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IVR, Agents & Business Rules = Customer Satisfaction
During internal meetings last week, we got side-tracked on the subject of “the customer satisfaction silver bullet.” As we all know, there is no such silver bullet. A lot of folks talk like they have the only answer. But at the end of the day, it takes a great deal of coordination, information and determination to manage and improve the technology, people and processes that influence customer satisfaction. Read More...
What’s on Your Roadmap this Week?
Just for fun, I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the exciting trends we’re seeing in the industry. If you work for a company that owns, supports, services or sells to contact centers, you no doubt have a similar list of your own. You’ve probably got a roadmap that identifies the trends appropriate to your market and how you can best leverage and evolve your product or service to meet tomorrow’s customer requirements. Read More...
Positive customer experiences
One of the things that’s really cool about working for IQ Services is the customer experience we get.
Because we test systems remotely – from the outside in, just like your customers use them – we very rarely go on-site. Not that we haven’t. But the vast majority of the time we just don’t do it because we don’t have to. The upside to this methodology is our customers don’t have to do anything to their systems for us to be able to test or monitor. They don’t have to get us security credentials to be onsite. And because travel & shipping aren’t required, it’s all very cost-effective. Read More...
Poll Results & Filling the Gap between Internal Metrics & Customer Experience
Last week I had the opportunity to present a webinar called “Internal Monitoring Isn’t Enough.” It was an opportunity for me to educate attendees about a critical gap many companies haven’t bridged between internal performance stats and the true picture of how their contact center and communications solutions are performing – in other words, the customer experience. The simple method (or in our case, the cost-effective service) we discussed for filling this gap is Remote Availability & Performance Monitoring (RAPM)*. As you all know, polls in webinars are good, so we included several in our webinar to get a sense of the make-up and experiences of our audience. Not surprisingly, more than 60% of the attendees identified themselves as IT or service providers. Read More...
Monitoring! Monitoring! Monitoring!
Whenever we start talking about our remote availability and performance monitoring services (HeartBeat™), like I did just a few weeks ago during a monitoring webinar, there is invariably a little confusion at the outset about the differences between remote availability and performance monitoring, call recording/agent quality monitoring, and voice quality monitoring. So I thought it might be helpful and interesting to define these different monitoring methods in a blog post. And I promise to try to do it without talking like an engineer (too much). So here goes… Read More...
You’re Taking It Out of Context
Living with a writer for the last 36 years, one of my favorite books has become “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”
The cover of the book shows two pandas, the vegetarian whiting out the comma, and the NRA member walking to the right brandishing a handgun.
The point is, of course, that punctuation matters. Why? Because punctuation establishes a context for words and thereby turns them into a thought & gives them meaning. Of course it’s not just about punctuation – content has to be coherent for there to be identifiable meaning – but context certainly matters. Read More...
You Are Here
Last week, we were talking with a few people from a well-known research institute. We were just introducing ourselves and one of the women started talking about quality and service assurance issues for the contact center. She talked about the value of bottoms up and top down metrics for the contact center. But she also talked about a lingering gap that still remains when it comes to the ability to associate this plethora of great information with what is really happening to customers at a given moment. How do you effectively and simply put all that info into context? There are so many cures out there like speech analytics and surveys. And yet the cures sometimes come with more obstacles to overcome like: high costs, information overload, disassociation from actual transactions, lack of real time data and the possibility that the cure could itself impact the customer experience (e.g., a survey). Read More...
HeartBeat™ by the numbers
I was fortunate enough to have an idea for a webinar accepted by the Contact Center Performance Forum (CCPF) a couple of months ago & the event came off without a hitch on August 6th. The topic was “Great Customer Experiences Start with Consistently High Performing Technology,” the expected audience call center managers – the people managers, not the IT wonks. I’m used to talking more about the performance of the machines in the contact center than the impact on the agents, but the hook for this webinar was you’re not going to have even half a chance at a positive experience if the technology required to handle & deliver the calls to agents falls down on the job. When callers finally do get through they’ve already been preconditioned with a lousy experience, and who will they take it out on? The CSRs of course! The moderator worked me over a bit and kept saying “Mike, you’ve got to make this real for people. Give us some real numbers. And don’t forget, agents are people too!” Read More...
The Unexpected Benefits of Contact Center Load Testing Setup
Launching a new contact center? Preparing to load test it to make sure it works? It isn’t just about throwing 100 or 1,000 or even 10,000 calls at a solution to see what happens. That’s taking the “let’s see if this breaks it!” approach, and like I’ve mentioned before, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Many of our customers have been surprised to find that preparing for “the dreaded load testing event” can actually help everyone – employees and vendors alike – work more effectively as a team. Everyone benefits (including end-user customers) when you approach testing as a team effort instead of a series of isolated exercises to generate reports, which can be used to beat up vendors & colleagues later. Read More...
The hidden value of customer service – a project perspective.
We’d like to think that every week is Customer Service Week for our company. But it is great to have that special annual reminder to take time to focus and recognize customers, employees and partners alike.
In fact, it got me to thinking about the roots of our company’s customer-centric approach to the market (again). After over 40 years of working with customers -- a large chunk as a manager of operations and project implementation -- one of the most important lessons learned was how critical our vendors were to helping manage technical, schedule, and financial risk. Completing projects on time and within budget is challenging work. The challenge is increased when projects involve the integration of multiple vendor products and activities. Read More...
Being a Small Business: Part 3
A couple of weeks ago, Gregg Williams kicked off a blog series about “Being a Small Business.” He wrote about a question that many small businesses hear from their prospects.
Why should I do business with a small business?”
Gregg talked about some of the advantages of working with small businesses and posed the very interesting and amusing question “Given all the great stuff small businesses can do, why would you want to do business with one of those bigger guys?” Read More...
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