Posts by Carolyn Blunt

When developing a strategy to improve omni-channel customer service, it’s helpful to have a few focus points that are aligned with what is most important to customers. It is one way to keep things simple and ensure that whatever channels you choose to use, you retain a customer centric approach. Recent surveys have highlighted focus points on which customers scored their experience and satisfaction or dissatisfaction. These were: Level of personalization; reliability, knowledge of customer service agents, timely response and query resolution, and how easy the customer service channel was to use. With these focus points in mind, let’s look at how at how they can be applied for calls, social media, live chat and email customer service:

Contact centre life should be enjoyable! If your front line agents aren’t engaged with their role and employer then this negatively impacts their performance. Love it or hate it, the phrase ‘Happy People Sell!’ is absolutely true. Happy people also give better customer service.

If your team leaders or quality coaches spend hours identifying calls from which to coach, then good speech analytics will save hours and hours of time and improve results. With the average call centre generating in excess of 200 hours of talk time per day it is often almost impossible for more than 1% of that to be manually listened to, in detail, per day.

Do you ever wish you could wave a magic wand and solve the challenges you face in your contact centre? If you had unlimited budget these would be easy to fix. You could simply replace those old legacy systems, get better insight data and pay your front line staff more. This would enable you to attract and retain the very best talent and invest in the training and development of your people.

Getting customer service right every time – now that’s customer obsession for you. Striving for perfection, anticipating what the customer wants, giving them more than they expect, it’s a goal that most of us strive to achieve. Sometimes we get it right, but more often than not things go wrong. We simply can’t be perfect all the time, we are human after all. Considering this, is customer obsession something we should be implementing in our organization? Are there times when it can do more harm than good, regardless of it being a positive thing to aspire to?