Coaching is so much more than sitting in a room and discussing skills with our agents. If a manager looks at coaching as a boring checklist item to be completed weekly or monthly, the agent will approach it the same way. Your view of coaching affects you, your customers and each member of your team. [...]
Even when our agents are coached and trained to provide the best customer experience, those best efforts can be in vain if our processes aren’t making our customers happy. It may make perfect sense as you read those words, but how many times have we made excuses about a company process being necessary for some [...]
The evolution of technology has transformed the way consumers interact with brands. According to the Retailing 2020 report, the demand for an omnichannel customer experience will be amplified by the need for nearly perfect execution by 2020. And for call centers, the hub of customer experience management, the pressure is on to get the omnichannel [...]
We know that coaching offers many benefits for our experienced agents so we design coaching programs for on-going employee development success. However, we may not have equally effective plans in place for introducing and rolling out coaching with our newly hired agents. The first few weeks on the job can be major turnover time if [...]
Loaning out your employees to the rest of the business gives them fresh perspectives on career paths and spreads your knowledge to the rest of the organization – but it also brings knowledge back. I once led customer experience for a division of a Fortune 25 company. Knowing that the call center was where the [...]
One of the reasons our business stays open is because someone purchases our services or products and will continue to do so based on having a successful series of interactions with us from purchase through delivery and later support if needed. A simple enough way to describe the importance of customer touch points for our [...]
Your people make the difference. Of course you know that. It's probably in posters all throughout your call centers, your break rooms, everywhere. And you believe it. Which is why you invest money and time in them. You have online training they can take to improve their knowledge. You regularly pull them off the phones [...]
There are many tech support agents who are extremely successful at creating a great customer experience over the phone. They are patient, ask good questions, listen well and help find the best solutions for their callers. Soft skills seem to come natural to some of these support phone pros. Others who need to learn the [...]
The idea of employee engagement receives a lot of lip service. Employees who are engaged will deliver better experiences to your customers, leading to increased retention, improved referral rates, and more revenue overall. Hurrah! But what happens when your organization is structured to actively disengage your employees? Most leaders don’t even know this is happening. [...]
We read a lot of articles about training, coaching and motivating our center agents, supervisors and leaders. One area of our center doesn’t seem to receive as much attention: our WFM (workforce management) employees. Every member of our team has both direct and indirect effect on the customer experience every day. Our WFM team members [...]
