Our customer advocates trust us. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be advocates. They want that trust to continue and we need to do our part of this. Sadly, businesses lose advocates daily. Often, this stems more from neglect than from anything we do. The video below looks at five principles for maintaining trust and keeping the momentum going. This video …
Over the past decade, ICMI has studied, codified and periodically published a summary of the most important principles behind building strong, profitable customer relationships. Lately, I’ve been asked, are these principles less important? Have evolving customer expectations, social communities, new channels and other developments changed the fundamentals? Not at all! These 12 principles are as important as ever, in large …
Adherence to schedule is an important performance objective for agents. It is within their control (when implemented appropriately) and measures if agents are available to handle contacts as scheduled. However, to ensure your approach is supporting the culture you want to establish, consider these suggestions for getting the best results: 1. Educate each person on how much impact he or …
The impact of employee engagement is incredible. In fact, engaged employees are four times more likely than non-engaged employees to go beyond what’s expected of them according to the Temkin Group, a US firm focused on customer experience. Other studies show that quality improves, customer loyalty goes up, and employee turnover goes down. Learn more about the power of employee …
The amount of intelligence gathered through customer service is significant, in any industry. There’s far more value to handling customer contacts than improving the satisfaction and loyalty of customers, as vitally important as that is. So, how do you build the potential of customer interactions to deliver value? Assemble a small cross-functional team to explore how well your organization uses …
Sam Del Rowe recently wrote an article for www.destinationcrm.com titled “The Top Customer Service Trends: Building Better Service Beyond Voice.” In the article, Mike de la Cruz of Directly and I provide insight into artificial intelligence (AI), omnichannel strategies, and agent involvement in the future. If these are issues on your mind for the future of your customer service center, …
Is there a secret to ensuring that your customer service strategy is effective? Are there common denominators among organizations getting the best results? I’ve observed four key factors that you can use to take inventory and get a good sense of how well your strategy is performing. These four factors are explained in the video below, “Gauge the Effectiveness of …
Are you working through difficult discussions related to resources and budget? Just remember, contact centers must handle most customer-related work as it happens, so resource mismatches quickly result in big problems. It’s essential that those making decisions have a basic understanding of staff tradeoffs in a contact center (read: real time) environment. The following table is an example of how …
