Anand Subramaniam
Knowledge Management: The Cure for Contact Center Agent Training Ills in the Variant-Era
According to Training Magazine, US companies spent $82.5 Billion in 2020 alone for employee training. Training is clearly not an inexpensive endeavor. In fact, it costs almost $16,900 to train a new call center agent in the pharmaceutical industry over a 12-month period, according...
7 Customer Service Mistakes Companies Should Avoid Making in 2021
2020 was a tumultuous year but it did bring customer service back to the forefront of the business planning agenda for 2021. As you plan and prioritize your initiatives, it is important to avoid mistakes. Here are some common but critical ones. 1. Foot off…
The New Digital Customer Engagement for the New (Ab)normal
Why more with digital now COVID-19, aka Coronavirus, has literally and figuratively changed the meaning of the tech marketing cliché “digital or death”. Consumers are still very wary of exposure to the virus and want to get more things done digitally. While this had always...
Best Practices in Proactive Customer Service and Engagement
Proactive customer service is the act of providing contextual customer service at the right time, right place, and the right way, even before the customer asks for it. It can be leveraged in specific customer issues and across customer life stages. Here are five...
Findings from new research: Trends, hurdles, and best practices in customer service messaging
Findings of consumer survey Driven by millennials and Gen Z consumers, messaging is fast becoming a popular channel for B2C customer service. We commissioned YouGov, a leading market research agency, to survey US and UK consumers to learn what consumers like and not like about...
Customer Service Messaging: From Mess to Mastery
The stats are staggering—1.3 billion users on Facebook Messenger, which continues to add 100M users every 5-6 months. According to CTIA, 1.5 trillion text messages were sent in 2017 alone. By 2020, ~50 million consumers will opt in to receive business SMS! While consumer messaging...
CX Excellence in Growing Mid-Size Companies: Challenges and Path to Success
Mid-sized companies are typically defined as those with 100-999 employees or annual revenue of $10-$25M at the low end to $250M. 70% of such companies think that CX is an important basis to compete on and 69% think that digital is essential to delivering...
Beyond Training: Defeat the “forgetting curve” of contact center agents with in-band knowledge and...
Have you ever heard of the “forgetting curve”? A concept pioneered by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, it refers to the rapid deterioration of human memory over time. This decay is also called “transience”. Ebbinghaus’ research showed that humans retain only 25% of information after...
How to Make Freelance Contact Center Agents Successful
The freelance economy, on-demand economy, gig economy, or whatever you want to call it, continues to grow. According to research by McKinsey, the Freelancers Union, and others, freelancers already account for 25% to 36% of the workforce in the US, and the growth rate...
Customer Service Rage: Myth or Reality?
Have you ever heard of customer service rage? This is what a New York Times article had to say about it—"..you fume. Your face turns red. You shout things into the phone that would appall your mother.” To be accurate, they called it “tech...
Want to Transform Customer Experiences? Staple Yourself to Their Queries!
In 1992, HBR published a seminal business process reengineering paper that urged executives to “staple” themselves to a customer order to identify broken links in the backoffice and the supply chain. The authors argued that an order is essentially a surrogate for the customer,...
Seven steps to digital customer service excellence in 2018
According to Gartner, phone interactions will drop from 41% to 12% over the next five years, as consumers keep going digital. Businesses that excel in digital customer service will clearly have a leg up over the competition in this new world. Here are seven...
How to Clone the Best Agents in Your Contact Center
As routine customer service queries are increasingly handled by self-service systems, requests coming into the contact center are becoming more complex. Moreover, millennials and Gen Z, who account for the majority of contact center agents, tend to switch jobs faster than previous generations, leading...
Want to transform customer service? Question conventional wisdom!
1838. It was the year that the term “conventional wisdom” (CW) was first used in print. Over the decades, CW has prevented or stalled progress in many domains, and customer service is no exception. Here are some common beliefs about customer service that you...
5 Innovative Use-Cases for Customer Service Transformation
Customer experience (CX) innovation is no longer a luxury, with 89% of companies expecting to compete mostly through CX (Source: Gartner). Here are five examples of how you can innovate in customer service, and deliver winning CX. Adios, IVR Music Being put on hold...
Virtual Assistants: 12 Tips to Go From Valet to Wallet
Trick question: Who work 24x7, engage customers and answer questions in a smart and fun way, give website tours, show relevant web pages, and never call in sick? Answer: Virtual assistants (VAs). Also called virtual customer assistants, chatbots, avatars, and concierges, VAs help businesses wow...
Making next-gen contact center agents successful in the digital era
Next-gen defined For the purpose of this article, we are defining “next-gen” as millennials (born ~ between 1980 and 1995) and Generation Z (i.e. those born ~ between 1996 and 2000.) These two are the primary generational groups that are/will shortly be a big part...
Cobrowse for Customer Engagement: What, Why, and How
Prolog Scene 1 Agent: Click on the second item in the menu near the middle of the screen Customer: Which menu? There are two of them near the middle Agent: It is the one that is titled registration Customer: The menu items don’t show up…