but professional knowledge will never be more valuable to business performance and innovation than a single customer who uses a product or service and offers real world feedback, especially negative. At the same time, collecting customer feedback is just the first step to ensuring product innovation. It’s what you do with the feedback that truly matters. In fact, a Gartner study shows that 95% of companies collect feedback. However, only 10% make improvements based on this feedback. The bottom line is listening to your customers and acting on their insights is the only way to guarantee you create a product or service that evolves in line with their expectations, solves their problems and fulfills their needs.

Improving the Customer Experience

A happy customer is a retained customer, and since it costs six to seven times more to obtain a new customer than to retain an existing one, it’s worthwhile to keep your customers happy. That’s why constantly keeping a finger on the pulse of customer feedback is critical to providing the best customer experience at every touch point. And while positive feedback can be a helpful indication of what the company is already doing well, understanding why a customer is angry is even better. Negative feedback in a customer service setting can help a company reveal flaws in the product development and the customer service process. If product marketing is making promises the product is not fulfilling, this too will often emerge in the feedback. At the same time, in many cases, an unhappy customer who experienced a problem with a product or service, but it was quickly addressed and fixed, often shows more loyalty to a brand than a customer who has never been disappointed with that same product or service. In fact, studies show if a brand resolves a complaint in the customer’s favor, they will return to do business again 70% of the time, while up to 95% of first-time customers will give you a second chance if you handle their complaint in a timely manner. In the end, your customers make or break your business, so use the insight from customer feedback to create a consistent customer experience that will keep them coming back for more.

Marketing Research Intelligence

When businesses and organizations make critical decisions that determine business strategy and planning, it would be incorrect to assume that only intensive, elaborate and expensive market research can provide the necessary information that organizational leaders need in order to make those strategic decisions. As customer feedback is the ultimate source of tangible data and insight into how customers really feel about the product or service businesses deliver, this feedback is also critical to guiding strategic business planning and marketing decisions. For example, before investing time and money in new products or services, it makes good business sense to offer them first to your customer base for their feedback. Without first tapping into the perspective of their customers, companies are missing out on a critical source of data that can help determine the sustainability of a brand’s long-term success.

The bottom line is that brands that embrace and utilize their customer feedback across all channels are the ones that will develop a product or service that customers want to buy, and an experience that exceeds their expectations, enabling growth and success, now and in the future.

Credit & Source: Jacada