Right now, the cloud is all the rage. The technology seems to be popping up all the time in advertisements for both personal and business purposes across all mediums and platforms. All this attention means the cloud is surrounded by quite a bit of hype, which can make it difficult to drill down on exactly what benefits it can offer your business.
Microsoft recently announced that after July 14, 2015 they will no longer issue support or security updates for any version of Windows Server 2003. If you are still running Windows Server 2003 in your datacenter, you need to take steps now to plan and execute a migration strategy to protect your infrastructure.
When it comes to customer service, consumer expectations are higher than ever. Today’s buyers expect consistent excellent service and when their needs are not met they may take their business elsewhere and influence others to do the same. To ensure your representatives aren’t irritating customers with preventable mistakes, your supervisors need tools that can help make call center coaching more efficient and effective. Envision’s Click2Coach software can ensure your agents stop the following common annoyances in their tracks before they began to affect your business negatively:
Customers do not want to hear condescending phrasing such as, “if I were you” or “what you should have done” from contact center agents. With Click2Coach, agents can monitor every aspect of customer interactions and provide training materials right from their desktops, including:
It is much less expensive to retain customers than to onboard new ones. And a loyal customer is worth his or her weight in gold. In fact, while only 12-15 percent of customers are loyal to a single retailer, they represent between 55-70 percent of sales in some verticals, according to the Center for Retail Management, Northwestern University.
“I’m just looking,” is a well-known clue to retail salespeople that they should back off: the customer just wants to browse. But how do your service agents know when to back off during a service call?
Establishing boundaries is key to effective customer interactions, especially where your agents want to upsell and/or cross-sell. But in their quest to make extra sales, sometimes these agents can be overzealous. Remember the extreme example from Comcast just a while back in which the customer service rep refused to let customer Ryan Block cancel his service? The agent’s refusal to comply with the user’s wish was a national embarrassment, on top of almost certainly costing Comcast any chance of ever winning that customer’s business back.
In today’s business environment, in which customer expectations are at an all-time high, companies have become obsessed with improving the customer experience—and for good reason. Research has shown that consumers are willing to spend more money with a company that delivers superior service. Sure, customer service is imperative and has become a competitive differentiator, but are companies becoming so fixated on their customers that they’re forgetting about their most important asset—their employees?
Gone are the days when a customer’s only option for reaching a company’s customer service department was to pick up the phone and dial an 800 number. Thanks to the Internet, consumers now have a breadth of communications channels—such as email, live chat, SMS and social media—from which to choose.
No two customers are the same; different people prefer different methods of support. According to a survey of 8,000 consumers conducted by Ovum, 52 percent of consumers use three or four communication channels when engaging customer service. While 56 percent of participants still favor traditional phone calls with agents, 44 percent prefer non-voice channels—such as email and social media—as their first choice for customer service.
By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator with approximately 80% of executives expecting contact centers to play a key role in defining it.
But, while the majority of companies say they deliver "superior" customer service, only 8% of customers agree. So, where is the disconnect, and how can contact centers bridge the gap?
Join us for this webinar where we'll uncover the key challenges preventing contact centers from meeting customer satisfaction expectations and 6 ways to address them including:
Attracting new customers and retaining existing ones are arguably two of the most important aspects of business; however, they are also the most challenging. In fact, 21 percent of U.S. small business owners say that customer acquisition is the most difficult hurdle they face, according to the Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index.
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