Jeremy Watkin: Building a CX-focused Contact Center
5 Lessons Learned While Attempting to Boost Contact Center Productivity
I’ve come to the realization recently after seeing several demos of various CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) platforms that there’s a flaw in the whole selling process. And I don’t think it’s the fault of the fine sales folks or even the software...
3 Practical Ways Your Customer Support Team Can and Should Listen to Customers
I was recently thinking about certain practices we talk about in the world of customer experience. I can’t help but think that we’re sometimes a bit careless about how we speak of them as if we can start doing them with the flip of...
6 Questions to Assess Your Contact Center’s Readiness to Identify Customer-Impacting Issues
A customer contacts us with an apparent product issue. With a bit of digging, we discover a larger bug or problem that may need to be addressed by engineering. Before reporting to engineering we get a sense of how many customers are impacted by...
4 Internal Customer Support Practices for the Modern Contact Center
Thinking back to the early days of my first management role in a small contact center, I can remember one day when a newly-hired customer support agent came over to my cubicle for what had to have been the twentieth time to ask me...
Optimizing Self-Service: 4 Lessons Learned from Our Chatbot Journey
Almost exactly a year ago, I published a column titled How to Optimize Zendesk to Deliver Both Effective and Efficient Customer Support. In my third point about the importance of optimizing your Zendesk knowledge base, I left incomplete exploring artificial intelligence as a means...
How to Optimize Zendesk to Deliver Both Effective and Efficient Customer Support
Just a couple of years ago I was working at a contact center outsourcing company where nearly half of our clients were Zendesk users. Part of my job was to regularly work with our managers and clients to share best practices for implementing and...
Macros Are an Essential Contact Center Tool… if Used Correctly. Here’s How
Macros, canned response, scripts, templates...call them what you want. They boast a number of benefits for contact centers handling text-based support channels like email, chat, SMS, social media, and more, including: Improved speed and accuracy when interacting with customers Reduced time to full resolution Faster…
New Contact Center Leaders, Here are Practical Solutions to Four Problems You’re Likely to...
My first job out of college was as a frontline agent in the contact center for a SaaS startup — and over the next 15 years, I grew into a director role. Ready for a change, I’ve been on an operations hiatus of sorts...
Contact Center Agent Productivity: Do’s and Don’ts of Dual Monitors and Wallboards
Walk into a modern contact center and you’re likely to see screens prominently placed in a couple of different places. Your eyes are first drawn to agent workstations where the typical agent uses not one, but two monitors to interact with customers. On the...
6 Questions to Answer Before Your Contact Center Agents Work From Home
Current events have highlighted the importance of work from home as essential to a good business continuity strategy. And this certainly rings true for contact centers who are challenged to continuously connect with their customers. But work from home as a business continuity solution...
How to Deal with Customer Abuse and Fraud: 6 Recommendations
As a contact center leader for a number of years at a SaaS (software as a service) company, one thing that I’m not sure my upbringing adequately prepared me for some “customers” actively trying to rip the company off. I reserve the term “customers”...
3 Ways to Bridge the Gap From Training to Proficient Customer Service
When I started out in customer service nearly two decades ago we had this homegrown ticketing system that was completely archaic by today’s standards. But it had this feature where agents could be placed in “QA mode” so every response to a customer had...
4 Good Reasons to Kill Email-Based Customer Support
I recently sat with a group of customer service leaders who declared that email support was dead for their company. They were turning off their [email protected] email address(es) and instead channeling their customers to phone, web form, text(SMS), chat, and other messaging channels. This news...
Optimizing the Cancellation Experience: What’s the Right Amount of “Friction”?
In my work with a variety of customer service teams to understand their top contact drivers, especially in relation to customer satisfaction, I often find account cancellations are frequently near the top of the list. Over the course of my career, I’ve encountered company...
4 Tips to Get Value From Contact Center Quality Scores
I have two scenarios for you regarding contact center quality assurance. In the first, imagine a manager or supervisor listening to a phone call and using a set of criteria to grade that call. They then add up all of the points and deliver...
Journey Mapping in the Contact Center: 6 Insights to Maximize the Value
I’ve recently been collaborating with my colleagues to improve customer satisfaction for one of our clients. While our approach has many aspects to it, one of the key initiatives has been to establish a new voice and style for how we interact with customers....
Customer Service Edge Cases. To Empower or Not to Empower?
Have you noticed the change in professional sports television viewing over the past few years where it’s become standard for a rules official, oftentimes a former referee, to provide expert interpretations of the rules and judgment calls in instant replay situations. If you’re not...
7 Essentials for a Customer Service Voice and Style Guide
Over the past few years, I’ve worked with dozens of our new clients at FCR to help them design a quality process for the customer service team that drives the sort of customer experience they want to deliver. Of the many different topics we...
Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Support Channels: Which is Better for Agents and Customers?
I’ve found the topic of support channel mix to be an interesting study in organizations. Traditional channels can be categorized a few different ways. Phone and video are live channels that use both spoken and nonverbal communication. Email, not a live channel, is a...
3 Reasons Why Customer Satisfaction Should Not Replace Quality Assurance
Not long ago I saw a demo of a cool product for gathering customer feedback called Stella Connect. They have a fun angle on customer satisfaction where customers are invited to rate their experience with the specific agent that helped them. Customers can then...