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As the saying goes, customers are more likely to tell people about a bad experience with a company than a good experience. This saying remains true for experiences with a company’s contact centre. This is why it’s important to have a contact centre providing services that only improve a company’s brand image.

When contacting a company, a PwC study found that that speed, convenience, helpfulness and friendlessness are the characteristics most important to a customers experience. The study also found that one bad experience would lead 1 in 3 consumers leaving a brand that they loved.

How can contact centres help improve brand image?

Be a Multichannel Service Provider

Having multiple methods of contact is one way to improve a customer’s experience with a contact centre. Many customers like to talk to a person when contacting customer service, but being on the phone is not everyone’s ideal method. Other methods to connect with customer service may be:

• Email
• SMS Text
• Web Chat
• Web Forms

Consistent Message and Standard

Having a consistent message and service from a company improves the company’s brand as it keeps people wanting to come back. This is especially important in call centres, they are a representation of the brand. As a company you do not want one part of the brand to fall short of the standards set. When all aspects of the company are the same standard and message, the company’s brand image will improve. Keeping consistent messaging and standard customers to trust and like the brand more.

Fully Trained Agents

Having well trained call centre agents is important because they are a representation of your company and brand. Responsible call agents are trained to represent your company’s message and to solve problems for customers. If they cannot solve a problem or do not promote the correct message, this can reflect badly on the brand and you can lose customers. When call centre agents are well trained, it will improve your company’s brand image because the agents will treat customers to the same experience that you would.

Speaking the Same Language

Having a customer call and talk to someone who speaks the same language and has a similar accent as them can make the calls seem more familiar to the customer. Customer’s have complained in the past when talking to an agent that does not natively speak English. To improve the experience and improve your brand, having agents talking the same language and having similar accents is important.

At CallPageboy, we set out to help improve your company’s brand by providing the characteristics listed above. As a Contact Centre offer 24/7/365 virtual services including customer service, virtual reception and help desk. Being a Dublin based company, we provide agents that speak English and are trained for your company.. We help create a script that is consistent with your brand, not to hurt your brand.

This article was originally written by Olesya Dmitracova, posted on independent.co.uk. 

Behavioural Psychology in Customer Service

Research into human Behavioural Psychology has been embraced by leading marketers. Given that we’re more sensitive to the possibility of a bad outcome than a good one, it’s not hard to see why. 

….Continue reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

Customer service is a dangerous thing to undervalue. As competitive advantages such as price and location are becoming less relevant, providing excellent customer service and a seamless customer experience are becoming more important. Particularly in today’s era where one bad customer experience can spread across an online community, tarnishing your brand identity in a matter of minutes. A company must remember the importance of every customer interaction,  positive and negative, in order to keep the company’s image intact.

The Negative Effects of Bad Customer Service

To ensure optimal customer service, it is paramount for a company to understand what is expected of them. From consumers expect, and what constitutes as bad customer service. According to a recent American study, 75% of customers believe it takes too long to reach a customer service representative.

On average consumers will wait 11 minutes on hold before hanging up. These times reduced to 5 minutes for online customer service. Poor customer service can be very damaging to the business. 50% of people will scrap a planned purchase or transaction because of bad service. While 51% of customers said they will never do business with a company again after one negative customer experience. As a result $62 billion is lost annually by companies, due to bad customer service.

Social Media

To make matters worse, this negative customer experience can have a detrimental effect on brand identity. With the rise of social media in the past few years, today’s world is more connected than ever before. Social media outlets provide consumers with a platform to voice their complaints to an increasingly connected online community. The same study shows that the average person will tell 15 people about a poor service experience. Versus the 11 people they’ll tell about a good experience. Therefore it is crucial for companies to recognise the influence of social media. It has and the negative effect poor customer service can have on brand identity.

The Positive Effects of Good Customer Service

The study in addition demonstrates how consumers on average are willing to spend 17% more to do business with companies that offer great excellent service, with Millennials willing to spend 21% more. All these statistics combined show how brand and customer service are more intertwined than ever. Companies must be very diligent in how they deliver customer service. Excellent customer service provides the following benefits to a company’s brand identity:

Protects Brand Name

Having excellent customer service ensures helps preserve the brand name. This is important as it improves recognition. It creates trust in your brand, helps support your marketing efforts, builds financial value and inspires your employees.

Attracts New Customers

As the statistics show, having a reputation for providing excellent customer service is proven to be attractive to potential customers. With this better reputation comes increased word of mouth recommendations, which decreases advertising spend, thus helping increase profits.

Retains Existing Customers

When your customer service is exceptional and exceeds expectations, customer satisfaction levels increase, and with that comes customer loyalty. Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits anywhere from 25% to 95%.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article was originally written by Thomas Griffin, posted on inc.com

Current Customer Service Trends

The article goes on to include;

• More Self-Help Options
• Virtual and Augmented Reality

…continue reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

Why use Live Chat in the First Place?

Live chat is an integral part of good customer experience because it allows you to seamlessly connect with your customers in real-time, directly on your website. This unique set of characteristics distinguishes chat from all other contact channels and can positively impact your business’s success. Chats have become a hugely popular and effective way to interact with your customers.

• Improves the support experience for customers
• Helps with customer acquisition and on-boarding
• Lets your agents build instant rapport with customers
• Boosts your customer service team’s productivity

First impressions are everything. This is true when meeting new people or talking to someone over the phone for the first time. So why would it be different for online chats? Check out our blog , Effective Ways to Humanise your Online Chats, for more information.

Tips on Chatting Professionally

Speak in a Way That Is Accessible to Customers

There is a fine line between speaking with customers in a way that is familiar and friendly but also keeping it professional. Being professional does not mean that you should be excessively formal. Speaking with customers in a way that is friendly and approachable will make them feel like your brand is relatable.

Prioritise First-Contact Resolution

First-Contact Resolution (FCR) is also sometimes referred to “one-touch” cases. This single number reflects both the efficiency and effectiveness of your service reps, so it’s no wonder that teams put this KPI up on a pedestal. The main advantages of prioritising FCR is time efficiency from a productivity perspective but arguable more important is the reputation of fast and effective problem solving, empathy and great customer service for your customers.

Use Positive Language

The chances that users are starting up a chat because they have an issues or are frustrated is quite high. By using positive empathetic language the users feels a sense of being listened to and you understand their need to help them as best you can. When you can’t provide something customers want, place emphasis on the solution.

Phrases to avid are:

• I dont know
• I cant
• No
• Its not my/our fault
• Iv already answered that
• It’s not available right now

etc..

Instead provide solutions in your answers, by using:

• Great question, let me find that out for you now
• This product will be available within XX weeks. I can place an order…

Collect Relevant Information

Making use of relevant customer information is one way to make yourself an expert in each and every customer. Have your live chat agents reference the pre-chat survey as well as information on the customer’s account or in their chat history when possible before asking customers for more information.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article was originally written by Michele McGovern, posted on customerexperienceinsight.com

Communication That Keeps Customers Engaged

Customers get mixed messages – one from Sales, something different from Marketing and another from Service – and that interferes with a great experience and how the customers engaged. Here’s how to keep messages consistent and customers engaged. 

One of the biggest problems with customer communication is it comes from different areas within companies – Sales, Service, Marketing, Accounts Payable, Shipping, etc. And each area may use different software and avenues, such as email, social media, calls and print, to communicate with customers.

And they all don’t speak the same language.

“Disjointed internal processes can lead to costly mistakes, like misspelled customer names or confusing jargon, that can frustrate customers and negatively impact a brand’s reputation,” says Dorian Stone, the general manager for Grammarly Business. “So companies need to ensure brand consistency is seamlessly built into workflows across teams and locations. Doing so enhances the customer experience, decreases customer frustration, and saves employees time on multiple revisions.”

Here are four tips to keep your customer communication consistent so customers feel engaged, not disconnected:

1. Be authentic

Even though much of the experience is digital these days, customers still want to feel an emotional connection with companies and brands.

“Research shows that larger companies have so many instances of inconsistencies in their customer-facing communications that they often negate the value of any strategic investments made to the brand experience,” Stone says.

Sign, tag or author communication with real names and faces. Use language that sounds like a verbal conversation, not a corporate letter. Be the first to share good and less-than-ideal news from your organization with a down-to-earth tone, showing authenticity. And make sure the same language and tone is used in tweets, emails, letters, posts, blogs, etc.

2. Create guidelines

If you’re like most organizations, customer communication doesn’t come from one source, person or department. So many people from different areas create the content customers see and/or hear.

To keep all that communication consistent, create a style guide for your organization. Define your most important product, service and solution terminology. Determine the few words you’ll use as acronyms with customers (because customers seldom understand your inside acronyms as much as you do). Decide how you’ll address customers – first name, titles and surnames?

“It’s important to understand the nature of the communication gaps. For example, inconsistent uses of a company’s name or product can be addressed with simple alerts as employees write,” says Stone. “Uses of jargon or terms that are not brand-approved may require an alert with an explanation and edit suggestion to help the employees determine how to address the issue.”

The article goes on to include;

• Easy access
• Regular reviews

…continue reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

The growth and success of a business depends on its ability to attract new customers. While a business can smooth sail along if it has excellent customer retention, it cannot reach its full potential and thrive without a bank of new customers to fuel growth. And so a company will look to lead generation methods to generate new sales leads.

Lead generation is all about finding the right target groups and the individuals within these. If a business has a good quality process, it will make it easier to find the right customer. However many companies still to this day have poor lead generations strategies. Many fail to generate good quality leads as they don’t have the correct tools in place. Generally speaking, they tend to lack either some or all of the following:

• A process for qualifying/disqualifying leads
• A process to convert the qualifying leads
• Buyer personas mapped out correctly

Lead Generation

Finding potential customers and successfully reaching them is a long and difficult process, no wonder many companies are getting it wrong. The process combines the various marketing actions that businesses can take to reach these potential customers. These marketing actions can either be technology-based which refers to database collection and using other internet based computer programs. Or else they can be people-based which refers to direct contact through telemarketing or events. Which a business uses is up to them as both methods of lead generation provide the same.

Advantages For Business

Enables Business Growth

Lead generation drives traffic to a website, thus helping acquire new customers which in turn increases a business’ sales and revenue. Having increased revenue ensures that a business is able to achieve growth.

Increases Efficiency

Automated lead generation software ensures outbound marketing is more efficient. Having the appropriate technology not only frees up time that would otherwise be wasted, but it is also more cost efficient as it enables both marketing and sales to work in unison, thus closing any communication gaps that might have previously been problematic.

Awards Competitive Advantage

Companies that use lead generation are always a step ahead of their competition. If they can acquire new customers and do it more cost and time efficient than competitors, well then their business has the market advantage.

Having a lead generation specialist will help a business a lot in both generating new leads, and working with the ones it already has. A lead generation specialist can offer a lot of good services but for most businesses, particularly B2B, the most important thing is to generate new leads from outbound telemarketing. At Call Pageboy our aim is generate quality leads for our clients to ensure more sales and ultimately, more revenue. Our lead generation services include call scripting, appointment setting, data collection and diary management by an expert sales team.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article was originally written by Ohad Rozen, posted on multichannelmerchant.com

Online Customer Experience

Online customer experience is the new frontier of business differentiation. Eighty-nine percent predicted that by 2016, they will separate themselves from their competition on the basis of customer experience—more so than product and service. A variety of factors influence a customers’ experience with a company, ranging from interactions with an in-store sales clerk, to reading an FAQ page to navigating a company’s website. We are currently seeing businesses invest heavily in customer experience, with Gartner reporting that businesses invested in customer experience more than any other area of marketing in and are expecting customer experience to lead innovation spending.

As companies dig further into customer experience possibilities, we are likely to see growth in humanisation and omni-channel integration. Computer scientists are getting better and better at designing artificial intelligence and creating decision chains that will allow businesses to speak directly to customers based on their data. By combining purchase history and behavioural analytics, websites will be able to make predictions much as a seasoned salesman is, or even better. From a customer service standpoint, websites will be able to respond to customers’ needs at any point they need it, directly on a webpage, almost as though a customer representative was looking over their shoulder.

Additionally, companies will begin placing human elements into their online interface. Customer service itself will intensify its integration across channels. Customers will be able to initiate a process online, then visit a store and resume the process from the precise point they paused, and vice versa. If industry predictions are correct, the best customer experience innovators will become the most successful companies.

Below, I have outlined six of the top innovations in customer experience that can boost a company’s bottom line.

The Top Innovations

Personalisation

People are different and so are their preferences. Adjusting the way you interact with customers can help your business satisfy them: 74% of people are frustrated by irrelevant advertisements and 56% of customers report feeling more inclined to shop at a retailer that offers a good personalised customer experience. Good personalisation ranges from having relevant content on landing pages, to sending customised emails (that have 41% higher click-through rates) and making pinpoint suggestions to your customers. Amazon has set a prime example of how personalisation can boost sales, with remarkably good product recommendations.

Responsive Web Design

One key to customer experience is consistency. Businesses should present their customers with the same information no matter where they go, be it a website, store or a call centre. Responsive web design—the creation of fluid websites built for optimisation on any platform—provides this consistency for a company’s online presence. Additionally, mobile functionality is more critical now than ever–over half of internet traffic comes from mobile devices and is expected to grow to 75% of all internet traffic. On top of those numbers, mobile functionality is also a necessary component of search engine optimisation. In April of 2015, Google started to give mobile-friendly websites a boost to higher rankings.

The article goes on to include;

• Walkthroughs
• Social Media Integration
• Enhanced Visuals
• Verifiable Reviews

…continue reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

An exceptional customer experience (CX) is no longer a luxury but a critical priority for businesses. As technology progresses so do the needs, wants and desires of a customer. Today’s customers are no longer satisfied with a poor CX journey. Nor the customer service provision that was common place 10 years ago.

The customer experience refers to the journey that a customer has with a company. This includes every single interaction with your company from the first time they heard about you. To purchasing a product or service and any calls with your customer service team. The ideal CX journey is the one that includes as little hassle as possible. If the experience is of benefit to the customer, engagement continues. If it doesn’t meet the customer’s expectations, they will go elsewhere.

A customer experience strategy begins and ends with exceptional customer service. Customers want to feel that their needs are being heard and met by the companies that they choose to interact with.

CX Journey

Using two little words during customer interactions

Beginning and ending each conversation you have with a customer by saying thank you. It can be one of the most effective ways to ensure that your customer service provision will add to their overall CX journey. This shows that you appreciate your customer and will elevate your brand’s reputation to one of loyalty and kindness.

Making sure your technology puts customers first

Today’s customers enjoy having a degree of independence when it comes to managing their own accounts and accessing both information and customer support. Offering easy to use features such as live chat to customers can be an absolute godsend as it allows them to ask questions while on the go, especially if they have limited time to spend on a phone call.

Engaging with your customers in their own space

Show a real interest in your customers overall journey with your brand by engaging with them on the channels that suit them best. Be it social, email or over the phone, taking an active interest in your customer’s experience pre-and-post visits lets them know that you truly value them.

Poor Experiences

If a customer has a poor or bad experience with a customer care agent, this can have a huge impact on how they view your brand going forward and their overall CX journey. It doesn’t matter if your company sells top of the line products or great problem solving solutions, if a customer doesn’t enjoy the interaction that they have with your company on a whole, you can be at risk of losing them as a customer. This is why the provision of excellent customer service ensures an enjoyable CX journey for your customers.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article was originally written by Michele McGovern, posted on customerexperienceinsight.com

COVID-19 Changed Customer Service

What you should do now

B2B customers’ buying habits and interaction expectations changed quickly in the face of COVID-19. Here’s what they expect now – and how customer experience professionals will want to respond. 

Bottom line: B2B customers want to feel like they’re having a B2C experience.

“Buyers no longer are willing to accept less from their professional experience as B2B purchasers than they are accustomed to getting from their personal experience as consumers,” say researchers at McKinsey, which recently released a study on customer experience shifts in the wake of the coronavirus.

Where’s the difference now? McKinsey noted these three major changes:

• Spend. Not every B2B has cut spending, according to researchers. About half will cut spending up to 25% in the short-term. But more than a quarter will increase spending by 25%.
• Technology. B2B companies think digital interactions – from sales to service to support – will be two times more important than they’ve been in the past.
• Location. More customers will not be in their offices. As many as 90% of B2B sales have become virtual through online meetings, phone calls or IM. The best part: Many customers and their sales and service professionals think the virtual experience is just as good as – if not better than – the in-person experience!

Help, regardless of ability to spend

Customers won’t spend as much – if at all – in the foreseeable future. But they’ll still want help and attention. Answer their questions and fix their problems as always.

“Transparency and compassion from brands is key in our current environment and moving forward,” says Ryan Maund, Chief Product & Innovation Officer at Sitel Group.

To add value to the experience, which will be appreciated, remembered and rewarded when business gets back to the new norm, aim to:

• Help customers maximize the products or services they have. Pass along tips – via your social media channels, email, snail mail or on YouTube videos you promote in social – on how customers can get more or different uses from their current products and services.
• Commiserate. Don’t complain about the hard times and how it’s affecting you. Instead, help customers process their emotions around the situation and move them toward a realistic outlook. Talk about things you’ve seen work for other customers in similar situations and how they might try those, too.
• Thank customers for their loyalty and pledge to help them through tough times. Give them information that’s important to them financially, professionally and personally. Send links to great content for managing those issues. Maybe you can set them up with free online conferences. Try to connect customers who can create partnerships for space or resource-sharing that will help them survive through the crisis…

….continuing reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

All businesses will inevitably encounter negative customer feedback at various stages during the lifespan of their company. As much as we all hope we could, it is impossible to ensure that our customers will be happy. Also, satisfied 100 percent of the time.

With accessibility to the Internet improving, along with this shift to Working From Home, customers are doing more online shopping and contacting companies through media than ever before. However we need to understand that it’s much easier for a customer to share their negative experiences now. The most important part of receiving negative feedback is how your business decides to handle it. React correctly and you may be able to diffuse the situation quickly. React badly and the events may escalate further.

Although it can often be hard to deal with negative customer feedback, it’s essential to not take it on a personal level. Below are a few best practice guidelines which you can follow when handling negative reviews and comments from disgruntled customers:

Customer Feedback

Assess the situation

If a customer is discussing your products or services in a negative manner either online or to your customer service agents, it is important to understand what triggered this response. Identify the issue that your customer is experiencing and determine whether their complaint is valid or not.

Respond immediately and appropriately

It is always important to acknowledge and reply to the customer as soon as possible. Especially, in a respectful and sincere manner. No matter how you feel personally about your business, you need to be courteous. Also make sure to thank the customer for feedback.

Take it as a ‘golden opportunity’

Always use negative customer feedback as an opportunity to see where you can improve your business. Customer feedback may highlight products, services or business processes that are sub-standard. If you make sure your customers know their voice is her, it shows that your business cares about your customers.

Follow up

Following up with a customer after receiving a negative customer complaint proves how much their loyalty means to you as a company. If you ensure that they are happy with the solution that you provided, it can improve customer satisfaction and retention levels.

As a call centre, we train all of our agents on a frequent basis to make sure that they are able to perform correctly in all customer service scenarios. Our agents are trained to understand customer needs and provide effective customer solutions. In a situation where a call agent is unable to resolve a customer’s complaint, we follow the correct escalation procedures to make sure your customers receive the support that they need. For more information on how our call centre services can help you manage customer feedback, contact us here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article was originally posted on inc.com. 

Humanise Your Customer Experience

….continuing reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

The first point of contact team acts as the first impression of your business and the start of a positive customer experience that will boost a customer’s confidence in your service and product offerings. Above all, the service ensures that all issues and concerns will be resolved in a quick and respectful manner. While also ensuring customer loyalty and retention.

In an increasingly demanding technological world, customers have access to multiple touch points for contacting your business’ customer support at any time of the day. However, when customers first contact your company, they desire their queries to be solved right away. This should be a norm in customer service, failure to do this can often be harmful to customer satisfaction.

There are many reasons why a business should avail of a first point of contact service. Especially when it comes to ensuring the satisfaction of your customers.

Here are the benefits of first point of contact:

Knowledgeable support 

When a customer reaches out to your business, they want a hassle free and fast solution to their problem. The first point of contact team ensure that your customers are being met by a customer support representative. That is knowledgeable of your business and respectful of your customers’ needs.  All call agents are expertly trained to ensure your customers are provided with quick, seamless expert advice.

Reduced costs 

Outsourcing customer support services can have multiple benefits for business owners especially in terms of reducing overall business costs. Using a first point of contact service team means that there is no need for hiring in-house.

Information access 

First point of call agents have access to your business’ CRM and diary management systems allowing them to easily access and update customer information. This is beneficial as it allows call agents to provide customers with a personalised customer service. Service is based on their past interactions with your business.

Response time 

All call agents are coached in providing the highest level of customer service and first call resolution to ensure that queries are promptly and efficiently answered. A first point of contact team may use a call script provided by your business if you required.

Improved customer loyalty 

Resolving a customer’s issue in the first call is a benefit when improving loyalty among your customers.

Call Pageboy Contact Centre‘s first point of contact service offers seamless support to your customers. Our call agents answer your customers queries over a number of different touch points including phone, email, SMS, and online support. We integrate with your CRM system or diary management software and adhere to all escalation procedures to ensure that your customers concerns are efficiently answered.

Technology is advancing on a daily basis at an alarming rate. It is inevitable that all businesses will need to adapt to these changes. This in order to continue competing in their respective markets and to satisfy customers. These updates also determine the level of expectation that customers will have of a company’s service support and operations.

Investing in call centre technology can help your company raise the bar in terms of customer service provision. Not only will it allow you to increase productivity and communication but also and most importantly, customer loyalty.

Benefits of Call Centre Technology

Today’s customers have become accustomed to being able to contact a company on their own time and terms. The customer journey has entered the era of omni-channel communication and businesses need the right technology in order to keep up. These advances in customer service technology provide the following benefits to companies:

Customer Insights in Call Centre Technology

The various big data platforms and software programs that are now available to call centres can provide a company with extensive insights into their customer database. From having instant access to data on behaviour, customer interactions with the company and their satisfaction levels. A company can accurately improve the customer journey. This will ultimately provide deeper insights for marketing strategies, lead generation campaigns and product innovation.

Evolving support software 

As technology progresses, so does the ability of customer support services to adapt. Also the ability to talk with their customers across a wide range of channels and methods. Call centre technology allows call agents to begin a conversation with a customer on live chat and carry it across to phone or email without disrupting the conversation and keeping the customer journey consistent.

Increased security 

An outsourced call centre provider can offer a company back up services in the event of a disaster. This means that all your company’s and customers information will be kept and held in a secure space. For example, if your company experiences a power outage, a call centre will be able to continue providing your customers with high quality customer support regardless of the hour and will update database information so that your company can have peace of mind knowing that your data is secure.

Here at Call Pageboy Contact Centre, we believe that the most successful part of a call centre is the technology infrastructure and resources that it offers. Our resources allow us to offer our clients and their customers 24 hour support, responding to customer needs in a quick and efficient manner.

If you would like to know more information about investing within call centre technology, contact us today.

This article was originally posted on customerthink.com

Empathy in Customer Service

The crisis brought about by COVID-19 has created an unprecedented shift in the way we go about our daily lives. Due to the risk of viral spread, contact centers around the globe have sent employees home to work, while absenteeism rates are at an all-time high due to illness, lack of childcare, and government mandated city shutdowns. Everyone is frantically trying to find a way to navigate this new, hectic environment. Amongst all of the craziness, our industry must not forget the most importance of empathy in customer service.

Though empathy has always been top of mind for customer experience (CX) professionals, right now it is more important than ever. In an industry built on people and relationships, it is vital to humanise each conversation to understand and build connections with every customer.

Employees should be prepared to serve each customer knowing that whomever they are talking to may be affected in some way by COVID-19. For example, maybe a consumer is calling in to stop automatic payment because they just lost their job, or another consumer is calling to cancel a reservation because they just found out their mother has tested positive for COVID-19. CX professionals must be proactive – listening, thinking and connecting to make sure each interaction makes customers feel supported. Demonstrating empathy has the power to deliver the short-term benefit of satisfying customers in the moment, and the long-term benefit of creating a positive emotional connection that translates to brand loyalty. There is no better form of marketing, than creating a lasting impression of the brand based on a memorable and positive interaction with customer service.

There are many ways those in the customer experience industry can demonstrate empathy that helps relieve stress and calm fears in these trying times.

1. Over communicate

In moments like these, there is no such thing as “over communicating”. Provide critical information proactively, respond to questions and concerns with high empathy, and exercise lots of patience. Make sure all employees are trained properly in empathy to create positive memorable customer experiences.

2. Utilise technology

In the midst of a crisis, long wait times can be detrimental. Implement a call back feature and make sure to update self-help portals. There is also no better time to re-think video customer service as a strategy. Video can help deepen relationships, build trust, and connect on a human level.

3. Create bots for employee and consumer use

HGS has developed three different pandemic bots, one to screen on-site employees with a health questionnaire to help eliminate virus spread, another for employees to use for tech support when working from home and one for customers, which tracks messages for agent callbacks. All of these practical tools can help create a smooth, positive experience for…

….continuing reading ‘The Importance of Empathy in Customer Service At This Time’ here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article was originally posted on wns.co.za.

Build Stronger Customer Relationships

Customers are unpredictable and understanding their buying behaviour is simply not possible. Well, not actually. This statement is only true for companies who have not yet harnessed the power of predictive analytics to gain customer insights. Up until now, most companies tackled customer retention by taking corrective steps after they went wrong to avoid losing out on potential customers. Today, companies can use predictive analytics to anticipate customer spending and focus on creating the right opportunities to foster customer loyalty.

A lot is spoken about analytics, particularly customer analytics, which is not an entirely new phenomenon and has in fact been around for quite time. Back in the 1950s, when businesses began to realise that every customer is different from the next and each have their own needs and wants, they started gathering data about their customers to begin to understand how these needs can be met. This saw the rise of customer segmentation according to demographics, physiological and social metrics, among others.

Fast forward to present time and the picture is similar, however, the amount of customer data now available has grown exponentially and a number of tools and technologies are available to decode and understand it. It is easy for companies to get lost in a deluge of data and have no idea what to do with it. That is the purpose of analytics – to thoroughly interrogate the data and go beyond the data to find the underlying stories that can drive greater business success.

Analytics can be divided into three broad types; descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics. In simple terms, descriptive analytics looks at the data and summarises it, predictive analytics analyses data to determine what is likely to happen, and prescriptive analytics looks at what can be done and makes the necessary recommendations for sound decision-making.

Gartner research reports that by 2020, predictive and prescriptive analytics will attract 40% of enterprises’ new investment in business intelligence and analytics.

Painting Accurate Customer Portraits with Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics can be particularly valuable to a company’s overall customer experience. Through analysing both the structured and unstructured data, this technology can highlight historical patterns in relation to customer behaviour and use this to forecast future behaviour for particular customers on an individual level. In addition to pattern matching, predictive analytics also makes use of various other techniques, such as predictive modelling, forecasting, regression analysis and multivariate statistics.

Continuing reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

Abandoned Calls Vs Missed Calls

An Abandoned Call

An Abandoned call is a call that did not reach the agent or business because the caller ended the call before it being answered. When a user calls outside of dedicated business hour answering times and the caller gets frustrated and hangs up before leaving a message. Alternatively this can happen when a caller is in the waiting queue without being presented to an agent in a timely manner and is directed to leaving a voicemail, and the caller hung up before leaving the voicemail.

Call Abandonment Rate KPI

Its important to keep an eye on call abandonment rate, its a great KPI for your business as a high abandonment rate represents missed opportunities, customer dissatisfaction and ultimately lost revenue. Call Abandonment is often directly connected with wait and hold times.

How to Calculate Abandon Rate

Divide the number of abandoned calls by the total number of calls.

# of Abandoned Calls
__________________  = Abandon Rate
# of Total Calls

For example, if you receive 100 calls and 20 are abandoned, your abandon rate is 20%

A Missed call

A missed call is a call that has rang at least once but was not answered or was rejected by the agent or business. Also when a call is redirected directly to a voicemail but the caller hung up without leaving a message.  A missed call also happened when the call ends due to a technical issue or the caller themselves hangs up during the agent or business greeting when the call is answered. While blind transferring a caller to another department that doesn’t get answered this is also regarded as a missed call.

Missed Calls = Missed Business 

Danny Longbottom, BT Business SME managing director, said:

“We already know from speaking to our customers that missed calls mean missed business. Companies, especially SMEs, are becoming increasingly mobile – 77 per cent offer flexible working and 45 per cent hot-desking, according to the research – so getting calls to the right person is potentially more difficult… No one cares about how a call is routed, especially the customer – they just want to get to speak to the right person.”

Missed calls do make an impact on your revenues, probably more than you realise. The impact of revenue hurts you both short and and long term.

Short-term, you lose the daily revenue you might have made for that specific calls. Roughly about 85% of the people whose calls you miss don’t call back. That means you’ve lost whatever revenue you might have gotten forever.

Long-term, that lost revenue adds up to quite alot. So how much is this actually affecting your business? Here’s a simple formula to calculate it;

How to Calculate Revenue Lost from Missed Calls

Average sales amount per call  X  # of missed calls = Revenue lost

For example, if your average sale per call is €50 and you missed 20 calls, your Revenue lost is €1,000

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article was originally posted on forbes.com. 

Customer Experience Mindset Post COVID-19

It used to be that customer experience was the only way to differentiate your brand among a sea of sameness. Now the challenge is not just to stand-out, but to pivot, innovate and transform. These three buzzwords are much more easily said than done. This is not the time to quiver in fear and count our losses, but be a leader in helping customers get back on their feet. We are now serving a customer that’s been financially impacted by COVID-19, who wants to be a touchless and digital customer, and who will be living differently for some time. In modern life, we have been lucky to not have incurred a global catastrophe of this nature in over 100 years.

While we haven’t had a pandemic for over many years, we can look at history to assume there will be major lasting changes in the mind of the customer, as well as how we run our businesses and governments.

The Black Death, The Spanish Flu, WWII, 9/11 And … COVID-19

In a recent podcast with David Mayer – Senior Partner at Customer Strategy Consultancy Lippincott – we looked back at pandemics in history to think about how life might change tomorrow. For example in the 1300’s the Black Death in Europe killed 25–30 million people. It was credited by historians with ending feudalism – structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour and serfdom. The Black Death also ushered in the enlightenment – a range of ideas from the 1700s – centered on the celebration of reason. The new goals of rational humanity were happiness, knowledge and freedom. Here we also saw constitutional government and the separation of church and state.

The Spanish Flu of 1918 took between 50 and 100 million lives (2.5% of the global population). Afterward many governments socialised healthcare for all, while the U.S. initiated employer-based insurance plans. Additionally countries recognised the need to coordinate public health at the international level.

During World War II (1939-1945) women stepped up to take on jobs largely held by men (think about Rosie The Riveter – a cultural icon – who sports a red bandana, a strong flexed bicep and generally a “We Can Do It!” quote). Efforts to temporarily reduce social and legal barriers persisted after the war, driving an acceleration of female workforce participation. Then the men came home from war, got their jobs back, got married and moved with their wives to the suburbs to participate in the…

Continuing reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

As of March 24, 20% of the world’s population is effectively not leaving their residence except for essential activities.  So what has the impact of this new working norm had on customer experience?

Customer awareness, concern, and buying norms in reaction to the virus is rapidly shifting customer expectations and needs. This is a great opportunity to excel because customer expectations are high now with so much emotion and uncertainty. It has also forced many businesses to rethink what their customer care means.

Shifting Norms

As Working From Home is quickly becoming the new norm for many people, it has massively accelerated the inevitable shift from face-to-face interactions towards omni-channel digital communications.

Research from Salesforce tells us that 75% of people now expect a consistent experience wherever they engage with brands – be it through social media, websites or direct messaging. Immediacy is also in demand, with 64% of consumers expecting companies to interact with them without delay.

Customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. A good example of this is Amazon, where the delivery and convenience often acts as a driver for the products themselves. Consumers are no longer tolerant of poor digital performance and experiences. A third of all consumers will desert their suppliers after just one sub-standard digital customer experience.

Digital Options

Digital options for products and services has become a necessity for both companies and customers who are confined at home. Adoption to these digital options is growing rapidly, even strong growth within the most “digitally resistant” of customers. For some companies, the rapid development of digital functionalities is key to ensuring continuity of services. Many companies being forced into digital transformation in order to survive.

Digital needs such as online stores, online returns, online customer service for queries or complaints are just some of the digital transformations and/or improvements currently being explored by companies. Customer Experience shifts during COVID isn’t just about your current customers, what about your marketing and branding efforts?

L’Oréal China shifted all offline advertising budgets to only online and saw its online make-up sales rose in February.

Moreover, it is also important for brands to recognise that consumer needs and behaviours are changing, and thus brands should re-evaluate their digital storefront experience and address these changes throughout the journey.

Interactive Features

Features on websites enable brands to interactive more with their audiences. This could add a number of benefits including;

1. More fun to the customer journey which encourage them to repurchase.
2. Facilitate purchase decision making using technologies such as; virtual try-on, product filters, shop-able virtual stores to replicate the in-store experience and live-streaming.

All these require long-term investment to set up and maintain, but such digital capability helps brands defend future disruptions in physical stores.

Balence

Between looking for cost savings during this time but investing into necessary technologies to keep business going.

Necessity is the mother of invention and there’s no time like a crisis or a recession to force a business to look very frankly at its future strategy and consider where it’s going to be when the storm has passed. The pace at which COVID19 has hit has required many businesses to be very nimble in their response at a time when the mantra ‘innovate or die’ has never been more relevant.

Plenty of Irish SMEs – as well as companies that are not so small – have stepped up to the challenge and are diversifying their offering to cater for new consumer demands, or have completely refocused their enterprise in order to survive.

Source RTE

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article was originally posted on khoros.com

Re-engaging customers after quarantine

Though the timeline is unclear, the COVID-19 quarantine will eventually end and you will need to re-engage customers. Businesses have been in reaction mode as the crisis has escalated — updating their messaging, content strategies and customer service tactics to best support their customers through a difficult time.

But it’s not too soon to start looking forward. Even though things will be different for a long time, people will start going out and consuming again — and businesses can be ready for them. Once people are allowed to leave their home, having a business strategy in place for re-engaging customers will ease the transition from supporting them in quarantine to serving them as they return to a new normal.

Above all, it’s vital to understand your customers’ needs during a unique period. To help you get ahead on your post-COVID-19 strategy, here are eight tips for effectively communicating information important to your business and encouraging customers to engage.

1. Plan an announcement on your website and social media for when you resume operations

Once you’re ready to resume more traditional operations, even if it involves contactless transactions, safeguards, and other necessary precautions, you’ll want to let your customers know. You should do this across a variety of channels, but it’s important that you add any post-quarantine announcements to your website’s homepage, where they can’t be missed. You can accomplish this in several ways. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Banners — Adding a small, non-intrusive banner can be used to highlight important announcements without disrupting customer experience. Be sure to add the banner to your homepage, and consider making it global across your site so that customers can see it no matter what page they land on.
• Pop-ups — Like banners, pop-ups are an easy way to implement announcements globally across your website. Pop-ups allow for more room for text and will ensure the announcement doesn’t go unnoticed.
• Blog posts — Lengthier announcements may require their own unique pages, and your blog is a perfect medium for this. Use the space to lay out thorough information about when and how your business will begin to resume operations, and what customers should expect.
• Social media — Your website isn’t the only place to make announcements. Make sure to get the word out on social media so that your customers will know you’re back in business even if they don’t visit your website…

…The article goes on to include:

• Email your customer list
• Update your Google My Business listing with hours of operation
• Offer exclusive content or discounts
• Host a small event, with proper precautions
• Support your community
• Listen to customer feedback

Continuing reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

What is Customer Experience or CX?

You might think that Customer Experience is just a trend or a buzzword. However it is a very real and very important part of your business. Customer Experience (CX), refers to how a customer feels about a brand or company based on their experiences. CX managers and departments responsible for creating an optimal Customer Experience Strategy are tasked with ensuring customers have positive experiences with the company. Whether through purchasing a product or service, receiving support for their purchase, or being engaged by marketing or advertising initiatives.

Why is CX Important?

Expectations

Due to the rise of seamless, on-demand services delivered by the likes of Apple. Customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

Research from Salesforce tells us that 75% of people now expect a consistent experience wherever they engage with brands – be it through social media, mobile, or even in person. Immediacy is also in demand, with 64% of consumers expecting companies to interact with them without delay.

Customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. A good example of this is Amazon, where the delivery and convenience often acts as a driver for the products themselves.

Technologies

Mobile

With the rise of digital wallets and high-speed internet through the 5G network, it’s more convenient than ever for consumers to shop on their phones.

Engineering Manager of Mobile Raquel Hernandez says: “It’s no secret that the convenience of mobile digital wallets is starting to become increasingly prevalent in both brick-and-mortar and online retail.”  – Source: BuiltIn

The availability of Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Android Pay is further reducing the friction of online payments in a mobile world.

AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes it possible for machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks. In CX this application in used to provide answers to simple customer questions 24/7. Sorting messaging, prioritising queries to a human agent quickly where necessary, and by freeing up human agents to facilitate higher value calls.

This is possible by analysing large amounts of data faster than a human agent ever could. Therefore predicting the required response quickly, and with more accuracy, than has been previously available.

AI uses cutting edge voice recognition to understand what someone is asking, identify the consumer, and predict the necessary response.

VoC (Voice of the Customer)

Voice of Customer, captures, analyses and reports on all customer feedback—expectations, likes, and dislikes—associated with your company. It’s aimed to help you discover what your customers think of your business, product or service.

The secret to retaining customers isn’t a price or product. It’s the customer experience (CX) that your company offers. Collecting customer feedback helps you understand your customer expectations, and identify ways your company could deliver on those.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article was originally posted on abtasty.com.

Customer Experience During Covid-19

You, like me, like my colleagues, are probably working from home. In fact, as of March 24, 20% of the world’s population is effectively not leaving their residence except for essential activities.

This is an unprecedented societal shift, and from a purely business perspective, it’s already affecting buyer journeys, customer expectations and brands’ abilities to meet them.

Anybody who works in marketing, sales, and product development is facing similar challenges – we’re all in the same boat.

While not wishing to minimise in any way the human impact of this pandemic, we wanted to share some tips for smoothing out the customer journey in this novel context.

Optimise Mobile Experience

You may have intuited this, but all of this ‘at home time’ is pushing smartphone usage way up – especially among the younger generation. A Global Web Index report, which collected data between March 16 and 20 from 13 countries, bore this out:

“70% globally say they are spending more time on their smartphone, climbing above 80% for Gen Z.”

Digging into the data reveals some differences based on age, gender and location, but the overall trend is prominent.

So, if you have a web presence, you’re going to want to make your smartphone customer experience as smooth as possible. We have lots of tips on how to improve the mobile experience on our site, but a few to start off with:

• Scrupulously consider the position of your most important CTAs – are they within ‘the thumb zone’ on mobile?
• Consider using stick-to-scroll for important elements, like the search bar, ‘add to basket’ CTAs, etc.
• Consider slimming down any bulky header images or removing non-essential content out of the prime real estate zones.

CSR and Value-Driven Brands

Embracing Corporate Social Responsibility and showing the ‘purpose’ behind your brand is key in…

…The article goes on to include:

• Focus on Social Media to Build Engagement
• Change Up Your Subscription Model
• Reassure and Inform Your Customers

Continuing reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

Customer Service in Industry today

Today, customer service is no longer a supplementary business function, over the last few years it has quickly become a competitive necessity rather than a competitive advantage. It actively impacts your businesses bottom line. In fact, according to research done by Accenture, almost 50% of customers would be willing to pay a higher price for products or services if they could also expect a higher level of customer service.

Bad customer service can cause:

• Bad reputation
• Loss of existing customers
• Loss of leads
• Loss of employees
• Loss of profit

All businesses will inevitably experience negative or bad customer service feedback at various stages during the lifespan of their company. As much as we all hope we could, it is impossible to ensure that our customers will be satisfied 100 percent of the time.

Negative Customer Experiences

With accessibility to the Internet improving, it is much easier for a customer to share their negative experiences. Also many can see the negative complaints. The most important part of receiving negative feedback is how your business decides to handle it. React correctly and you may be able to diffuse the situation quickly. React badly and you can be sure that events will escalate further.

Relying on un-useful success metrics

Metrics are very important because they allow us to quantify our results. However, not all metrics are useful, and some might be useful but are hard to interpret. So what makes a metric useful?

The easiest way to assertion if a metric is useful, or Smart, use the 3 “A’s”:

1. Actionable
2. Accessible
3. Auditable

Lack of Employee Motivation

When morale within a company or for an individual becomes low or decreases, the employees’ focus shifts to self-preservation and fulfilling self-interests. The knock on effect on your business customer service is that employees no longer show a genuine interest in satisfying your clients’ needs.

Employees who are unhappy and have a lack of concern for the company tend to project those feelings onto a firm’s customers. Poor motivation and resentment in employees usually originates from feeling unappreciated by management

Personal Problems

When an employee’s personal life is in turmoil or they have loss of control, they may exercise control, anger and negativity toward customers in an attempt to create control in that part of their life.

One of the solutions is to have clear communications with employees:  If their personal life is affecting work performance, talk about it.  Time off, offer access to talk with a professional or just offering listening support may prevent more serious problems.

Not having a Customer Experience Strategy

According to survey done by Gartner, 89% of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience, up from just 36% in 2010. Customer experience is the most pressing mandate for marketers.

Although we all know that retaining customers costs less than attracting new ones, for some reason this isn’t being translated into business strategy. Increasing customer retention rates by 5% leads to on average an increase to profits by 25%, even as much as 95%! According to research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company.

Given the fact that on average it costs 5 times more to attract a new customer to your brand then nurturing the customers you already have its a no brainer to have a Customer Experience Strategy in place.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article on AI was originally posted on forbes.com.

AI Increasing Role In Customer Service

Customer experience should always be a top focus for any business. Keeping existing customers happy gives businesses a much better return than having to constantly find new customers. Continual advancements in technology are giving companies additional tools and resources to transform customer service interactions, providing better response times and increased quality of interaction. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is helping companies improve customer service, improve customer loyalty and brand reputation, and enable employees to focus on higher value tasks that provide greater returns. As AI is increasingly adopted, the potential impacts to customer service are announcing themselves in surprisingly useful ways.

Improved Customer Satisfaction with AI

The use of bots as customer service agents capable of handling many tasks is revolutionising the relationships between companies and their clients. From handling various tasks, troubleshooting, or interacting with potential customers, companies are finding much value from AI powered bots. AI powered chatbots are capable of helping a large number of customers 24/7 without the need for an actual human employee. Because of this, AI-enabled chatbots are increasingly being used as the front-line of customer engagement. Using chatbots as a first interaction can help identify consumer needs in a way that can easily identify more complex problems and ensure that the correct people are looking at them.

AI powered bots can proactively start conversations with customers, provide relevant information and help with each touch point throughout the entire customer lifecycle. This allows customers to get the answers that they need, when they want it, without having to wait on hold for an employee to become available, which can drastically improve time to resolution and customer satisfaction….

…The article goes on to include:

• Customising the User Experience
• Privacy Concerns

Continuing reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

Managing customer calls can be overwhelming for your in-house staff especially when call volumes rise. Be it due to a lack of in-house resources or due to a busy seasonal period, outsourcing your overflow service to a third party call centre can offer huge benefits for your company.

An overflow service is easy to set up and offers your business around the clock customer support and help desk services. Whether for operational or strategic reasons, outsourcing your overflow calls ensures that your customers are never kept waiting. This is especially important in a competitive business environment. Being there for your customers even when your in-house staff cannot, will ultimately boost overall customer loyalty and company profit.

Benefits of an Overflow Service

Improves call quality 

Providing your customers with an uninterrupted level of customer service. During peak hours reduces call waiting times and customer frustration levels. Trained call centre agents handle overflow calls. During your busy and after hours periods leading to an increased level of service and call quality for your customers.

Ensures business continuity and successful disaster recovery 

In the event of company downtime either due to bad weather, power outages or unreliable computer infrastructure having an overflow service contract. With a call centre ensures that your business continues to provide a high level of customer service at all times. Call centre agents will have access to your customer database and CRM system enabling them to track customer calls and queries until your company is back up and running.

Reduces call abandonment rate 

As a customer, you can be frustrated when you are put on hold. When getting in touch with customer support. It is inevitable that during peak hours it may not be possible to adequately answer all calls to a standard. That your business would like to provide, especially if call volumes are large. A frustrated customer can often lead to a lost customer. If you hire an overflow service, your customers will never be left waiting. Leading to a reduced call abandonment rate.

Improves customer satisfaction levels

Outsourcing your overflow service provides your in-house staff with more time resources. To provide a higher quality of customer service during busy periods. Without the stress of handling large volumes of calls, your in-house staff will be able to focus on and address your customers’ needs. When your customers consistently receive a positive customer experience on every interaction with your business, it ultimately leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction.

At Call Pageboy Call Centre, our overflow service ensures that your customers are always kept happy.  Your emails and calls will always be answered 24/7/365 because our trained call agents are always on call. If you are interested in learning more about our overflow service or the range of customer support services that we offer, contact us here.

This article on on the success of communication was originally posted on communicaid.com. 

Communication with customers is key to success

An article in the Economist focused on the secret of IBM’s long success story as the latter celebrated its 100th anniversary. The article suggests that IBM’s success was due more to its ‘strong customer relationships than with its machines or software’. The fact that this large organisation has always kept up regular communication with its customers has been an essential key to its success.

Everyone would agree in principle that maintaining customers once they are part of your client base is fundamental. With time, your customers build up a relationship with your company and consequently develop a sense of loyalty. They are therefore more open to any changes that your company implements and more understanding than new customers might be of any errors or delays. So, what are the benefits of communicating regularly with these customers?

Benefits of Communicating with Customers

Regular communication makes change easier 

As IBM experienced, market changes can be rough and the survivors are those companies who learn to adapt quickly to these changes. Customers will be more inclined to stay with the company they trust when changes in the market occur. Trust is built up through regular communication and can help ease existing customers through these changes by making them appear less dramatic.

Customers can be a source for new ideas 

Good communication works both ways. It is important to allow customers to express their views on your products or services and to make suggestions about what improvements can be made. This ‘feedback’ could reveal some common feelings among large numbers of customers and imply that some modifications need to be made. Customers who see that you are acting on their comments will feel valued and continue to communicate in this constructive way.

Listening to customers’ needs helps companies tailor and improve their products and services

Working together with your customers enables you to develop services that are tailored to their specific needs. Why impose products or services on a customer when ones can be developed which suit the customer better? Each customer is an individual and consequently has individual needs. Since 2002 the IBM services industry, its main division, often ‘co-creates’ products with customers…

…The article goes on to include:

• Good reputations are spread just like bad ones
• Communication skills training

Continuing reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

Why use a Diary Management Service?

The importance of keeping an accurate business diary is a vital part of your business success.

This business tool can be the difference between your business expanding and not expanding. Carelessness of this vital part of your business will lead to an array of issues both presently and down the line in the future.

Why you don’t think you need one?

The most common reasons why people think they don’t need a Diary Management system is:

• My business is currently too small for a diary management system
• Its too much work to set up
• Its not a vital service to get for my business

Why use a Diary Management Service?

Outsourcing your diary management service to a third party company can have huge benefits for your company. Especially when it comes to improving both time management skills and freeing up valuable in-house staff working hours. The latest ONS statistics show that around 582,000 people are employed as business sales executives, sales accounts and business development managers. That’s a lot of appointment diaries that need to be managed, with many companies leaving team members to look after their own. Free up your employees time to do the work you’ve hired them to do and not to waste time on admin obligations.

Some of the common issues businesses face from this carelessness include:

• Time waste which translates into revenue loss
• Retaining current clients
• Converting new clients
• Ability to secure partnerships and build important industry relationships
• Employee and client frustration

The most common diary admissions that take up valuable time and are better off being handled by a diary management system is:

• Recurring appointments
• Tentative meeting requests
• Meeting confirmations
• Categories and colour coding
• Scheduling time for tasks
• Blocking time for specific tasks

Not only does having an effective diary management system to organise your day and not miss any important meetings, calls or deadline. But research has discovered that by merely having a task entered into a calendar we are 75% more likely to achieve this task on-time. So it actually increases productivity while freeing up time for yourself and your employees.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology  allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article on Point of Contact was originally posted on marketing91.com. Marketing 91 is a resourceful marketing portal on the web.

Point of Contact: Meaning, Types, Examples, and Advantages

Point of Contact is the individual representing a business entity or an organization for a particular task and who handles the communication and co ordination. It can also be a specific department that acts as a coordinating point in terms of an activity or a project.

It’s is mainly used in circumstances where the situation demands accuracy and exact timing in all its dealings.

Meaning 

Point of contact is considered the focal point that collects necessary information and data and distributes it accordingly. He is an important part of your organization that acts as its frontal face. Potential customers contact this individual to gain and share their information.

He is a representative who has been hired to serve a key role in the company. He maintains a balanced and cordial relationship with the customers who wish to deal with the company.

All the interactions that are conducted between a probable client or customer and the point of contact cement the future relationship one step further. The point of contact serves as a bridge between the organization and the interested clients and customers.

This focal point helps the brand to gain better visibility in the market and increase brand awareness in the mindset of the consumers.

Types and their duties

It can be a single person or a team that handles requests for a company, project, service, department, location, event, or a business function. It has various duties, but the most important one is to maintain a healthy relationship with its customers.

• Customer service is an important area for a business entity. It hires and keeps a point of contact that is part of a team that will offer necessary help to its customers via several communication channels like face-to-face talks, messages and mobile app, emails, company website, and telephone. All the requirements in terms of complaints, shipping inquiries, and order inquiries and are handled through this team.
• Sometimes the organisation maintains a separate customer service department to handle their customers. This is their focal point that helps the customers to sort out their problems effectively.
• Sales People can be point of contact for many companies. They are one of the first point of contact a new lead comes across.
• Sometimes the point of contact is just a phone number or a website that is handled by a team to solve security concerns, administrative requests, inquiries, and other problems.
• The manager who is in charge of a project also acts as a point of contact and answers queries related to the project to the related people.
• The company sets up a service desk to handle inquiries from attendees and vendors.

Advantages and examples 

The advantages of maintaining…

…Continuing reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

One of the first rules of business is to build a loyal customer base, and build a great relationship with them. The best indicator of your brand loyalty is your customer retention vs your customer churn.

Although we all know that retaining customers costs less than attracting new ones, for some reason this isn’t being translated into business strategy. Increasing customer retention rates by 5% leads to on average an increase to profits by 25%, even as much as 95%! According to research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company.

Given the fact that on average it costs 5 times more to attract a new customer to your brand then nurturing the customers you already have, its very surprising that 44% of companies have a greater focus on customer acquisition vs. 18% that focus on retention.

Customer Churn

Understanding and limiting churn is critical to business success. The most simplest explanation, churn is when a customer decides to stop using your product or service.

With the aid of big data and analysis we can now highlight the possible reasons why a churn happened, allowing visibility into early indicators that a customer might churn soon, allowing you time to rectify if there is an issue before the churn actually happens.

A high churn rate will decrease profit margins and if left unchecked might complete stop your ability to achieve profits.  Even if you have a big churn rate but are currently achieving profits, unfortunately this is not sustainable.

How to measure Customer Churn Rate

Don’t worry, there are no complicated algebraic formulas that take pages to solve. Measuring churn rate is relatively simply, which is one of the reasons why it’s so important for all companies to do. Keeping a close eye on your churn lets you attach value to sales and marketing strategies and allows you to use researches more efficiently.

Churn calculation example; 

Take a time period – lets say a yearly quarter.

How many customer did you have at the start of the quarter VS how many customers you had at the end of the quarter;

Start of quarter = 100
End of quarter = 85

100-85 = 15
15/100 x 100/1 = 15%

You have a 15% churn rate.

There are more advanced and complicated churn rate calculations you can do however get the basics right first and then look further if you wish.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article was originally posted by bareinternational.com. Bare International gathers the information needed to improve the overall quality of brand performance and profitability.

Why Ignoring Your Online Reputation Could be Fatal

As a business, your online reputation is incredibly precious. As more consumers rely on online research, your brand’s reputation can make or break your business.

In 2019, online reputation management (ORM) is not only applicable to every business with an online presence; ignoring it can cost you customers and money. Are you paying attention?

Your Reputation Already Exists

Whether you like it or not, if your business is online, your reputation is also. With more than 90% of consumers now looking at online reviews before they buy from a company, you have the potential to gain, or lose that 90% based on what your consumers can find…

• On Google: When someone needs to find information on a business/product, they search online. If you don’t have this information available through your own site, you risk having your competition, negative reviews or false information ranking at the top of the search results instead of your own accurate information.
• On Social Media: The same goes for your social media presence. With over 2 billion users across all of the major social networks, there’s a pretty good chance someone is talking about you. Without an online presence in social media, there is no one to respond to these comments or answer questions that people might have. Without responses to these mentions and queries, the loyalty of customers is being lost. This is why you need reputation management.

Managing Your Reputation

Reputation management is the process of taking your online reputation back into your own hands. By investing in Online Reputation Management, you’ll create an active online standing to help boost your brand’s legitimacy and credibility.

As you’ll see in the infographic below, courtesy of WebpageFX, online reviews and reputation management is crucial to…

… continue reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

Talking to a customers using online chats vs on the phone requires a special kind of training and is much more than just typing responses or sending prewritten answers. This type of instant communication has changed the way companies interact with their customers. Live chat has become the leading digital contact method for online customers, a massive 46% of users prefer live chat compared to just 29% for email, and 16% for social media.

Online Chats Tips:

First Impressions are Everything

This is true when meeting new people or talking to someone over the phone for the first time. So why would it be different for online chats? Well its not. In fact use of language and tone is arguably more important over chat. Sentiment or meanings can easily be misunderstood or miscommunicated so extra care is needed when chatting with a client.

Introduce yourself

Always start the conversation introducing yourself with your name so the client immediately humanises you.

Typing indicator

Use a typing indicator so the client knows you are responding and have not left the chat.

Use real pictures

Using a display picture of the agent the client is talking with humanises the agent and allows the client to have more of a connection with them.

CAPS

Avoid using caps, they can sound AGGRESSIVE.

Response time

Clients choose to use chat for the immediacy of support. If you are not responding within a timely matter you’re not giving your client the support they expect.

Pre-chat surveys

Use pre-chat surveys –  Asking a set questions before the chat is initiated. Maybe there is data needed before an agent can talk about a certain account, or there are specialists for different areas of the business or query types. If you ask the client for this information it not only saves time, but the agent may have a better understanding of why the client got in touch and can personalise or adapt their approach from the very start. Making the whole chat quicker and more efficient.

Post-chat surveys

Allowing clients to give feedback shows them you care and it improves your overall service to identify any issues.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article was originally posted on freshdesk.com.

Chatbots

What a customer takes home from a brand is the experience it provides. Gartner proved that customer experience is a game-changer for brands. In fact, 81% of companies expect to compete on the basis of customer experience in 2019. This head-on competition is driving brands to strengthen their customer experience strategies.

“Regardless of your service, product, size of business or industry, customer experience has proven to be a key differentiating point for companies around the world.”
– Michel Falcon, Customer Experience Advisor and Keynote Speaker

What can your brand add to your existing strategy to up your game?

A chatbot.

While there are a bunch of things you can do, chatbots are a must have in your customer experience strategy. In this article, we discuss how it can positively impact your customer’s journey.

What’s a Chatbot and Why Should You Use One?

By definition, a chatbot is an artificial intelligence (AI) software that can simulate a conversation (or chat) with a user.

With technology improving by the day, traditional methods of engaging customers are also advancing. Industries like banking, entertainment, healthcare, news, fashion and more have adopted chatbots. Going by research — 85% of all customer interactions will be conducted without humans by 2020². Everyone is headed towards using chatbots as the mode of communication. A chatbot is one of the key differentiators for brands that provide good customer experience versus the rest.

Brands like Sephora, H&M, Duolingo etc., use chatbots to offer their services.

The H&M chatbot does the job of a personal stylist.

At the end of an interactive conversation, the bot recommends an outfit based on the customer’s taste.

In the banking industry, Bank of America launched its digital assistant ‘Erica’. Apart from making payments and checking balance, Erica also educates and helps customers save money.

Here’s How Your Brand Can Improve Customer Experience With Chatbots:

#1 Play Assistants to Support Agents

A study conducted by PwC revealed nearly 80% of American consumers feel that speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service are the most important elements of a positive customer experience³….

…The article goes on to include:

• #2 Lend a Helping Hand to Reach Milestones
• #3 Collect Feedback and Customer Details
• #4 Monitor Social Media
• Conclusion.

Continuing reading here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

According to statista, as of October 2019, 1.6 billion users were accessing the WhatsApp messenger on a monthly basis. The app’s reach and usage penetration is particularly strong in markets outside of the United States. It is one of the most popular mobile social apps worldwide.

As a result, using it to connect with your users is beneficial. However you can forget about using WhatsApp to target their 1.6 billion users with ads. WhatsApp currently doesn’t serve ads and its encrypted messaging system means targeting would be very limited anyway.

A lot of business are talking about and looking into WhatsApp Business or the WhatsApp Business API. Omnichannel customer support has become the customers preferred choice in communication. Because of this, many customers are now choosing products and services based on their ease of customer support offerings.  Customer experience is quickly overtaking price and product as the key brand differentiator. A good example of this is Amazon, where the delivery and convenience often acts as a driver for the products themselves.

WhatsApp Business vs. WhatsApp Business API

WhatsApp Business

WhatsApp business was first launched back in 2018, but it was for Android phones only. Last April it was rolled out to iPhone and is now available in most countries around the world. It is a completely stand alone solution to the standard version of WhatsApp we all know. This app is mainly aimed at small business owners and is designed to make it easier for them to communicate with customers.

The main features are:

• When a user gets a message, they will be notified thats its from a business account inside the chat.
• The ability to introduce your business to the customers using a greeting message.
• The ability to have an ‘Away Message’.  You can add a schedule for when you are not active on WhatsApp to guide users to the website or FAQ section until a representative as available to respond.
• Users can easily get the business information; adding details like business address, description, working hours and multiple forms of contact details such as websites and email address for an omni-channel customer support approach.
• There is a ‘Quick Reply’ feature that businesses can have prewritten messages to save time typing for commonly asked questions.

WhatsApp Business API

This API is aimed at medium and larger businesses who use communication channels for their mass market. This is a paid platform and you are required to apply and be accepted by WhatsApp before starting to use the API. Once accepted, the API allows tailor made automate messaging, which isn’t available using the free Business App.

With WhatsApp Business API, companies can send;

• Appointment reminders
• Shipping alerts
• Order notifications
• Product demonstration videos
• Verification codes
• Boarding passes
• 2-way customer surveys and support messages

For more information about WhatsApp Business API please click here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article originally named ‘How IoT Can Enhance the Customer Experience’, was originally posted on banyanhills.com. Banyan Hills Technologies was formed in to help customers solve for the complexity surrounding the Internet of Things (IoT).

How IOT Can Increase Customer Service

First, let’s focus on why the customer experience is so important. Companies such as Amazon, Zappos, Apple, Uber and the Dollar Shave Club have made it a central part of their brand.

The reason is simple: companies that focus on the customer experience realise important benefits. Research has demonstrated that satisfied customers will spend more on products, exhibit deeper loyalty and recommend a brand more frequently than customers who are not satisfied. For those reasons alone, producing a positive customer experience should be considered a competitive edge.

What role does IoT play in enhancing the customer experience? It’s starting to touch almost every area and should be considered part of any customer experience strategy. Here are three places where IoT can be particularly useful in creating more satisfied customers:

IoT and Customer Support

IoT can play a significant role in creating a positive customer experience.

For example, IoT can improve customer satisfaction by monitoring equipment for problems. In some situations, the IoT sensors may be able to predict problems before they surface. Perhaps a piece of equipment exhibits certain symptoms before it breaks down. If the IoT device could send an alert to an engineer warning them about the potential problem, the equipment could be fixed before the problem leads to any downtime.

What if the problem has gotten so bad that the equipment failure has led to downtime? The customer will need to contact support, explain what happened and then wait for a technician to be dispatched. An Internet of Things solution could circumvent those steps by automatically notifying a technician that a certain piece of equipment has failed for a particular reason and requires a service call. All of this could happen before the customer even calls to speak with a support desk. How much happier would the customer be if they knew that help was already on the way?

IoT and Inventory

In a world where Amazon is increasingly dominating the shopping experience, customers want their products quickly and they want them shipped for free within a couple of days. That’s becoming table stakes when competing for customers’ share of wallet.

IoT can keep inventory levels high enough to meet customer demand. In warehouses where products are stored, IoT sensors will know when supply is low and send an automatic order to replenish. This in turn keeps customers happy because they can order their products without delay…

…Continue reading article here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

The main pillars of FPOC – First Point of Contact

Who is the First Point of Contact?

First Point of Contact isn’t actually any of your employees. Your first point of contact for many users is your online presence, especially for Millennials. Call them the Do-It-Yourself Generation. Having grown up with internet at fingertips, millennials are used to hunting information for themselves… we explain this further in this blog.

For many users their first point of contact with your business is your website or Google Business page. If you don’t have the latest information in place on these platforms or have wrong information, that is going to immediately  frustrate your customer or potential lead which is starting your business off in the wrong direction even before the user gets in contact.

Support your Employees

We now know that picking up the phone and calling a business for many users is the last option. They prefer to get the information from your website, from reviews, FAQs and forums. With that in mind it is highly likely that when they do pick up the phone they might already be frustrated. It is now the job of your support team to implement damage control.

Supporting your Customer Service team is essential. A recent poll by Partners In Leadership confirms that when employees are happier at work, 85% say they take more initiative; 73% say they are better collaborators; and 48% care more about their work. Effective leaders who understand the correlation between higher levels of engagement, happiness, and productivity facilitate movement in the right direction–and have people feel good about it.

Having the Right Tools

Data

The truth of the matter is that most businesses have not invested in gathering the data that they need to provide adequate customer service. How can you improve something if you don’t have access to the current data? A lack of data is one of the most limiting things that teams can experience when it comes to innovating customer experience.

Similarly, without the right data, you never know if you’re getting better: 57% of people report being unsure or not having enough knowledge of what to measure in order to indicate their customer experience strategy is getting better.

CRM Systems 

CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management. CRM systems allows businesses to manage, automate, and undertake improvements to their Customer Experience. CRM helps to get more visibility of the client base which eventually helps in designing the strategy needed for long-term profitability. The software comes equipped with an adept record-keeping system with precise financial reporting. CRM improves a company’s customer service practices, helping employees respond and resolve clients’ queries. For example, an entrepreneur can track customers’ complaints through CRM and take proper actions against it.

FCR as a KPI  

FCR is an acronym for First Contact Resolution. 

KPI is an acronym for Key Performance Indicator.  

FCR is also sometimes referred to “one-touch” cases. This single number reflects both the efficiency and effectiveness of your service reps, so it’s no wonder that teams put this KPI up on a pedestal.

In an increasingly demanding technological world, customers have access to multiple touch points for contacting your business’ customer support at any time of the day. However, when customers first contact your company, they desire their queries to be solved right away. This should be the norm in customer service and failure to do this can often be harmful to customer satisfaction.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article originally named ‘Call Center Outsourcing: The 7 Step Checklist You Need’, was originally posted on timedoctor.com. Time Doctor’s goal is to help individuals and organisations be more productive. To help people stop wasting their lives on distractions and finish what is important to them instead.

Call Center Outsourcing: The 7 Step Checklist You Need

If your business is booming, it may be time to set up a call center.

And, if your pockets aren’t as deep as you’d like them to be, call center outsourcing could be your best bet.

It’s important to note that setting up a call center is an investment of both time and money, and most firms can’t afford to get it wrong.

This article will act as a 7 step guide to help you get off on the right foot. You’ll learn everything from recognizing if you’re ready for a call center to investing in the right tools to run your call center efficiently and everything in between.

7 Step Checklist Summary: 

Step 1: How To Tell If You’re Ready to Outsource Work To a Call Center

Step 2: Conduct Research & Define Your Objectives

Step 3: Use Your Objectives to Guide Your Hiring Decisions

Step 4: Make Sure You Have The Right Tools

Step 5: Consider The Skills You Need

Step 6: Start Hiring

Step 7: Reevaluate Often

If you’re looking for an easy way to see which tasks your freelancers are working on, then check out Time Doctor free for 14 days.  You’ll see what tasks they’re working on right now, how long each task takes to complete, and see which apps and websites they’re visiting right now.

Step One: How To Tell If You’re Ready to Outsource Work To a Call Center

Before you outsource your call center, it’s important to make sure you’re ready for a call center. You can do this by asking yourself a few important questions:

• Are you growing at a rate where your in-house team can’t handle incoming calls?
• Do you need more agents to handle your customer service calls?
• Do you need outside help from sales representatives to grow your company more quickly?
• Do you have the budget in place to start outsourcing your sales and support work?

If you answered “yes” to these questions, then you know it’s time to start building your call center…

… To continue reading this article please click here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

What is Diary Management?

The importance of keeping an accurate business diary is a vital part of your business success.

This business tool can be the difference between your business expanding and not expanding. Carelessness of this vital part of your business will lead to an array of issues both presently and down the line in the future. Some of the common issues businesses face from this carelessness include:

• Time waste which translates into revenue loss
• Retaining current clients
• Converting new clients
• Ability to secure partnerships and build important industry relationships
• Employee and client frustration

The latest ONS statistics show that around 582,000 people are employed as business sales executives, sales accounts and business development managers. That’s a lot of appointment diaries that need to be managed, with many companies leaving team members to look after their own.

For example, a busy business consultant handles 6 clients each day. Each of those appointments may take up to 5 minites to schedule a time appropriate for both parties, to input the appointment into a calendar and then maybe send the appointment to the client.

6 appointments x 5 minutes = 30 minutes

• Weekly – 2.5 hours
• Yearly – 130 hours

Currently in Ireland the average wage for a Business consultant is €45000, if we break that down into the average working week of 40 hours. You are essentially paying your employees just under €3,000 a year to manage appointments. If you multiple that by 10 employee for example, thats €30,000 a year. This is vital time that could be spent with your clients making the business more revenue.

The important question to ask yourself is: Are the right people carrying out these necessary administration tasks, and are they doing it well?

Whats the solution?

If you’re already thinking of outsourcing your calls or signing onto a call overflow service, then why not consider one that also manages your appointments?

Outsourcing your diary management service to a third party company can have huge benefits for your company. Especially when it comes to improving both time management skills and freeing up valuable in-house staff working hours.

Diary management covers various customer support services such as virtual reception, help desk support and an after hours call service. Here at Call Pageboy Call Centre, we offer diary management as part of our overall call centre services. We appoint a dedicated account manager and team to manage and update all diary systems to ensure that you never miss an important meeting or call. For more information on the services that we offer, contact us here.

This article on ‘The Future of Customer Service: 12 Trends to Test in 2020′, was originally posted by Levi Olmstead on nextiva.com.

The Future of Customer Service: 12 Trends to Test in 2020

The future of customer service could mean the future of your business. 77% of customers are “fed up” with bad customer service, and 91% of consumers only buy from brands they trust. That means poor customer service leads to lost customers and lost revenue.

Consumers demand amazing service and will spend more to get it. Companies who don’t adapt to this risk their livelihood. And companies that do are making millions. But like so much else, change is fast-paced.

Each day brings new ideas and new challenges. And in a service-oriented space, you might feel adrift.

So, what can you do to ensure your business keeps pace with customer service trends? We’ve got you covered. Here are 12 customer service trends to watch and even get ahead of the pack!

12 Trends Driving the Future of Customer Service

1) Omnichannel Support

Omnichannel is one of the most successful trends in marketing. An omnichannel approach treats each customer experience as a single journey with the customer at the center. All channels work together seamlessly every step of the way.

Although many companies have multiple channels, they aren’t all truly omnichannel.

Multichannel approaches put the business at the center. And in this approach, channels often operate in silos, which disrupts the user experience.

According to Shopify, the omnichannel vs. multichannel difference is clear: “[O]mnichannel removes the boundaries between different sales and marketing channels to create a unified, integrated whole.

The distinctions between channels—onsite, social, mobile, email, physical, and instant messaging—disappear as a single view of the customer as well as a single experience of commerce emerges.”

But, omnichannel doesn’t mean every customer or every company uses every channel. Instead, successful strategies engage customers where they are.

It doesn’t tell them where they have to go. And they know what their various types of customers need. If a channel isn’t well-executed, you’ll do more harm than good. In fact, you’ll erode the customer experience.

2) Customer Success

Customer service is one thing, but it doesn’t guarantee your customers will stick around. In a world where it’s easier to do customer service right, great customer service experience might not be a differentiator. Customers must also get value.

A focus on customer success delivers value faster and more consistently over time. And results show up in your retention numbers.

So what’s the difference? Customer service is about reacting to situations and interactions. Good customer service happens when a product delivers on its promise. Or when the package arrives on time or early.

By contrast, customer success is proactive. It addresses problems before they start. And it arms customers with what they need for success. Customer success identifies metrics that create successful customers and works to help every customer succeed faster.

Ask yourself, what can we do today to help our customers get value from what we offer? You might even hire a Customer Success team to track, plan, and facilitate customer success.

The article goes on to include:

1. Artificial Intelligence & Chatbots
2. Real-Time Communication
3. Video
4. Social Media
5. Personalization
6. Empowered Customer Service Agents
7. Ticketing Systems
8. Self-Service Options
9. Data-Driven Support
10. Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology

To continue reading this article please click here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

FCR is an acronym for First Contact Resolution. 

FCR is also sometimes referred to “one-touch” cases. This single number reflects both the efficiency and effectiveness of your service reps, so it’s no wonder that teams put this KPI up on a pedestal.

In an increasingly demanding technological world, customers have access to multiple touch points for contacting your business’ customer support at any time of the day. However, when customers first contact your company, they desire their queries to be solved right away. This should be the norm in customer service and failure to do this can often be harmful to customer satisfaction.

How to Improve your FCR

Allow your customers to hep themselves

You can help your customers even before they contact you. Users these days, especially millennials, tend to be more self-efficient than older generations and want to figure out things for themselves. Therefore having resources such as FAQ’s, trouble shooting forums and online chats etc.. is essential. This allows them to help themselves and to do it quickly and efficiently for both the customer and the company.

What resolutions cause the most delays? 

After you have conducted a first call resolution analysis, it is important to conduct a root cause analysis on the calls that were not resolved on first contact. A good root cause analysis will help to identify trends, pinpoint inefficiencies and can inform data-driven decision making.

You can identify issues by looking into:

• Why did the call take longer to solve?
• Was the call transferred? Why and by/to who?
• Was the call escalated to a manager? Why?
• Did the interaction span different channels (i.e. phone, chat, email, walk-in)?
• Why was the caller not satisfied with the solution?

Use segmentation to filter common issues

Do you have multiple departments that can receive calls? Why not set up dedicated lines so customers can call the department they need directly rather than being redirected.

Or alternatively have a phone system set up that users call one number but are promoted to choose from a selection of options. This reduces time spent by support staff directing calls, where they can better spend their time solving issues for customers. This also reduces call times for customers as they are promoted straight away to choose their option. Rather than waiting for the line to be picked up by an agent, to be then redirected, to then wait again for another agent to pick up.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article on ‘Why is First Point of Contact so important?’, was originally posted by Susan Fish on charityvillage.com.

Why is First Point of Contact (FPOC) so important?

It can be argued that staff who are the first point of contact with your organisation, which includes but isn’t limited to receptionists, call centre employees, and gift processors, are among the most important positions in an organisation and should be supported as such.

Each staff member is your organisation, says behaviour change consultant Derek Stockley. An organisation can have 10,000 employees but for the customer — the volunteer, donor, client or member of the public — the one person they meet functions as the organisation’s representative or ambassador.

Donna Lockhart, partner with the Rethink Group, notes that first point of contact can be anyone from a senior executive to a volunteer, but that there are certain roles that include this function as a primary responsibility. Marketer Allison Gauss says, “Starting off on the right foot can be the difference between landing a valuable donor or falling off their radar.” The same can be true for first contact with volunteers or the general public: first impressions matter.

This can be translated into very tangible terms for the organisation, cautions fundraising consultant Fraser Green of Good Works. “If you contact a charity and they treat you like a queen, you might stay with them for twenty years.” In a world where donor retention and loyalty are legitimate challenges, Green adds, “Every opportunity to create donor loyalty is an opportunity to make a huge return on a small investment.”

Effectively, it comes down to customer service, even if a nonprofit’s customer base may be a more complex group than a for-profit venture’s. Staff who are the first point of contact need to be trained, for instance, to recognize their role within an organization’s philanthropic goals and to help potential and existing donors, as well as to engage with and support volunteers and clients as valued customers.

Hire right

When we asked CharityVillage followers on Twitter which nonprofit organizations in Canada had the best receptionists, the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver was quick to reply that their receptionist, Kat Palmer is “amazing.” Interim CFO Jules Marshall explained…

…the article goes on to include:

• Not just about hiring the right person
• Integrate them into team
• Empower and let them grow
• Recognise who is really responsible for what

To continue reading this article please click here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

Are you confused with the difference between Multichannel and Omnichannel? Not to worry, you are not alone!

What is Multichannel?

Multichannel is the process of communicating with your customers across multiple platforms and channels.

Multichannel increases brands presence and gives customers the ability to choose. They choose their own favoured method of interacting and engaging with you. Maybe your current customers prefer Social Media ads or radio ads could reach a fresh audience in a new way.

Therefore utilising multiple marketing channels is beneficial, especially as users switch between multiple channels and devices throughout the day. Consistent branding and messaging across within your multichannel strategy, this experience maximises brand awareness. It also makes it easier for customers to reach out to the brand when they’re ready to buy.

What is Omnichannel?

So, Omnichannel is Multichannel, but the strategy is taken to the next level. 

Omnichannel is an approach to marketing that involves using multiple channels to interact with customers in an integrated way, the goal is to create a seamless customer experience across all your chosen channels. We recommend choosing these channels by analysing your target market and figuring out how your customers  like to be communicated with.

Consistent Experience is Key

Whether a customer is browsing and shopping on:

• your e-commerce site
• from a smartphone
• from a computer
• seeing one of your ads on TV
• physically visiting your store

Above all, they should have a consistent experience. The various channels work together and share information, guiding customers through the buying process. This process targets messaging that guides users into purchasing. This allows you to optimally create personalised experiences.

Tackling omnichannel marketing involves multiple technologies and integrations. Due to this it’s common to feel overwhelmed when creating and managing a consistent brand experience, especially for the first time. The easiest way is to start small, one step at a time and slowly update your marketing strategy.

Is Omnichannel the way forward for SMEs?

Companies with a well defined omnichannel strategy achieve a higher year-on-year increase. As a result omni-channel customers spend 4% more in store and 10% more online than single-channel customers. For every additional channel they use, customer spend more money. Source – Harvard Business Review

Additionally, these organisations gain a higher average increase in customer lifetime value. In contrast with those without omni-channel programmes actually diminish customer lifetime value year-on-year as a result.

The ultimate goal is to create a superior experience for customers and keep them coming back. It would be helpful for SMEs to assess their resources and identify which approach they can afford for the moment, with omnichannel marketing being the ideal at the end of the day.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article on ‘How to Convince Senior Stakeholders to Invest in Customer Experience ’, was originally posted by Irish Tech News. Irish Tech News is an online publication aimed at keeping you informed of all the latest news from the world of Technology.

How to Convince Senior Stakeholders to Invest in Customer Experience

They say that Customer Experience (CX) is the new competitive battleground – but, all too often, that battle must start inside the four walls of the company. Despite the fact that CX has been consistently proven to make a brand stand out from the competition and win the market, many CEOs are still reluctant to invest adequately in this critical function. Customer Experience and Operational leads are left to fight for a seat at the table and for a war chest to create a CX strategy that excels.

First, this can be down to a misunderstanding about what customer experience actually is. For many CEOs, it simply means ‘customer support’ – CS agents handling queries and complaints from users. While some will intuitively understand the value of CS and some will not, without a clear understanding of the differences between the two, the decision not to invest in it is an easier one.

Second, proving the returns of investment in customer experience is not always a straightforward task. For example, it’s not possible to establish a direct and unequivocal correlation between higher NPS and CSAT and higher revenue, since multiple factors impact your bottom line. Therefore, it’s not possible to look at one of them in isolation. Similarly, positive customer sentiment can be difficult to measure purely in dollar value. So, with an often-difficult financial case to make, CX and Ops leads can find themselves facing an uphill battle with sceptical decision-makers.

This is the exact situation that many Heads of CX and Operations are in when they first reach out. They understand the true value of investing properly in their company’s CX but are having difficulty securing full buy-in from the C-Suite. Our approach is to work closely with these managers and help them to build a case for investment that successfully brings the CEO on board. While every case is unique, there are some fundamental steps that apply to most.

Define the Customer Experience

Many CEOs believe it is all about Customer Support, but that is really only a part of the picture. CX takes in the experience that customers have with your brand during every single interaction along the entire ‘buyer’s journey’. Common touchpoints include first landing on your site and navigating through the content, interacting with your team members via phone or chat, making the purchase or sign-up, and being supported and educated post-purchase.

The article goes on to include:

• Show how CX strategy can break down silos
• Show Data and Talk Data
• Prove the cost of inaction

To continue reading this article please click here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

What is Customer Experience or CX?

You might think that Customer Experience is just a trend or a buzzword. However it is a very real and very important part of your business. Customer Experience, or CX, refers to how a customer feels about a brand or company based on their experiences with it. CX managers and departments responsible for creating an optimal Customer Experience Strategy are tasked with ensuring customers have positive experiences with the company. Whether through purchasing a product or service, receiving support for their purchase, or being engaged by marketing or advertising initiatives.

Why is CX Important?

Expectations

Due to the rise of seamless, on-demand services delivered by the likes of Apple – consumers have become used to interacting with brands in a certain way.

Research from Salesforce tells us that 75% of people now expect a consistent experience wherever they engage with brands – be it through social media, mobile, or even in person. Immediacy is also in demand, with 64% of consumers expecting companies to interact with them without delay.

Customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. A good example of this is Amazon, where the delivery and convenience often acts as a driver for the products themselves.

Millennials

Younger generations are said to have the highest expectations of all. Taylor Schreiner, Director, Adobe Digital Insights said:

“You can see this expectation that technology will provide great experiences in some of their survey responses. For instance, about half of people under 35 would rather engage with a computer than a human when interacting with a brand. Older groups much more clearly want to talk to real people and expect interactions with people to give them better experiences.”

Millennials tend to be more self-efficient than older generations and want to figure out things for themselves. Therefore having resources such as FAQ’s, trouble shooting forums and online chats etc.. is essential. This allows them to help themselves and to do it quickly and efficiently for both the customer and the company.

Top Obstacles to Achieving Great CX

Training

Lack of employee knowledge and training is the number one obstacle keeping companies from achieving their CX goals. Untrained employees cannot produce a high-quality product or service. If they also lack adequate knowledge and skills to provide satisfactory customer service, this combination results in dissatisfied customers. The company will experience declining sales if dissatisfied customers choose competitors who can provide quality products and appropriate service.

Data

The truth of the matter is that most businesses have not invested in gathering the data that they need to provide adequate customer service. How can you improve something if you don’t have access to the current data? A lack of data is one of the most limiting things that teams can experience when it comes to innovating customer experience.

Similarly, without the right data, you never know if you’re getting better: 57% of people report being unsure or not having enough knowledge of what to measure in order to indicate their customer experience strategy is getting better.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article on ‘Ways Millennials are Redefining Customer Service’ was originally posted on salesforce.com.

Ways Millennials are Redefining Customer Service

1. Love self-service

Call us the Do-It-Yourself Generation. Having grown up with internet at fingertips, millennials are used to hunting information for themselves. Whenever they have problems for your product or service, they will first search for your FAQ pages and community forums. Research shows 69% of millennials say they “feel good” about both themselves and the company when they can solve a problem solo.

A smart move for you is to create a community where millennials can connect and give advice to each other. They can find answers by themselves quickly, and your agents will have more time to deal with more complex issues. This also shows you respect the opinions and time of your millennial customers.

2.  Want it fast

Speed is critical. According to Desk.com, 25% of millennials expect to get a response within 10 minutes after reaching out for customer service via social media.

3. Prefer text messaging over phone calls

Millennials stay in message threads all the time, whether it’s SMS, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. It’s instant and mobile, which allows them to respond quickly wherever they are. But businesses are not keeping up with the same speed. Research shows 20% of millennials currently don’t receive any text messages from businesses at all.

Now it’s time to change that. Start to connect with your millennial customers today with LiveMessaging, and serve them their way.

4. Hyper-connected generation, with all kinds of devices

Smartphones, tablets, and laptops – millennials are switching among these devices every day. To please them, make sure you have seamless service support across all platforms. Remember to start with a mobile-responsive website design.

The article goes on to include:

• Value brand engagement on social media.
• Demand personalisation.

to continue reading this article please click here. 

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

No matter what kind of business you run, one thing which you are always going to have to focus on is ensuring that your customers are as happy as possible as much of the time as possible. That, of course, will ensure that the future of your business is much brighter indeed, and it will mean that you can expect great things to come no matter what.

Satisfied Customer – Customer Service

Listen to your customers

The best companies are good listeners who seem concerned with customer needs. Helping them purchase the product or service in a way that solves their particular pain point. Listening and responding to what your clients issues are reduces tension and defensiveness on the part of customers who is looking for a solution or is unhappy with a part of your product or service. It’s comforting for a customer to know that a customer service agent is listening intently to what’s being said.

Answer your phone

Failing to answer your phone will frustrate your customers, it leaves their issues unresolved, and convinces them that you just don’t have a solution for them. Part of the reason why the phone remains a preferred channel for customers is its potential for empathy. Being able to interact with an invested and attentive human voice is invaluable when it comes to fostering a good rapport with a customer. Empathetic customer support is a way to increase customer loyalty.

Don’t Make Promises you cant keep 

Deal With Complaints

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article on ‘Five Ways AI Is Changing Customer Service Today’, was originally posted by Omer Khan on aibusiness.com. AI Business is a content portal for artificial intelligence and its real-world applications in enterprise and the business world.

Five Ways AI Is Changing Customer Service Today

Customer service is a massive industry that has created jobs for millions of people. It’s only a matter of time until we won’t be able to tell apart a human customer support agent from an AI one.

Companies like Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Google have been investing heavily into this field, and have created astonishingly lifelike AI assistants that talk and react almost exactly as you would expect a real person to.

Today, customer service has become so reliant on AI that most companies use this medium for their entire first point of contact, to the point where they don’t even hire people for the job. We’ll be going over some aspects of customer service that have been affected deeply by artificial intelligence in detail.

1. Dynamic problem solving

When a user contacts customer service, they want their problem to be rectified almost immediately. But when a customer agent constantly asks them to hold or gives them a waiting period for the query to be completed, it can certainly be annoying.

AI customer service handles this in a far more reliable and dynamic way. Most AI customer service agents are referred to as bots. These bots are equipped with various tools they can dynamically use while assisting a user.

You are given various options during your conversation with the bot, allowing you to solve your problem dynamically. It’s a fairly useful technique that leaves the user satisfied without wasting their time.

2. Consistent 24/7 Quality Service

While it’s true that many companies that still offer 24/7 customer service off the back of a human workforce, this isn’t always as helpful as advertised. The cost of creating an AI that is responsive to user queries is significantly lower than training, hiring, and then paying a human employee.

That isn’t to say that AIs are perfectly adequate agents for this job, but their availability is guaranteed due to the fact they are fundamentally a series of code that will respond, react, and adapt to situations required by the user….

The article goes on to include: 

• Conversational Process Automation
• Accessibility and availability of services
• Personalised care

… Click here to continue reading.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

Whether your business operates in the sector of healthcare, telecoms, security or utilities, customer service is crucial for customer loyalty and driving profit margins. With the rise of social media and the fact that customers can post a negative message online and damage your company reputation in minutes, customer satisfaction metrics have become hugely important. Companies need to invest in customer service and have an established and experienced team in place. This can provide positive results and assured profitability. Having subpar customer service will increase a business costs as low quality training leads to high staff turnover. Which increases recruitment costs, while at the same time, increases the need and thus cost of additional future training. Companies should consider outsourcing their customer service. This strategic move enables profitability in different ways:

Cost Effective Creating a Profit 

Having an in-house customer service team comes with its own associated costs. Maintaining a high level of employee talent is crucial to customer service provision. Recruitment and training can lead to high overhead costs. This helps make a profit. In addition, having the latest technology and communication methods such as Automatic Call Distributor, Interactive Voice Response, Call Recording Systems and Voice Biometrics to name a few can increase in-house expenses. Outsourcing removes these associated costs and thus can increase profitability levels.

Improved Customer Service Creates Profit 

By outsourcing to a call centre that holds expertise in customer service, you are leaving the task at hand to the capable representatives, thus increasing your customer satisfaction levels. Having a high level of customer satisfaction not only helps retain customers. But, also promotes Word of Mouth marketing, both of which help drive profitability.

Company Growth 

Outsourcing to a call centre allows a business to focus internally on other important issues to allow the business to grow. However, managers don’t have to spend time micromanaging a customer service team and creating customer service strategies. HR can focus on recruiting and training employees for other departments in need of expertise. All individuals within the company can focus on the major tasks and responsibilities they have. Enhancing productivity that will help the company’s future growth, instead of worrying about a customer service team.

Greater Efficiency 

When it comes to unpredicted traffic, call centres have the flexibility. Flexibility to respond to seasonal business demands in a more timely and efficient manner. They have the technology and the employee talent in place. Thus, the capacity to scale operations up or down when needed. More importantly, they are able to do so without sacrificing quality service and without disrupting normal business operations, all of which help drive profitability for your business.

Call Pageboy has over 40 years’ experience. The provision of superior customer service, providing your customers with a positive customer experience. We offer a range of customer support services to help businesses in their goal of providing a seamless, hassle free customer experience journey. If you would like to know more about the customer services that we offer, and how we can help your business, contact us here today.

This article on ‘9 sample customer journey maps – and what we can learn from them’, was originally posted by on mycustomer.com. MyCustomer.com provides guidance on engaging and serving customers across their entire journey – from path to purchase and beyond.

9 sample customer journey maps – and what we can learn from them

In essence, a customer journey map is really quite a simple concept: an illustration that details all of the touchpoints at your organisation that a customer comes into contact with as he/she attempt to achieve a goal, and the emotions they experience during that journey.

But the process of building the map is not so simple.

The mapping process demands rigorous research and a meticulous understanding of the customer. If the map is to be truly reflective of what the customer experiences at a human level, corners cannot be cut.

To complicate matters, no two maps will be exactly the same, with the design varying according to the business, product, service and customer being mapped out.

Having said that, there are best practices that organisations should adhere to during the mapping process, and these represent useful pointers for those that are creating a map for the first time.

So with that in mind, let’s take a look at some sample customer journey maps and examine what we can learn from them and apply to our own mapping efforts.

1. Make sure you have done your research

The data that will be used to inform that map should not be based on guesswork.

Organisations should firstly identify their best customers (or the customers that they would like to attract), and make sure they thoroughly understand them, building a buyer persona for these customers, and any other customer group that is important to the business.

To aid this process, it is best practice to interview these customer groups about their journeys to ensure that you understand their motivations, goals, purchasing habits and pain points.

Businesses shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming they know what customers want.

This map from Heart of the Customer demonstrates how the buyer persona informs the entire map, ultimately concluding how successfully this particular demographic’s journey has been.

The article goes on to include: 

• Defining behavioural stages from the customers perspective.
• Capture your customer’s considerations
• Detail every touchpoint
• Detail customer pain points
• Chart changing customer emotions
• Consider what other detail can be added to the map
• Outline opportunities for improvements

… Click here to continue reading.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

Average handling time refers to a metric used by call centres to estimate the total average call duration of an interaction between a call agent and a customer regardless of communication channel. In the past, reducing this metric often meant that a quick turnover of calls took precedence. Over ensuring customer queries were adequately solved.

However, due to the changing nature of the digital world and customer service provision, having a low average handling time metric now relates to providing customers with a positive experience on their first point of contact while not sacrificing on quality or customer satisfaction.

Benefits

There are multiple benefits to ensuring that your business has a reduced average handling time with customers:

Improved customer service

By providing first call resolution to customers ensures that they have a positive customer service experience. Reducing hold time and providing customers with quick access to a knowledgeable customer service agent across a range of communication channels. This will lead to fewer frustrated and dissatisfied.

Higher quality of knowledge and productivity

In order to reduce average handling time, providing high quality call agent training is essential. Call agents who have extensive knowledge of a company’s service and product offerings will be in a better position. To handle a query in an efficient manner while also ensuring customer satisfaction. With frequent training, a call agent will be skilled in using a range of call centre technology solutions and will be aware of the adequate escalation procedures to ensure a customer’s query is dealt with in a timely manner.

Builds customer loyalty and retention

Customers who receive a positive experience when interacting with a company are more likely to become a loyal customer in the future. By having a client dedicated account manager and team, your business can be assured that your customers are being met by an experienced call agent. Who will be able to answer any question in relation to your business without hesitation.

Call Pageboy understand how important it is to solve a customer’s query as quickly. Also how to efficiently as possible without compromising on quality service provision or customer satisfaction. Our call centre agents receive frequent agent training. To ensure that they can perform customer support services to a high level on a daily basis. Our dedicated account managers also work closely alongside our clients to drive targets. Also design specific customer care programs for your business. For more information about the services we offer, contact us here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article on ‘The future of AI in Customer Service’, was originally posted by on cio.com. CIO has a database of enterprise CIOs and business technology executives. They have peer insights and expertise on business strategy, innovation, and leadership.

The future of AI in Customer Service

There is no doubt the age of the customer is here. Whether B2B or B2C, customers expect to be able to contact businesses, and receive assistance, at the time of their choosing, and via the channel of their choice.

But how does a business adopt an ‘always on’ approach with customers, while savings costs and improving the bottom line?

The answer is artificial intelligence (AI), which is fast becoming a customer service must-have. In fact, according to Gartner, up to 80 per cent of customer service interaction is expected to be handled by AI by 2020.

AI improves customer service and accelerates business outcomes, including improving the bottom line. By automating simple tasks that don’t require human interaction.

Cost & Time Efficient

It is neither cost-effective nor time-efficient to have human staff answering simple questions for customers. Businesses simply can’t facilitate effective customer retention by transferring time-poor customers to multiple agents within the business just to get a query answered.

AI assists with this in a number of areas: by providing answers to simple customer questions 24/7, sorting messaging, prioritising queries to a human agent quickly where necessary, and by freeing up human agents to facilitate higher value calls.

This is possible by analysing large amounts of data faster than a human agent ever could, therefore predicting the required response quickly, and with more accuracy, than has been previously available.

AI uses cutting edge voice recognition to understand what someone is asking, identify the consumer, and predict the necessary response.

Natural language processing (NLP) is the latest tool in AI’s arsenal. It analyses human language to understand context and outcomes, so AI can converse…

… Continue reading article here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article on ‘The Top 10 WOW Customer Service Stories’, was originally posted by Shaun Belding on customerthink.com CustomerThink is a global online community of business leaders striving to create profitable customer-centric enterprises.

Top 10 WOW Customer Service Stories

We found these examples invaluable in examining and illustrating the skills and attitudes that create wow experiences and real customer loyalty. We hope that you find these top 10 wow customer service stories from 2018 as useful, enlightening and inspiring as we do! Here are our winners, presented in order from number 10 to number one.

10. So, A Bear Walks Into A Liquor Store…

There likely aren’t a lot of customer service manuals out there with instructions on what to do when a bear wanders into a store. Fortunately, a quick-thinking employee at Crazy Bruce’s Discount Liquor was able to avert a potential disaster. When the automatic outside doors opened and a bear walked it, the employee swiftly moved to lock the inside door to prevent the bear from entering. It was a good thing that he stayed alert, because moments later, a customer walked into the vestibule where the bear was. Fortunately, the employee was able unlock the door and let the customer into the store before things went horribly wrong. It is a great (and unique) reminder of the role that awareness plays in customer service.

Here’s the story

9.  Trader Joe’s Employee Says it With Flowers

Sometimes we forget how much of an impact a small gesture can make. A cashier at Trader Joe’s was chatting with a customer at the checkout, and heard her mention, “it’s just me and the kids.” After the customer left, the cashier ran after her with a bouquet of purple roses. She asked “you are a single mom right?” When the customer said yes, the cashier handed them to her, saying, “Here, these are for you.” The customer had been going through a tough time, and was deeply touched by the gesture. She posted her experience on Reddit, saying “If you’re on reddit, thank you. You are an amazing kind woman and your kindness is an even greater gift than the beautiful roses.”

For the record, there are a number of similar stories about Trader Joe’s out there. Kudo’s to a company that empowers their employees to make a difference in the lives of their customers.

Here’s the story

8. Burger King Employee’s Side Order of Caring

Providing outstanding customer service is a lot of work, particularly in a high-traffic environment. It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of just processing customers instead of caring about them. Well, this certainly isn’t the case for Amarillo, Texas Burger King drive-thru cashier Tina Hardy.

When Rebecca Boening, a diabetic, realized that her blood sugar had dropped to dangerously low levels she pulled into the Burger King, and mentioned her situation to the voice on the other end of the speaker….

The article continues to include the following stories:

• All I want for Christmas is… a Chihuahua…
• Southwest Employee… Just, well… Wow…
• H-E-B Employee – Would You Like This Gift Rapped?
• This Is Where Customer Service Starts
• Ikea Demonstrates How To Build Real Loyalty
• Doctor Uses Twitter To Jumpstart Unresponsive Drug Company
• The 225-Mile Pizza Delivery

… Continue reading article here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

Lead generation is a marketing process businesses use to generate more sales of their products and services. The process captures more sales by stimulating and capturing a customer base.

Lead generation finds new sales leads for your business by searching for a customer base interested in your product. Instead of sending out mass advertisements and marketing campaigns to the masses.

Benefits of Lead Generation  

Increase Sales

Lead generation increase your business’s sales. This is because you are marketing and advertising to customers who are interested in your product and services. This process turns leads into customers by using specific targeting methods for the audience best suited to your offering.

Desired Customer Loyalty

When your business uses lead generation for marketing, you are able to target a specific audience. Marketing to a targeted audience means that your business is able to gain loyal customers. It also give you information on your company’s desired audience.

Brand Awareness

When you use lead generation marketing, you are able to generate brand awareness. Using a target audience, you gain customers that want to purchase your brand. This creates customers that will also spread your brand from WOM (Word of Mouth) as they are now hopefully loyal customers. According to Byron Sharp  (an oxford graduate and brand marketing author) one of the strongest drivers in making consumers buy is simply the ability to recall that product.

Audience Insights

Using lead generation you are able to gain audience insights into customers interested in your products. This process gives you information about who is interested in your products and services from online or offline analytics. This is turn allows you to be more specific with your targeting which will in your ROI.

Optimise Revenue

Lead generation increases your business ability to optimise revenue. When you use this process you are marketing to a specific targeted audience and not mass marketing. This means you can save money on advertising to to an audience not interested in your product. You know that the audience you are targeting will be more likely to purchase your products and services. Lead generation can allow for lower marketing cost and more sales, which optimises your revenue.

At Call Pageboy, we offer lead generation sales and marketing services for our customers. We can manage prospecting, database management and collection, daily or weekly reports and more. Click here to see more about our lead gen services.

Check out our blog about the Importance of Lead Generation.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article on ‘9 Undeniable Advantages of Hiring a Lead Generation Agency’, was originally posted by Britt Laeger on storytellermn.com,  Story Teller Media + Communications is leading in communications, Inbound marketing and media production.

9 Undeniable Advantages of Hiring a Lead Generation Agency

Lead generation is at the core of any successful marketing strategy—it is the job of the marketing team to drive demand and interest that ultimately results in customers. A lot of marketers face internal obstacles that keep them from being as successful as possible when trying to generate leads and this is where hiring a lead generation agency can really help boost productivity and achieve real results.

Here are 9 undeniable reasons to partner with a lead generation agency:

1. Access a Team of Experts

A lot of internal marketing teams are filled with employees, who are doing their best to know everything. Marketers are called on to be;

• Subject matter experts
• Writers
• Copy editors
• Search optimization experts
• Graphic designers
• Conversion analysts
• Social media strategists
• Branding masters

…and so much more.

The best lead generation agencies will give you access to a specialized team of experts that will support your internal marketing team and help add a level of complexity to your marketing program that can be hard to achieve internally without hiring a lot of employees.

2. Focused on Results

The great thing about partnering with an agency is that they are not inundated with the day-to-day tasks of your company. Their primary goal is to drive results for your business, in fact, this is how they provide value to your company and prove their worth.

With an agency focused on driving new leads to your company through your website, you can focus on other initiatives, goals, and priorities.

The article goes on to include:

• Get the Most of Your Marketing Automation Software
• No More Cold Calling
• Create Lead Prioritisation and Follow-Up Strategy
• Shorten the Sales Cycle
• Found Online
• Stop Using PPC and Purchased Lists
• Leverage an Established Lead Generation Playbook

… Continue reading article here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

Quality customer service can be very important to your company and brand. Customer service affects your brand image and customer base. Here are some reasons that improving your customer experience is important for your company.

Importance of Good Customer Service

Money

A Think Jar report stated that 55% of consumers are willing to pay more for a guaranteed good experience, word of mouth reputation. If you give a quality customer experience, customers are willing to spend more money on your product or service because as they have peace of mind. This can also be important if you are selling an expensive product, because customers will be expecting to receive better customer service.

Loyalty is Cheaper

When you have good customer service, customers are more likely to return to your company. Customer retention is less expensive than spending money for marketing on trying to gain new customers. Existing customers are also more likely to buy from you than new customers. If customers know that you are a brand they like and trust, they are more likely to come back. They will remain loyal if they trust you. It is important to provide a quality customer service to keep customers.

Effect on Brand Image

Customer service has a big impact on your company’s brand image. Your customer service agents represent your mission, values and are a representation of your brand. If customers have a bad experience with customer service, this will represent on your brand. Bad customer experiences can lead to a bad brand image. It is important that you have customer service that presents your company’s mission and values to allow for a better customer service experience.

Customers referrals

When customers are pleased with a company, they are likely to tell their friends and family about it. Friends and family word of mouth is the most trusted form of referrals for people. This means that your customer can be free advertisements and endorsements for your company, if they are pleased with the customer service. Customers are also more likely to tell friends and family about a bad experience than a good one. Why would you want to have bad endorsements of your company spreading? Insuring that you have good customer, can lead to free endorsements and advertisements.

At Call Pageboy, it’s our business to be your business. We provide many different call centre services and quality customer service for our clients. See how we can improve you customer service and call centre.

This article on ‘Meeting Rising Expectations for Customer Experience’ was originally posted on the 17th of June, 2019 by REBEKAH CARTER from uctoday.com. UC Today is leading in unified communications, collaboration & CX news and latest trends.

Meeting Rising Expectations for Customer Experience

Verint Systems, a global leader in Actionable Intelligence Solutions, recently revealed findings from a study. The study was more than 34,000 customers across 18 countries. According to the research, customer retention and global loyalty are declining at a rapid pace. Only 44% of consumers in total say that they have stayed with their service providers for at least 3 years. This is a reduction of 39% since 2015.

As the lives of today’s consumers become more connected, and we continue to rely more heavily on the latest technology, our expectations are changing. We’re beginning to expect more convenience in the ways that we interact, both in our personal lives and at work.

Technology like AI, chatbots, and social media have created an always-on environment. This makes it harder than ever for businesses to maintain the loyalty of their customers.

Relationships with Digital Service Are Changing

3 years on from Verint’s “Digital Tipping Point” research, which explored the relationship between human beings and digital channels for customer service. There’s been a massive change in the way that customers and companies interact. Over the last year, demand for interactions via mobile apps has increased by 57%, and demand for video chat has risen by 50%….

The article goes on to include:

• More demographic percentages and figures
• The Rise of Convenience First – One of the most significant findings from the research.

… Continue reading article here.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

As Artificial Intelligence changes technology in contact centres, we see a better way to capture many different audiences including the millennial customer.

According to Business Insider, Millennials make up about 30% of the population today. Because they are a large portion of the population, the millennial generation will be an important part of your company’s customers. It is crucial for your company to have seamless and easy methods of connection to your call centre.

Artificial Intelligence in Contact Centres

Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows for multiple methods of connection for customers and companies.  AI allows contact via web chat, web forms, SMS messages, email and more. Because the amount of calls into contact centres is shrinking, other methods of connection are becoming important for any business.

How Artificial Intelligence Captures the Millennial Customer?

Self-service

The millennial customer is known for being loyal and technology driven. If you have a self-service connection avenue for customers to contact customer service, your company will be more suited for millennials. AI technology allows contact centres to implement a self service method like web chat. Because millennials are less likely to make a call to solve a customer service problem, a self-service method is more suited for millennials. Studies have shown that if a millennial has a good experience with a company they are likely to repurchase products or reuse a service. Therefore, providing an easy self-service connection method will please the millennials.

Multiple Methods

In addition, Artificial Intelligence allows for an Omnichannel service for customers to connect. In other words, Omnichannel customer service is one place for multiple methods of connection customer service. Some of these methods include web chat, SMS messages, social media, email, and web forms. The millennial customer will want more than one option to connect with your company. Therefore, with the use of these avenues on the internet, your company will capture the millennial customer.

Quick Solutions

Because millennial customers live fast paced lives, having quick answers to their problems is important. AI allows your customers to get quick solutions to their questions. If a customer has a low level question, which are easy to answer or commonly asked, AI allows them to find an answer faster.  FAQ pages and web chat portals use AI. These allow for quick answers because the answers are automated.

At CallPageboy, we work to give our client’s customers multiple channels to connect with customer service that meets all customers’ needs.  We offer the ability for your customers to contact customer service 24/7/365 via Web Chat, Web Forms, Email and SMS Messages. It is important that we change to meet the need of your customers. Click here to get a quote.

This article on ‘How to Break Through Stagnant Customer Experiences’ was originally posted on the 19th of June, 2019 by Judith Aquino at TTEC. TTEC is a leading customer experience technology and services company .

How to Break Through Stagnant Customer Experiences

At Forrester’s CX NYC 2019 conference, the message was clear: customer experience has a hit a wall. The failure to understand what customers really want and deliver value has led to irrelevant experiences and disengaged customers. Across a total of 16 industries in the research firm’s latest U.S. Customer Experience Index, 81 percent of the brands have a stagnated customer experience.

The good news is with the right strategy, data insights, and a healthy dose of experimentation, companies can break through the wall to drive greater customer engagement and loyalty. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from the conference on how to do exactly that.

1. Think POST

While cutting-edge technology is a key driver of great customer experiences it isn’t the only component that matters when making a buying decision. “Too many firms don’t put the customer in the centre of their CX technology buying decisions. Or they’re not taking a holistic view of how the technology fits within the rest of the organisation.” Said Forrester Senior Analyst Faith Adams at a breakout session.

The result is a waste of resources and unsuccessful customer outcomes. Adams suggested the acronym POST (People, Objective, Strategy, Technology) as a smarter and more effective way to integrate technology into a company’s CX initiatives.

Kathy Schwartz, director of customer experience at pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur, shared additional tips for implementing a successful CX strategy. Being transparent in the RFP process about the sources of data that vendors would be asked to work with and asking them to demonstrate their capabilities quickly pares down the list, Schwartz said.

Also, defining the success metrics of the CX program early on is important. But “don’t overcommit to those metrics,” she advised. As the CX program matures, companies should remember that KPIs and priorities could change, so it’s also important to do regular assessments.

This article also covers:

1. Engage values-based consumers strategically

2. Unlock empathy by humanising data

3. Employee experience matters

Click here to continue reading the article.

At CallPageboy, it is important to us that your customers get the best customer service experience. Our technology allows us to respond to your needs quickly and effectively with 24 support.  Contact us today to see what we can do for you.

This article on the Best Customer Service Quotes was originally posted by Blake Morgan a keynote speaker and author of two books on customer experience on the 25th of April, 2019.

All over the internet there are customer service quotes, marketing quotes and sales quotes. Rarely do we see a round-up of quotes purely based on customer experience. This experience as a discipline has only grown in importance. Google searches on the phrase “customer experience” increasing steadily in the last few years. Growth IQ author Tiffani Bova recently shared a stat that Google searches of the phrase “customer experience” have nearly tripled in the last decade – and now the term hashtag #CX is at an all time high (2004-2019).

Customer Experience Quotes

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” – Jeff Bezos

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” – Warren Buffett

“CXM = The art and science of coaxing lifetime loyalty from daily transactions.” – Steve Curtin

“The customer’s perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” – Mark Zuckerberg

To continue reading more quotes click here.

At CallPageboy, we want to give your customers an excellent experience with your call centre. Check out how we can help improve your call centre to impress your customers and keep them coming back!

Excellent customer experience builds a foundation of loyalty and helps you to improve your customer retention. People are now looking for high quality products and services at the most affordable price. However, they are willing to pay more for the same products and services. Especially, if they feel the companies are providing extra value through excellent customer service.

What will an excellent customer experience do for your brand?

According to Forrester they define customer experience as ‘How customers perceive their interactions with your company’ If we focus on the word perceive we realise that just having an excellent customer experience is not just about what you do as a company or a brand but about how a customer perceives your brand based on all of their interactions with it over time. Every time a customer visits your website or contacts your service team, it will shape their perception of their experience. Nowadays, we are ‘always on’ and the smart companies see all of these interactions as an omni-channel approach. This helps them to shape customer experiences over time.

Let’s take two examples:

Let us consider two different experiences such as a ski holiday or an online clothes purchase. These will be different for each individual depending on the emotions they feel as a result of that experience. A ski holiday may be a thrilling and enjoyable experience for one person. However, it could be a terrifying experience for someone else who has a fear of heights or loss of control. As people our emotions are altered based on how these different interactions make us feel.

Most people will remember the emotions attached to an experience rather than the actual experience itself. However, how we perceive each interaction is also an important element when shaping our customer experience. For example; the online purchase of a new outfit may be enhanced for a customer if a brand can recall the customer’s previous online search activity and combine it with your profile data to present more suitable choices for you.

When you consider the companies that have achieved high levels of excellent customer experience, you can understand why they are reaping the rewards of this approach. The other thing that we should consider is that this is not only an external perception, but also an internal one. In a time when we are at almost zero unemployment, staff retention is key and good company culture is a key driver. If you have fostered a culture where your employees are valued, then they emanate this through their interactions with your customers. Even with advances through new technologies, such as robotics, the internet of things and artificial intelligence, there is still a need for human intervention and now more so than before your team are key within the chain of providing an excellent customer experience.

What business benefits will you experience?

• Increased customer loyalty
• Higher customer retention
• Reduced churn
• Higher lifetime customer value
• Greater brand equity
• Reduced costs of service

Research carried out by the Aberdeen Group has revealed that the world’s top performing businesses enjoy an average of over $300 million in incremental annual revenue as a result of their customer experience management initiatives. This study was based on companies that have an annual revenue of over 1 Billion. However, organisations of all sizes should expect to reap the benefits of customer experience excellence.

This article on Emerging Technologies was originally posted in CallCentre Helper a leading contact centre magazine in the US on Wednesday, January 16th, 2019.

1. Robotic Process Automation

How does Robotic Process Automation (RPA) work?

RPA mechanises each of the activities that are required to resolve a customer query from the contact centre, back office and beyond in the quickest time possible. By automating manual processes which are of a simple, transactional nature and require little (if any) subjective judgement the contact centre can give advisors other tasks, of greater value.

What benefits do these technologies bring to the contact centres?

The value of RPA is in making the workforce more efficient. These technologies also eradicates human errors in many processes, helping to prevent costly mistakes and consequently sustain high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty. RPA also frees employees from the burden of monotonous, repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on performing more enjoyable tasks. This increases employee engagement and leads to a better overall customer experience. Other key benefits of RPA include; automating updates and alerts, maintaining consistent customer communication and providing employee desktop support aids.

This article goes on to explain:

2. Passive Voice Biometrics

3. Internet of Things

4. Smart Desktops

5. Soft Phones

6. Wireless Headsets

7. Predictive Analytics

8. Mobile Screening

9. Chatbots

10. Cloud-Based Solutions

To continue ready here.

At CallPageboy, we use technology to help you with all your call centre needs. We will come up with a personal strategy to meet all your company’s needs in a call centre.

For too long contact centres have been seen as a ‘necessary evil’ as opposed to a ‘strategic advantage’ in business. However, due to changes in technology we are finally beginning to see a shift in a change of mindset. Why? 

In a market of full employment, culture and customer service are core to a businesses brand. The need for reliable customer service in a competitive business environment is a necessity. But in my view, another element that is really driving this change is the contact centres. They have the ability to deliver value to other departments within the business.

Just think about the value it can deliver to your sales, marketing, and back office teams. This is down to the vast amounts of information we can gather about your customers. Then it’s no wonder it has been instrumental in driving better customer service. Technology has enabled us gather, not just their demographics and account data, but also their wants and needs. In addition with the growth of artificial intelligence we are able to capture conversations. Which we then transform into insights on buying behaviours. This begins with in-depth analysis of cross-channel customer interactions. Enabling us to fully understand customers’ expectations, needs and wants, and how well it is responding to them. We can deliver this through interactions across all points of contact; phone, email, chat etc.

So, how does this translate into value for your various departments?

When you consider your sales department, it provides an understanding of how best to respond to your customers. Especially when you are up-selling or cross-selling. It then lets you know exactly who and when to offer your products and services to. Your marketing department can gather valuable information about how your customers feel and gain insights on your competitors. This allows you to adjust your campaigns on the fly to achieve a greater return on your investment.

With breakthroughs in real-time decision making and enhanced technology platforms, routine processes can be automated. Your back office team can be intuitively guided to achieve the best possible outcome in even the most complex interactions. It also ensures that human interaction does not deviate away from the policies and procedures that have been integrated into your processes. In the past, information like this has been impossible to obtain and act on without expending great effort or expense, hence the reasons that contact centres have developed such a bad name. But, by having it readily available and easily accessible companies can now substantially improve performance. Both at departmental and business-wide levels.

It’s a long road, but we are getting there.

Let’s be honest though, we still have work to do . . . a huge majority of call centres operate offshore in places like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines and South Africa as it provides businesses with a perceived economic advantage. Some may think that this is a good way of doing business, but in a lot of cases they are just large centres with a lot of bums on seats. Because of the locations, do they really carry out a needs analysis to assess whether or not they can support their partners with relevant solutions for the client.

In CallPageboy, we approach every customer in a similar fashion, whereby we gather information on industry experience, cultural fit, operational fit, technology fit and how we need to scale based on the opportunities we can deliver. The beauty is we never close, so 24/7 we are there for you gathering these insights to help you realise your long term strategic goals.

Our aim is stop being seen as a ‘necessary evil’ and to shift the dial so we become a strategic business partner. We can do this by becoming the conduit for valuable information for your various departments throughout your organisation.

This article on Artificial Intelligence was originally posted by Peter McGuire for the Irish Times on Thursday, March 7th, 2019.

Young people have stopped picking up the phone to complain. Instead, they’re increasingly likely to do business over web-chat, messenger or Twitter. As artificial intelligence advances, it’s likely we’ll all be chatting with even more automated and intelligent bots. Even if they appear on the surface like a human customer service agent.

In February, the CEO of Citigroup, Mike Corbat, suggested that “tens of thousands” of people who are currently working in their American bank centres are likely to be replaced by machines. A few days later, a report from two economists at University College Cork suggested that two in five Irish jobs might be supplanted by Artificial intelligence, with administration and customer service roles at particular risk, although another economist later suggested that their report was “overstated” and “fear-inducing.”

So what’s the reality for contact centre workers?

What jobs are at risk?

Dorothy O’Byrne is managing director of the Customer Contact Management Association (CCMA), which represents contact centre management and encourages knowledge sharing and continuous professional development in the sector. “Customer service has evolved with new social media and digital channels,” she says. “Less calls are being handled and there is a lot of messaging, web-chat and automation coming into contact centres. From our perspective, the industry is growing and thriving and the challenge is recruiting people. And as an industry, we embrace AI: it means that companies can do more in customer service. Using simpler, more transactional activities supported through tech and the higher value tasks handled by more skilled advisers. Our members see opportunities to up-skill staff to handle more complex queries.”

O’Byrne says that their members are already using technology to engage with and understand their customers. “Artificial intelligence can do incredible things but you need to use data to establish patterns and knowledge, and this means we need people with data analysis skills. So the roles might change, and the operations might become more sophisticated but, even with the advances to date, we haven’t seen significant job losses in the industry – indeed we’re seeing more recruitment, particularly at eir.”

This article goes on to explain:

• Changing Times: Web-chat and text
• New Technology: Introduction of AI
• Humans Still Want to Talk to other Humans
• Crunching the Numbers: Artificial Intelligence and Contact Centres in Ireland

To continue reading click here.

The phrases ‘cold calling’ and ‘outsourcing’ can send chills down the spines of many business people.  It’s often viewed as an intimidating, difficult, and a boring process. Because of this, they generally get ignored. However, outbound telemarketing campaigns can be a great way to reach new prospects. You have the option to communicate a message, gather feedback, and determine what the next step should be. In a normal process, somebody in sales should make hundreds of cold calls so they could set up appointments and generate leads, often with a low conversion rate. However, most sales people prefer to close sales and not instigate them, so outsourcing the task is never high on priority lists. Here are some tips when considering outsourcing your telemarketing to CallPageBoy:

We specialise

If cold calling is an effective way to introduce your company to new prospects, then don’t ignore it. Instead of getting your sales team to devote time to prospecting, why not use an outsourced telemarketing group like CallPageBoy to make a high volume of calls. This way we can find you the decision makers and provide quality leads for your own sales team. If you leave the prospecting to us, then your salespeople can spend all of their time selling and closing. Your company can produce more revenue in the same amount of time. Furthermore, your own sales team earn more commission, doing what they love, and they’re more satisfied with their jobs.

Estimate your call volume

In most cases, your call volume drives your headcount, software needs, phone system and the office space you’ll need.  If you’re thinking about outsourcing, these are the first questions we will ask:

• How many calls will we need to make and over what period?
• How long is the campaign and do we just need to call a certain number of potentials or is it an ongoing initiative?
• Are we calling into different time zones?
• Are there certain days of the week, month or year that are most important when making calls?
• If you were making the calls, then how many calls you can complete in an hour?

This way we’ll have a basic estimate on the number of calls and hours we will need. Remember that it’s tough to get decision makers on the phone. A good sales person may only have a handful of quality conversations each hour and everything else is usually a callback.

Budget for everything

Don’t forget the incidentals as these are costs that can sneak up on you. If your budget is skyrocketing, it becomes harder to generate a return. These are the considerations that we need to make:

• Headcount
• Headsets & phones
• Workstations
• Long distance charges
• Extra phone lines
• Software licenses
• Bonuses and incentives
• Management

Develop a good script

We can work with you to develop good scripts that we will keep fine-tuning. We need to capture peoples attention, build value, and close; a good script will help us do it consistently.

• We will make your scripts conversational, simple, and focused on the end goal.
• It helps if you listen to calls as we are developing and refining your script. What looks good on paper may not work on the phone.
• Get feedback from your team as well.

We make it fun

Telemarketing is a tough job and turnover is a big issue. We aim to keep the energy high and our team are never bored or unhappy. Believe it or not, it comes through in their voice.

This article on CX was originally posted by Peter Dorrington for TTEC on April 5th, 2019.

We’re experiencing an explosion of choices. The digitalisation of industries allows consumers to source nearly anything they want from anywhere in the world. For example, this has led to the commoditisation of most products and services. As a result, companies need new ways to connect with their customers and differentiate themselves from the competition. Enter emotions. I’ll explain why emotions play a vital role in driving excellent customer experiences (CX).

Customer engagement is emotional engagement

As I explained in my recent CX Workshop, “Customer Experience, It’s How You Make Me Feel,” in today’s world more choice often means more complexity, and humans always try to simplify complexity. However, this gave rise to many goods and services becoming commodities with few differences in product quality. The ease of access and ‘on demand’ services also weakened customer loyalty. What’s more, measures of satisfaction are no longer predictive. Therefore, we need to understand customers better so as to deliver tailored, personalised experiences. Our perception of an experience is complex, being driven by past emotions and social norms. Logic and feelings are how you judge experiences. And what a consumer takes away or recalls from an experience will drive their next decision with your company. Therefore, it’s critical to understand how emotions can drive an exceptional CX program.

The heart of the customer experience

Humans hate complexity, they’re looking for simplification. What that means for many organisations is don’t offer customers more confusing choices, make the decision process simpler for them. For example, highlight the key differences between similar products or explain how the products complement other products. Saving time for the customer by simplifying the selection process creates value and can generate positive emotions. What else can companies do to leverage the power of emotions in driving better customer experiences?

Read more…

At Call Pageboy, we can to help with your CX. Contact us today!

Every company has goals for their business. One of these is, more often than not, to increase their overall revenue each year. However, in order for companies to do this, they need to ensure that their customer and client database are satisfied with their products and services. However, to get their customers to this stage, they need to have an effective lead generation strategy. Most individuals are unaware of the role that call scripts play in generating and nurturing a lead to the point. This is where they become a loyal customer.

When most people think of call scripts they often imagine a call agent sitting at a desk and reading from a generic piece of paper. This is far from the truth. Call scripts have proven to be extremely useful tools for lead generation. By having the right resources and understanding the needs of the potential customer, a call agent can provide a positive customer experience from the first point of contact.

Benefits of Call Scripts

Used as part of a lead generation strategy, a call script can:

• Provide consistency –
  • Having a call script ensures that a customer will receive the same quality of response. This service provision regardless of which agent answers the phone. These call scripts are crafted specifically for each company and ensures that each customer has the same experience with your company and brand.
• Increase satisfaction and loyalty –
  • When agents understand the change in customer service industry, it means that the agents have been efficiently trained. In addition, it will have the appropriate knowledge to effectively communicate with customers across a range of channels such as social media, live chat and over the phone. This in turn will lead to increased levels of loyalty and satisfaction among customers.
• Increase in-house productivity –
  • A call script can be incorporated into your CRM and IVR systems, allowing call agents to easily access customer information and therefore, respond to their needs more efficiently.
• Relate to real customer experiences –
  • Over time, by listening and understanding your customers, a call centre can adapt real life experiences scenarios. Their call scripting meaning that they can truly empathise with customers and provide them with a positive customer experience.

At Call Pageboy our aim is generate quality leads for our clients to ensure more sales and ultimately, more revenue. Our lead generation services include call scripting, appointment setting, data collection and diary management by an expert sales team. If you are interested in learning more about our call centre services, please don’t hesitate to contact us here.

This article on branding was originally posted by Datamark on September 19th, 2018.

It’s no secret; technology runs the world. It is intertwined with almost every single one of our daily functions and tasks. It helps run our personal, professional and social lives. The world of technology is both fascinating and complex. It is also extremely competitive. In order to remain relevant amongst a myriad of brands, companies need to craft a competitive niche and build reliance with its customers. Branding is vital in the technology sector. Consumers want to have trust and confidence in the brands they interact with.

That is why companies do not need the distraction of having to design, build, and maintain an in-house contact centre. This time-consuming task leaves little to no time for brand enhancement. But branding isn’t simply placing your logo and design on your product. Yes, product recognition is important, but having it be synonymous with great customer service is equally as important. Outsourcing your contact centre can alleviate that problem for your company.

Meeting with clients

Meeting with the client is the usual protocol throughout much of the outsourcing industry. But at DATAMARK, Inc., we take the time to truly engage with our clients in order to genuinely understand their brand and core values. The client’s culture is important to grasp in order to develop business processes that fit their needs and wants. DATAMARK allocates time to partake in the company’s culture to properly apply it across the complete customer journey.

A visible presence

At DATAMARK’s contact centers, your brand’s visibility is important. Our dedicated agents, or agents solely dedicated to the operation of your contact center, will have visual representation of your brand. Humans are visual beings. Allowing your brand to have a visual presence inside our contact centers is important for the full-representation of your company.

Read more…

Call Pageboy can help you company with clients. Contact us today!

This article about customer service was originally posted by Michelle A. Shell and Ryan W.Buell for HBR on April 15th, 2019.

When people feel anxious, it’s human nature to turn to others for help. For example, an apprehensive taxpayer might want guidance from an IRS agent in interpreting a new tax law. A distressed patient might want to speak with a nurse when making sense of his blood test results. This type of behaviour is quite common. Yet many companies in high-anxiety settings – like financial services and healthcare – are funnelling nervous customers to self-service technologies (“SSTs”) – kiosks, websites, and smartphone apps – isolating them at the precise moment when they’re most keen for connection. It is clear that these technologies are a less expensive customer service option to offer than human support. But what’s less clear is the toll these self-service interactions may take on customers. Is it an effective way of helping customers deal with their concerns? Or is it exacerbating customer anxiety and doing long-term damage to customer service relationships?

In our research, we set out to understand these questions. Through two lab experiments and one field experiment conducted in financial services, we found that anxious customers interacting through self-service technology feel dissatisfied with their decisions even when those decisions appear aligned with their goals. Their dissatisfaction reduced their trust in the service provider. But our results also reveal how a simple, and surprisingly low-cost, change – offering access to a readily-available human – can reverse the negative effects of customer anxiety.

The domino effect of customer anxiety

We set our research in the financial service industry because it is riddled with uncertainty and complex decision-making known to provoke anxiety and distress for its customers. In our first experiment, we simply wanted to understand how situational anxieties – those outside of the company’s control – can crossover to affect the way customers feel about their service providers.

Read more…

At Call Page, we can help with your customer service. Contact us today!

When businesses think of outsourcing services to a call centre, they often presume that this just involves services that handle overflow call volumes, after hours support and diary management. While this is true, many are unaware of the fulfilment services that they can also avail of.

Outsourcing these services can be extremely beneficial for a company. Regardless ,if you are or are not already using a call centre service provider. During periods of the year when customer demand may be higher such as the Christmas or summer periods, a fulfilment service will both store and dispatch all your company material eliminating the need for you to.

What benefits does fulfilment offer?

A fulfilment service offers the following benefits to companies:

• Provides flexibility – Allowing a third party call centre to store and dispatch materials such as welcoming packs, marketing materials, brochures and application forms means that your company no longer has to get bogged down by storage issues and manual handling. This ultimately gives you more time to focus on the aspects of your business that matter most.
• Reduces costs – Without the worry of handling fulfilment services, this will cut down on in-house expenses tremendously. For example, you will not need extra staff, storage space, utilities, moving equipment or packing supplies. Outsourcing means that you are only paying for certain services rather than incurring unnecessary overhead costs.
• Provides access to improved technology – A call centre has access to the latest technological improvements in software and hardware machinery. By outsourcing these services, you ensure that your company’s database, inventory and shipments are kept up to date.

At Call Pageboy Contact Centre, our dedicated fulfilment department responds to your customers needs and requirements either via post or email within minutes of them getting in contact. We integrate our email system with yours so that our agents can reply to your customers directly from your domain. For postage requests, we dispatch all order from our storage space and ensure all customers next day delivery. If you would like to know more about the services that we offer, please don’t hesitate to contact us today.

This article about omnichannel customer service was originally posted by Amanda Roosa for Zendesk on February 25th, 2019.

Omnichannel is the new buzzword in the customer service industry. Everyone is trying to get a piece of the action. However, is this hype real, and do you need to become the next expert in it? In layman’s terms, an omnichannel solution integrates all your customer service channels in one place. This maintains context and end siloed conversations. It also allows your team to quickly reference who the customer is, what conversations they’ve had and what they may have bought from you in the past. In short, yes, omnichannel is all that, and more. But how do you know when it’s time to switch to omnichannel customer service? If you’re wondering whether you’re in need of an omnichannel customer service solution, below are some tips on what you should look out for:

Omnichannel: Low agent capacity and/or overworked agents

Is your ticket volume increasing? Are your agents feeling overworked and stressed out? No matter your agent capacity, if your agents are inundated with emails, calls, and inquiries, and feeling overloaded, something needs to change. In the world of customer service, there’s nothing more stressful than your ticket backlog rising due to a lack of resources. If your agents are constantly switching between channels, user interfaces and unable to communicate and collaborate in real time. There are serious consequences—think low CSAT, low ASAT, and a general lack of support efficiency.

Service is inconsistent across channels

Another telltale sign you need to integrate your customer service channels: if your team is delivering inconsistent support across channels. Does your customer service have customers repeat their issues when customer transferred? Or, say a customer emails you about an issue, doesn’t receive a response, and now they’re calling you but you have no idea they already emailed you. Customers don’t know which channel to trust and in an age of distrust in companies, that’s a mistake companies can’t afford to make.

Read more…

At Call Pageboy, we offer omnichannel services. Find out more here.

This article about pharmaceutical companies was originally posted by Datamark.net on September 12th 2018.

For public health to continue to progress and improve, pharmaceutical companies need to invest their time, money and efforts in what they do best; developing medicine by completing the necessary research for effective treatment. However, their primary focus is on scientific advancement. Not in worrying about establishing a functioning contact centre for their customer care. By establishing an outsourced partnership, pharmaceutical companies can gain multiple benefits for their company. Here are a few reasons why pharmaceutical companies should consider an outsourced contact centre.

Provided training, facilities, and technology

An outsourced contact centre is an alternative to an in-house contact centre. For pharmaceutical companies looking to provide an exemplary customer experience. Because outsourcers provide the training, facilities, and technology needed for great customer care, pharmaceutical companies can keep their focus on medical advancement and not on developing call centre agents to properly handle their customer care. The facilities and technology expenses are covered by the outsourcer by spreading it across multiple clients, keeping the pharmaceutical company’s costs relatively low.

Trust that your brand and product will be well represented

Outsourced contact centres employ highly trained and experienced agents. The agents can be trusted handling the company’s brand and product. Agents are trained to be an ambassador of a brand, continuously creating favourable experiences for the customer. Agents at outsourced contact centres are trained by expert management and support staff in quality assurance by using the most trusted and modern technology and methods, improving the quality of service the customers receive.

Read more…

Our call centre can help many types of companies. Read more here.

This article was originally posted by Shaista Haque for Ameyo.com on September 22.

Read more…

At Call Pageboy, we can help with many types of companies. Contact us today!

This article was originally posted by Mansi Bhatia for Ameyo.com on March 13 2019.

Are you still in two-minds about whether your business really needs self-service support since you already cater to most of the channels such as an email, voice and even social media to some extent? Well, the answer is simple – Yes and for good reason. Self-service usage increased from 67% in 2012 to 76% in 2014 (Forrester). Which is only going to increase with the changing times. The millennials, also known as the digital natives are tech-savvy and rather comfortable with finding and implementing the solutions on their own, without seeking help.

If we go by this logic, then offering self-service support not just makes sense but is actually the need of the hour. Having said that, how should be the businesses incorporate it into their customer support strategy? By having a helpdesk software which comes with an array of self-service options. Let us look at some of the ways to offer self-service support to your customers as well as the agents with helpdesk software.

#1. Customer Portal for Ticket Management

A customer portal is basically the go-to place for customers to request services or raise support tickets. Having an effective customer portal significantly reduces the workload of the agents as the customers are now able to raise a ticket and even follow up on the same using the portal. This in turn also help in improving the brand reputation. To further instil a sense of authenticity and add credibility to the portal, it is always a good idea to align its look and feel according to the overall theme of your brand. Such as using the same colour scheme and adding the brand logo.

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Recognised as the digital-savvy generation, millennials are categorised as individuals who were born between the early 1980’s and mid 1990’s. They are a generation of hyper-connected, tech-savvy and busy multitaskers who seek convenience from the brands they interact with. They see themselves as self-expressive individuals who can influence fellow millennial purchasing behaviours by sharing their personal experiences. Statistics show that as high a number as 40% of Millennials refer to online reviews and testimonials before purchasing a product.

Millennials are important to businesses because millennials have the most spending power. Therefore, it is necessary for companies to adapt to this generation’s preferences. In order to stay relevant and maintain their position in the market. And the biggest shift in preferences that companies have seen and will continue to see over the years is in the customer service arena as millennial expectations appear to be quite different than those of generations past.

Companies must realise that they need to adapt and become the business millennials want to interact with and purchase from. They need to become more flexible, and provide a more personal, seamless and responsive omni-channel customer experience. In order to please this powerhouse of a generation. In order to get a better understanding of how to please this age cohort, one must be aware of their expectations. Also, how they are redefining customer service:

Self-Service Generation

Having grown up well and truly into the Information Age, and during a time when advancements to the internet and technology were progressing, millennials have been used to having access to easily available information. As a result they tend to have a “Self-Service” approach to customer service. Hunting information and searching FAQ’s and online communities before contacting a company directly. Therefore, companies should show they respect the opinions of millennials and have as much product/service and company information as possible directly on their websites in order to reduce the need for customers to contact them directly. This in turn will benefit the company, as their agents will have more time to deal with the complex  customer service issues.

Millennials Prefer Personalisation

In comparison to previous generations, millennials are more trusting and willing to share their personal information. In order to have a more personalised customer experience. Relevance is very important to millennials. When they contact your customer support, they expect you to know their service history. Also, provide a customer service experience that it not generic, but relevant to them. For a business, this means ensuring you have an intelligent CRM system updated with customer details. You can impress millennials with your knowledge of their needs.

You Should Have Brand Engagement on Social Media

As social media is second nature to millennials,  they expect brands to have a presence across all social platforms. According to Microsoft’s State of Global Customer Service Report, about 47% of millennials have previously used social media to voice their opinions about a negative brand experience. Companies need to recognise that social media is a customer service platform and utilise it to respond to their unhappy customers. In order to maintain customer satisfaction levels and keep their brand image intact.

Fast Response Times are Crucial

Millennials want fast responses when they reach out to customer service. Time is of the essence for this generation who are always on the go, they don’t like to waste time. In a call or live chat queue waiting to speak to a customer service representative. Similarly if they reach out to you on social media, they expect you to respond in a fast nature. In addition recent research suggests that no single KPI has a bigger impact on customer satisfaction than first-call resolution. Millennials do not want to be transferred to another agent while talking to customer service because it takes up more valuable time.

As a result, companies need to have adequate staff working. This to ensure they can answer all customer queries in an efficient manner. Segmentation of the different customer service topics and queries should be in place to ensure that a customer is connected to an agent who is trained and knowledgeable in the field of the query, reducing the need to be transferred.

Omni-Channel Support is Imperative

Millennials tend to prefer alternative forms of contact over phone calls.  As mentioned above, social media is a huge part of their daily lives, along with messaging apps. They show preference to forms of customer service that are instant and mobile, allowing them to respond quickly wherever they may be. Therefore it’s important to make sure your business offers a consistent and seamless customer support service across all devices.

Call Pageboy Contact Centre understands the importance of providing high quality, omni-channel customer service. We offer a range of customer support services. These help businesses in their goal of providing a seamless, hassle free customer experience journey. If you would like to know more about the services that we offer, and how we can help your business, get in contact with us today.

This article was originally posted by Ameyo.com.

There has been a lot of buzz around Customer Experience (CX) emerging as the key differentiator. A driver for growth and sustenance in consumer industry. But, what exactly is customer experience and what makes it great? Gartner defines it as “the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels or products.” Forrester Research defines it as: “How customers perceive their interactions with your company.” Clearly the two basic elements of the definition are perception and interaction.

To simply put CX is how a customer perceives the brand through all the interactions across the customer life cycle. In the modern digital era, customers are well-informed and hyper connected than ever. With a growing number of communication channels, brands are increasingly turning to technology platforms as a way to improve customer experience across channels.

Customer Experience vs Customer Service

A great customer experience begins with a warm greeting from highly trained and knowledgeable call centre agents. Employee training is key. In recent years, the expectation of customer service provision has increased greatly. With numerous ways to get in touch with a company and continuous developments in communication technology. Customer satisfaction has become harder to achieve. However, call agent can have a huge influence on how a customer views a company. Likewise, if your customer has an enjoyable interaction with a call agent, they are more likely to return in the future. If they receive a bad experience then you run the risk of losing a customer.

Therefore it is hugely important for a business to invest in employee training. Making sure that call agents have the knowledge and skills needed to provide customers with the level of service. They deserve can have a big impact on the overall reputation of a company. It’s important during the training process to make sure that call agents:

• Employee Training: Have a great attitude –

  • When you think about customer service agents, you imagine someone who has a friendly demeanour and a smile on their face, day in and day out. In addition. ensuring call centre agents display a positive attitude and outlook. When interacting with customers is essential to making sure that customers will receive a positive customer service experience when communicating with your company.

• Customer Service: Have the appropriate product and service knowledge –

  • There is nothing more frustrating for a customer than having their call answered by a call agent who is unable to answer their question. By providing high quality client specific training, call centre agents become experts. Experts in your business and can provide your customers with the correct support and help that they need.

• Know how to display effective communication skills –

  • Top notch communication skills is vital for working in a call centre environment. Training ensures that call agents know the correct way to handle an array of customer service scenarios. But, each company will receive communication from customers who are disgruntled as well as satisfied with services and products. Call centre agents are trained to understand the customer’s needs, listen patiently, respond in a clear and warm tone. Provide an effective solution to your customer’s problem while ensuring customer satisfaction during each interaction with the company.

• Understand the correct escalation procedure –

  • Agent training outlines the correct escalation procedures that should be taken by call centre agents. If the situation arises that a call agent is unable to resolve a customer’s query, they will be able to transfer the customer to the correct department without hesitation to ensure that the customer receives the appropriate support that they need.

• Show a willingness to constantly improve –

  • Customer service provision is constantly changing and developing. A call centre agent needs to be flexible to change and know how to adapt new customer service practices to meet customer needs. A high quality training program provides call agents with the skills to work towards targets and KPIs to ensure that business goals are met. By undertaking ongoing training and feedback, a call agent can ensure that their performance levels and standards are kept high.

Call Pageboy firmly believes that each call centre agent plays an integral part in delivering high quality call centre services. To sum up, to ensure that our client’s customer is kept at the heart of everything we do, we focus heavily employee training, encouraging and motivating our call centre agents to excel at their roles. In short, Call Pageboy provides an initial induction programme and continuous training and feedback to our team through weekly meetings and quarterly training programs. If you are looking for a new career opportunity, check out our online careers page or get in contact with us today to see how we can help you elevate your career today!

This article on virtual receptionist was originally posted by Gemma Harding for Callcare247.com on October 31, 2018.

In a recent survey by Liberis, the concerns and aspirations of 200 UK SMEs for business growth in the coming year were clearly spelled out. What do SMEs need – and how can a virtual receptionist help them to achieve this? First let’s look at the challenges SME business owners are facing.

What do SMEs need?

• 58% of SME business owners say their main priority is to reduce costs
• Competition is seen as the greatest challenge that businesses face
• 39% are looking to grow their business in the coming year
• The two things that most wish to achieve are a healthy work-life balance (28%) and the ability to reduce wasted time by planning ahead (17%)

How can a virtual receptionist help your business overcome these challenges?

Focus on Growth – Not being able to see the wood for the trees doesn’t quite describe one of the main barriers to business growth. The real challenge is not being able to escape the present to plan for the future. Those phone calls and that admin can constantly distract you from the pressing need to plan for growth. A key benefit of a virtual receptionist is taking you away from the front line. They provide the space you need to focus on growth. They can help you maintain a healthy work-life balance by reducing ‘wasted’ time and allowing you to plan ahead.

Give Yourself the Edge – Customer service can be the key differential in winning customers. And it is certainly the main tool you can leverage to retain customers. It costs around five times more to sell to a new prospect than to sell to an existing customer who previously enjoyed the buying experience. Ensuring you offer a better customer experience than your competitors is critical. Virtual receptionists are faultlessly professional, trained call handlers. They offer impeccable customer service. In a business environment that is characterised by the threat of competitors, gaining the edge on the customer service you offer may help you reach the tipping point to secure that sale.

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For many businesses, Christmas can be the busiest time of the year. As always, strategic planning is hugely important but even more so in the run up to this particular season. Most companies will hire additional staff to cover the festive season. But if it’s extra customer support that is required, outsourcing to a call centre could be the answer to a company’s problems. Doing so will not only alleviate stress and pressure on in-house staff. Ensuring that loyal customers have their queries resolved, and new customers can have their calls answered, increasing the sales opportunities for the business. Here are some of the many reasons why you should outsource your customer support during the Christmas holidays:

Christmas Call Volume Prediction

Trying to predict call volumes can be very difficult for any business during the Christmas season. There can be periods of extreme high call volume and periods of the complete opposite. Your business will be unprepared because you can not make accurate predictions of call volume.  A call centre however, has the experience, expertise and technology. This to accurately predict these fluctuations and be able to respond effectively.

Alleviates Staff Shortage Concerns

During times of high volume, handling calls quickly and efficiently is essential. Many businesses will hire additional seasonal staff to meet these high demands. It is cost ineffective for your business to hire additional seasonal staff.  As they still have to pay the staff during the slow periods when they might not be needed. With a call centre, there is a large number of agents readily available to meet company demands. Agents will only be assigned to a business on an on-needed basis.

Ensures Efficiency

As mentioned above, it is important to handle customer queries and complaints as resourcefully and efficiently as possible, to ensure customer satisfaction. Call centres have the capacity to offer support over a range of platforms such as phone, email and digital communications. This ability to offer omni-channel solutions means they can quickly deal with customers based on the level of service they require.

Christmas Aids Customer Retention

It’s cheaper to retain customers than it is to acquire new customers and so while seeking new sales opportunities is always important, so too is maintaining current customer satisfaction. Outsourcing customer service means that customers receive the attention and special care they deserve that the otherwise too busy in-house staff might not necessarily be able to give them, ensuring that they keep spending their money with the business.

CallPageboy contact centre provides customer-centric services to a range of different industries. Our call centre technology ensures that a business maintains desired customer care service levels while also reducing company costs. Our expert call agents work across all communication channels including telesales, email and social media in order to solve customers’ issues, 24/7 365 days a year, ensuring customers’ queries are never left unanswered. The holiday season is there to be enjoyed, and a business owner can enjoy them fully when they know that their businesses customer service is still running smoothly while they are relaxing. For more information on how we can help your business, get in contact with us with today.

This article about pharmaceuticals was originally posted by Tanya Bansal for Ameyo.com on October 31, 2018.

This article was originally posted by Datamark.net on June 16, 2017.

With deregulation of markets in many areas across the U.S., competition is heating up for players in the utilities sector. Electricity, gas and water providers are competing on the basis of costs, eco-friendly production and customer service. Building efficient production and delivery systems and finding green energy sources are the core competencies of utilities. Customer care may be best when it is placed in the hands of a specialty provider. Here’s four reasons why it makes sense to turn this function over to an outsourcing partner:

1. Outsourcing helps manage the costs of customer care.

Utility providers are experts in building electrical, gas and water infrastructure and delivering supplies to customers. But customer care may not be a core competency, and it can be costly to set up an in-house contact centre. You need to invest in facilities, telecommunication and network infrastructure, desks and cubicles, and computer stations. You need to establish HR recruiting and training teams, and a budget for salaries and benefits…and the list goes on.

It makes better sense to turn the customer care function over to a specialist provider. Who has already made the investment in facilities and infrastructure, and who can handle hiring and training of staff. Your costs become transactional and controlled by contractual agreements, which can make annual and long-term budgeting and planning easier. Good cost management, including transparency of cost factors is also helpful when the time comes to explain rate increase requests to regulators and customers.

2. As more competitors enter the utilities sector, customer care becomes a differentiating factor.

Deregulation of the industry has opened the doors for more competitors. Electricity providers, for example, will battle for a big share of the market by establishing themselves as leaders in low rates, reliability, eco-friendliness and customer service.

Delivering reliable, efficient power through various means is a utility’s core competency, but customer care is often better left in the hands of an experienced specialist provider. Utilities should find a contact centre services provider that understands the industry and is prepared to handle account creation, billing inquiries, power outage reports and other issues 24 hours a day in a professional and friendly manner.

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This article about customer service was originally posted by Infinit Contact on June 29, 2016.

Providing exceptional customer service nowadays requires businesses to not only have the ability to collect real-time data, but to respond to it in real time, too. Access is important, but that’s just the beginning. This is because data is meaningless without the real-time responses that customers demand. If you want to be ahead of the competition in terms if customer service, real-time data should be coupled with real -time response as often as necessary. It’s increasingly becoming the main differentiator that will set you apart from mediocre brands.

Here are three real-time data strategies you can implement today that will engender customer loyalty and long term success.

1. Customer Service Decipher context clues when analysing real-time data.

Knowing what your customer is doing now is not nearly enough. You should look within the context of the bigger picture. This helps you piece together what the appropriate response is at that precise moment. This means that you need to be familiar with your client’s past actions. What they did before you arrived at this point.

For example, for a specific customer complaint, you’d be dealing with the issue differently. If the same customer had called about the same complaint three times before in the past week, compared to someone calling for the first time. It would help to get as much data as you can from various sources. Collecting as much historical context on a specific issue will inform how you’ll resolve it for each specific case.

2. Use data from mobile and social media to move swiftly.

Businesses are now privy to real-time data, thanks to mobile and social media. It’s the closest thing to having someone personally tell you what a customer is up to at any given moment. This is a goldmine of data that you can use to help you decide what your next marketing strategy will be, but you need to respond fast. Using what you know in real-time will give you a real edge, considering that the latest research says that 75% of people expect a customer service response via social media within one hour.

Monitoring social media will give you a sense of what your clients are thinking and doing at the moment. If you also know the details of your business operations, you can use this to make critical decisions that will impact the bottom line. From product inventory to new product pushes to launching new campaigns, you can integrate real-time data with marketing strategies that align with your business goals and sales projections.

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We can help with your customer service. Contact us today!

Here at Call Pageboy Call Centre we are delighted to announce that we have recently been awarded the ISO 27001 certification. While we already have the ISO 9001 certification, we are delighted to have been awarded the latest 27001. The 27001 international standard relates to how we as a company manage the security risks associated with the holding of our clients confidential information. By being awarded this certification, we can prove to our clients and other stakeholders that we are managing the security of their information to this globally recognised high standard. In addition, the ISO 27001 standard provides a framework for information security management best practice that helps organisations comply with regulations such as the European Union General Data Protection Regulation.

What are the ISO Standards?

The International Organisation for Standardisation is a worldwide federation that promotes and develops the facilitation of the international exchange of goods and services. The standards ensure that products and services around the world are safe, reliable and of good quality. The ISO has a number of standards covering almost every industry from technology, to food safety, to agriculture and healthcare. The ISO 27001 standard, as mentioned above is directly related to the management of the security of assets such as financial information, intellectual property, employee details or information entrusted to us by third parties. It can help small, medium and large businesses in any sector keep information assets secure.

Benefits of Achieving the ISO 27001 Standard:

While there are a number of internal benefits for us as a company being awarded this accreditation, it is our customers who reap the most rewards. Having the accreditation allows us to:

• Keep our customers confidential information secure
• Provide customers and stakeholders with confidence in how we manage risk
• Allow for secure exchange of information
• Enhance customer satisfaction
• Consistency in the delivery of our service
• Manage and minimise risk exposure
• Build a culture of security within the company
• Protect the company, assets, shareholders and directors

We are delighted to have achieved this accreditation and combined with the ISO 9001 standard we already hold we are proud that are dedication to provide our customers with the best possible call centre service has been successful.

This article on customer experience was originally posted by Vandita Grover for Martech Advisor on July 24, 2018.

As the lines between offline and online are blurring, store retailers and online retailers are both redefining the way they function to engage customers and create better experiences for them. Amalgamation of online and offline marketing strategies makes purchasing more rewarding and easier for the customer. Listed below are 5 ways online and offline customer experience are coming together:

1. Online/Offline Framework

Brick and mortar stores have invested in creating better store experiences. For instance, Walmart has combined the online and offline experiences of customers. You can order a product and check if it is available at a store near you for pickup, even if it isn’t, you can still order, and have it shipped to your local Walmart, ready to be picked up, free of cost.

Similarly, online retailers are also toying with the idea of opening up physical stores at select locations for their customers who prefer to pick the products themselves. In January 2018, Amazon opened its first cashier-less grocery store, Amazon Go in Seattle. You can simply waltz into the shop with Amazon app on your phone, pick up items and walk out without worrying about checking out or paying up. You would be billed via your Amazon account. A cool idea that saves your time standing in a queue and lets you handpick your grocery items.

2. Data Harvesting to Understand the Customer Journey

Nowadays companies are gathering data from all possible sources to gain insights into their customer base. The more customer data you have, the better you can analyse and research how offline and online customer journeys are correlated. The data you can harvest comes from your web traffic (session duration, most visited pages, visitor acquisition, keyword rankings etc.), social media analytics, email surveys and analytics, retail foot-fall (store visits), online or offline queries, coupons or vouchers used, time spent on mobile app and much more.

Warby Parker – a digital-first – eyewear frames brand has opened numerous brick and mortar stores in an era where retail is struggling to stand on its feet. Warby Parker gathers information on where their customers are, where they work or travel, population density, number of eyeglass customers and pre-existing customers in an area before deciding on their store locations. Reviewing data points of customer behaviour, tracking user (anonymous) movement from cell carriers and proprietary statistical algorithms assist the brand to figure out a lot about the best place and people to target with the best strategy.

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This article was originally posted by Chris Theriault for ICMI on March 8, 2017.

Contact Centres, as an industry, have been around since the advent of telephony technology.  That technological era has also enabled us to measure and track contact centre activity quite accurately.  For too many years, contact centres were focused on operating contact centres as efficiently as possible, not providing outstanding customer experience. Our early ability to track and measure activity resulted in a series of metrics being adopted to monitor the overall contact centre performance. These traditional metrics include average handle time, average wait time, occupancy, idle time, and service level among others. These metrics largely have a philosophical basis in Fredrick Taylor’s “The Principles of Scientific Management”, which still have a certain degree of operational relevance.  Even though managing to those metrics resulted in running contact centres efficiently (and thus became the new norm to benchmark against), it also resulted in contact centres blindly managing to those metrics alone, without any analysis of how they are servicing and satisfying their customers’ expectations today. In true Fredrick Taylor style, we still will find those same metrics present in most dashboards and reports used today.

But what about measuring customer experience?

The issue with traditional metrics is that they are largely inward facing to a company. Customer service has evolved since those early days and the relevance of traditional metrics have waned in the current age of customer engagement. It is a fair question to now ask if these traditional metrics still make sense as the benchmark?

Today, contact centres increasingly understand the importance of providing excellent service to their customers, and as a result, they are adopting a customer-centric engagement approach. All aspects of customer contact need to be weighed for effectiveness and striking the perfect balance to maintain a continuous relationship. For organisations to compete and differentiate themselves, departments such as marketing, sales and customer service must coordinate their varying points of contact across all channels – not to inundate the recipient, but to strategically keep the relationship alive.

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Growth is the key to success for any business. Without it, a business cannot keep up with its competitors in the industry and will ultimately fail. There are a number of ways a small business can grow and a virtual receptionist service is one of the most simple, offering a number of opportunities for growth: 

Provides 24/7 Support – A virtual receptionist gives a business the ability to provide support to their customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It allows customers to have their queries answered in real time, showing customer appreciation which in turn increases customer satisfaction. This superior customer service and increased customer satisfaction should result in positive word of mouth marketing, allowing you to get a step ahead of your competitors and ultimately experience business growth.

Cost Effective – Outsourcing your virtual reception services will help save the business money. The cost of a full time employee and all the expenses that accompany them such as paid time-off, healthcare, training, resources etc can weigh heavily on a growing business. Outsourcing is a fraction of the price, thus allowing you to reinvest the money you save into growing your business.

Increased Productivity – Without a receptionist (or virtual receptionist), employees are forced to take time out of their duties to answer the phone. This interrupts the flow of work, wasting valuable time and decreasing productivity of the team. By outsourcing a virtual receptionist service, you could eliminate these distractions, allowing your team to focus on their daily tasks which would help the core of the business and its future growth.

Helps Generate Leads – Your business’ ability to grow depends on its ability to attract leads and convert them into customers. This is something which can’t be done unless all phone calls are answered, no matter what time of the day, to nurture potential leads. Similarly, phone calls need to be given the appropriate attention in order for the customers query to be answered, something which often isn’t done by pre-occupied in-house staff.

Call Pageboy Call Centre’s virtual receptionist service ensures that your customers receive the highest level of service at all times while adding to customer satisfaction, loyalty and overall customer retention for your business. Our call agents use a variety of methods such as call patching, SMS texting and email integration to ensure that your customers have all of their queries answered in a friendly and professional manner. Our expert call agents work across all communication channels 24/7 365 days a year, ensuring your customers’ queries are never left unanswered. For more information on how we can help your business grow, get in contact with us with today.

The concept of disruption is interesting. If you ask most business people to name a company that is known for being a disrupter, you’ll hear answers like Amazon, Uber and Walmart.

Walmart disrupted local businesses when they came into a community. Uber disrupted the taxi-cab industry. And, Amazon started out disrupting bookstores and eventually moved on to disrupting the entire retail world.

While the companies just mentioned are household names, you don’t have to be a big company to disrupt. You can be a tiny company. Disruption is not about disrupting an industry. It’s about disrupting your competition. Doing something that is so noticeable that it pulls customers to you. So, here are five ways you can compete – and disrupt – your competition:

1. Stop comparing yourself to your competitors – This is a big one. Start comparing yourself to the best customer service companies you do business with. Today’s customers know what great customer service looks like. The companies and individuals who deliver amazing service set the benchmark for everyone.
2. Be amazing on social media – Social media is meant to be social. And, when it comes to customer service, it’s not just about responding to complaints. It’s an extension of your marketing and allows you to connect with your “community. It’s an extension of your marketing. Be appropriately bold and visible.
3. Respond quickly to every customer inquiry or comment – A quick response time can make a customer say, “Wow!” It shows you care, that you’re paying attention and that you want to do business. A quick response time creates confidence, which is one of the keys to creating customer loyalty.

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The idea of standard business hours has become a thing of the past especially for customer oriented companies. Having an after hours call service can be an invaluable advantage for your business especially for those companies who may not have the internal resources available to provide their customers with round the clock support.

It has become the norm for customers to expect your business to provide support services at all times. An after hours answering service can offer your business the ability to provide a high level of customer service across numerous channels such as email, SMS, social media and more.

Below are some of the advantages businesses experience by using an outsourced after hours call service:

• High level of customer satisfaction –

  • Being able to support your customers with any query and provide them with a solution goes a long way. When it comes to ensuring a high level of customer service and satisfaction. This is especially true for those customers who may not have the opportunity to contact you during business hours. This is due to working themselves or for those who prefer to research at night. After hours support services ensures that they are accommodated at all times.

• Boosts reputation –

  • 24 hour call support can have a positive impact on your overall business reputation. By ensuring customers receive a high quality customer service experience whenever they may get in touch increases the possibility of referrals. Through work of mouth and recommendation.

• Seamless communication –

  • Clear and open communication are provided by call agents across multiple support channels. Be it email, SMS or social media your customers will able to get touch with a customer support call agent. Also, have their problems solved when they are on the go or while sitting comfortably at home.

• Greater peace of mind –

  • After hours call service ensures that your customer service will continue operating even when your in-house staff has gone home. With this guarantee, you can relax in the knowledge that your customers will continue to be provided with the support that they deserve.

Call Pageboy Contact Centre is an ISO 9001:2008 accredited call centre based in Dublin. Our call agents are trained in providing around the clock support. Also, believe in the importance of providing a level of familiarity when representing your business and brand. For those interested in availing of our after hours service, we invite you to meet the agents who will be working for you and see the service in a live working environment. If you are interested in joining us for a site visit, contact us here.

This article about customer experience was originally posted by Marianne Wilson for Chain Store Age on June 20, 2018.

64% of consumers said they have avoided a brand because of a bad experience, according management firm Medallia. The findings reveal that customer experience is the top reason consumers cite for choosing a particular brand when making a purchase.

According to the “Customer Experience Tipping Point” survey, the demand for a positive experience is especially high in the United States. While loyalty is on the decline, expectations are on the rise, particularly among younger groups of consumers. For example, 30% of Gen Z and 22% of Millennials surveyed indicated that their expectations of customer experience in online retail are higher today than they were two years ago.

Also, U.S. respondents reported significantly higher expectations than European consumers for personalized experiences, real-time response, and ability to chat with a live agent.

Customer Experience Helps Branding

“They [consumers] expect to have a seamless and positive experience and if those aren’t met, consumers know they have options,” said Rachel Lane, solution principal, Medallia. “For companies looking to create a competitive edge, having a strong brand recognition, or even stellar product isn’t enough. Experience is the tipping point. Without a strong plan to create and maintain a positive experience, businesses will lose out.”

The study also revealed that:

• A single bad experience can cost a brand a customer. Forty-six percent of U.S. mobile network customers said they are likely to switch brands after having one bad experience.

• Every touch-point matters. Customers expect their experience to be seamless and efficient on and offline. For instance, 56% of online retail shoppers and 49% of retail offline shoppers expect consistent levels of service across physical and digital channels.

• Customers don’t want to be responsible for fixing a company’s mistake. According to the study, 70% of consumers report that they expect an immediate response when they submit a complaint.

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At Call Pageboy, we can help with your customer service. Contact us today!

The call centre has evolved significantly in recent years. Call centres are continuing to do so with the most sophisticated technology and infrastructure being utilised. Yet despite this, agents at the top of their game with human interaction playing a huge role in the customer experience. Agents need a particular set of skills in order to deal effectively and efficiently with the customer care queries encountered on a daily basis. While these necessary skills may be developed within the call centre environment, they will also stand to you outside of the office.

Here are 5 lifelong skills you’ll learn from working in a call centre:

Communication –

Call agents need to find a balance when communicating with customers. This is between having a professional manner, giving thorough answers, and still being conversational and friendly. Agents need to remember that customers do need that human touch and small talk. It is always appreciated to make the customer feel comfortable. Yet, they need to remember that customers value their time and so communication should be concise. Developing these to a high level within a call centre will benefit all agents. Communication skills are vital throughout all stages of life.

Patience –

When customers contact a call centre, they usually have a query or an issue that needs fixing. It is not unlikely for them to be discontent at some level. Call centre agents need to have patience in these circumstances. Let the customer explain the issue in full, never reacting negatively to an unhappy customer. If the solution to the problem is technical, which is true for many cases, call agents need to remember that the customer may not possess the technical knowledge needed to understand in full and so must ensure to remain calm and patient while providing an explanation. Being able to keep calm under pressure is something that not everyone can perfect. However, after working in a call centre this is a skill that will last with you.

Organisation –

Call centre agents have a variety of responsibilities. They undertake (all at once) phone answering, note taking, and updating the CRM system. This is all done while trying to answer the customer’s query. As a result of this multitasking, exceptional organisational skills are necessary to reduce errors during the provision of customer care. While one may enter the call centre environment with what they believe to be good organisational skills, they are sure to develop these greatly and leave with exceptional organisational skills.

Initiative –

Part of working in a call centre involves using ones initiative on a daily basis. Dealing with multiple customers everyday means encountering an array of different customer issues, some of which you might not have dealt with before. As a result, call centre agents need to be able to think outside the box and use their initiative to find a solution to the customers problem, building their level of responsibility. Using ones initiative to problem solve is an everyday part of life that agents will have a better grasp of from their experience within a call centre.

Adaptability –

Call centre agents need to have a level of adaptability to them. They may have a friendly, understanding customer one minute, and an annoyed customer with little patience the next. Their environment changes with each call they receive and they need to be able to adjust and make changes in response to this. Flexibility is key for call centre agents and this is something that will benefit them for the rest of their days.

All of these are a good set of transferrable skills to have that will stand to you for the rest of your working days. If you are looking for a new career opportunity, check out our online careers page or get in contact with us today to see how we can help you elevate your career today!

This article was originally posted by Shep Hyken on hyken.com.

There is an old saying in the real-estate industry: The three keys to success are location, location and location. I have a similar take on the customer service and customer service world. The three keys to customer experience success are consistency, consistency and consistency.

Of course, there is much more to delivering an amazing customer experience, but if there is something that is a non-negotiable to creating customer loyalty, it is a consistent and predictable experience – one that customers can count on every time they do business with you. The entire experience must be consistent. You can’t be great one day and just okay the next. The moment there is inconsistency, you start to lose the customer’s confidence, and ultimately you might lose the customer.

So, let’s talk about the different ways an organisation delivers a consistent experience.

• The quality of the product or service must be consistent. Whatever the company sells must meet the expectations of the customer, every time. It doesn’t matter how good your customer service is, if the product doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, the customer will find another company that better meets their needs.
• The different channels customers interact with you and your organisation must be consistent. Today’s customers connect with the companies they do business with in multiple ways. The traditional way a customer communicated with a company was in person or on the phone. Then along came emails, then chat, then chatbots. And, then there are social channels and other messaging apps. This is all part of the digital revolution, and the modern customer expects to have a consistent experience regardless of the channel.
• The attitude of the people who work at the company must be consistent. I’m not suggesting that everyone be a clone of each other. It is the positive attitude and the effort the employees make to take care of their customers that must be consistent. It shouldn’t matter if the customer talks to John one day and Jane the next, everyone comes to work with the plan to do their very best, every day. Regardless of who picks up the phone or responds to a message, the customer will always have a good experience.

When customers talk about the consistent company, they will say things like, “They are always so helpful.” Or, something like, “They are always so friendly and knowledgeable.” When they use the word always followed by something positive about the company, you know there is consistency. Delivering a consistent experience creates confidence. Confidence can lead to trust. And, trust leads to potential loyalty.

This article was originally posted by datamark.net on October 18th, 2017.

Your products, services and marketing messages all work together to shape a brand image for your company. Depending on your target market, your brand has a unique voice: It may say, “upscale and luxury,” or “family friendly values,” or “young, hip and tech-savvy.”

With everything you’ve invested to build your customer fan base, it’s important to remember that the contact centre is the front line for your brand image. If you decide to outsource your contact centre to reduce operating costs and focus on your core business, make sure you work with a partner that understands the importance of being a seamless extension of your brand.

Speaking the customer’s language

A consistent brand image across advertising, websites, stores and contact centres begins with language. For example, if your company is U.S.-based, customers will expect to reach out to an agent who speaks neutral-accented English. Many companies learned this lesson the hard way about a decade ago when they prioritised cost savings over customer service by outsourcing contact centre services in countries where non-U.S. English accents and dialects are common. Their brand image suffered when customers became frustrated trying to communicate with these agents.

Fortunately, the trend has shifted, and companies have brought their contact centres back to the U.S., in regions such as the U.S. Midwest and Southwest, where residents speak with neutral English accents. Another popular destination for contact centre services is nearshore, in Mexico, where the agent workforce consists of many who were educated in the United States and can speak fluent American-accented English as well as Spanish. Additionally, the Philippines remains an attractive offshore destination for contact centre services, thanks to a workforce that speaks English with a neutral American accent.

It’s all about location

Location also is important for maintaining a seamless brand image in an outsourced contact center. U.S.-based and nearshore agents who grew up in and often travel in the U.S. will have an unmistakable familiarity with American culture, history and trending news.

Being located close to your operations will also help ensure agents are familiar with your company’s latest news, leadership strategies and initiatives. Remember, you have customers who are major fans of your products and services. When they call, email or webchat with an agent, they will be pleased to find that the agent is “in the know” about what’s going on with your company. The customer experience will feel seamless and not “bolted on.” Read more…

This article about customer care was originally posted on September 27th 2017 by Infinit Contact.

In the past, customer care was accomplished by a simple phone call made by consumers to organisations asking for help about specific products and services. Today, the customer service industry has brought us something larger and far more complicated. As customer service is not just only about service but about experience. Currently, customers comes into contact with businesses via mobile phones. However, that they use to buy products, schedule services, communicate inquiries, and register complaints among others. Through mobile phones, the entire online world can receive information. Information about those products and services via texts, emails, tweets, and picture posts. The fact is the age of the mobile phone is here. It is going to rule the customer care industry with an iron fist. Here are 3 current examples how mobile phones are currently running the customer care industry.

1. Social Media Support

As most people today use social media to broadcast complaints, issues, and other comments about certain products and services, most organizations have a social media customer service support system. This emerging branch of customer service has an obligation to monitor all popular social media sites. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and check for any issues posted by people concerning their products or services. When they find an issue, they immediately engage in providing proper social media customer service by engaging in conversation with the individuals. They interact immediately and provide valuable information that may provide better service. In addition, many companies today even go the extra mile by giving unsatisfied consumers discounts and freebies on their next purchase or visit.

2. Customer Tracking

Providing excellent customer care for any organisation relies heavily on their ability to dictate customer experience. Dictating excellent customer experience today is all about providing customer care that utilises the right technology mixed with human interaction. In the U.S alone, more than half of adults own smart phones and a large percentage of this number use their devices to conduct many essential activities in their daily lives. To take advantage of how many people are using their phones, many companies are using a new technology known as Customer Tracking that has the ability to track consumers via their smartphones. This technology uses data collection to track and personalise customer experience. An example of an organisation using this technology is Amazon.com that keeps track of what their customers buy and even gives automatic updates on new promos and deals. Additionally this technology will aid customers whenever they visit a particular store.

Read More

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When it comes to outsourcing help desk support services, many businesses simply think of the financial considerations when making a decision. They often forgetting about the non-monetary considerations. Other factors such as the effect it’s going to have on your customer satisfaction and retention. Or on your internal operations are crucial and need to be weighed up by a business. In many cases, outsourcing help desk support services can improve responsiveness and thus customer satisfaction. Outsourcing your help desk services to an external party can bring a variety of benefits to your business:

• 24/7/365 Support Help Desk:

  • Customers can have an issue at any time of the day or night. Your business needs to be there to help them. For instance, for a business to operate around the clock can often be expensive and for some companies not even possible. Therefore, outsourcing makes it possible for you to provide your customers with the necessary 24/7/365 support.

• Help Desk Expertise:

  • Outsourced call centres have a pool of highly efficient and highly trained industry specific employees. These employees can provide a higher level of customer service. By outsourcing, you are ensuring that your customers are receiving the best in class customer support from a highly skilled professionals.

• Financial Leverage:

  • Outsourcing puts less pressure on a business financially as they no longer have the high and varied costs that come with recruitment and training. However, outsourcing generally delivers an opex model of fixed, predictable costs, that is much more desirable to a business.

• Flexible Capacity: 

  • Help desk call volume can vary greatly due to seasonal differences among other industry specific reasons. By outsourcing your services, your provider can scale up or down depending on demand, whilst you only have to pay a fixed monthly fee.

• Focus on Core Competencies:

  • Outsourcing allows your staff to focus solely on their day to day tasks, ensuring their focus is on the core of the business.

CallPageboy contact centre provides customer-centric help desk services to a range of different industries. Our call centre technology ensures that your business maintains desired customer care service levels while also reducing company costs. Our expert call agents work across all communication channels. These include telesales, email and social media in order to solve your customers’ issues, 24/7 365 days a year, ensuring your customers’ queries are never left unanswered. For more information on how we can help your business, get in contact with us with today.

This article about customer experience was originally posted by Keith Gallacher, on ttec.com on September 30th.

Customer centricity has become a business imperative. While many companies talk about being customer-focused, they are committing acts that will not only fail their customers, but also risk putting them out of business. Earlier this month, I attended the Gartner Customer 360 Summit in San Diego and learned a lot about the future of customer experience and how companies are engaging customers as their expectations continue to climb. While many companies have come a long way in improving customer experience, others are mired by their own antiquated policies and procedures. If you’re doing any of the following, you may be committing a deadly customer service sin:

1. Asking customers for their names when they contact you.

First impressions are everything. Customers want customer service associates to already know who they are when they call. In fact, they expect it. Using a customer’s name conveys respect and demonstrates to the customer that the company understands their needs and appreciates their existing relationship. Are your associates greeting customers by their names? Do you have the analytics in place to determine the genesis of the call? Have you linked their online and offline customer profiles?

2. Sending communication to your customers only when you want to sell to them.

Leading companies know that the key to successful sales and marketing involves a proactive communications approach that touches customers throughout their lifecycle. Is your data analysis complete so that you can reach out to customers about their specific needs? Do you have the ability to contact them at the right place and right time? Are your communications personalised and customised so that they resonate with customers and earn their respect and loyalty?

3. Selling your customers’ information to third parties.

In this age of privacy, selling customer information is a real breach of confidentiality and often results in a lack of trust. While customers’ data is a treasure trove of information, companies must protect their clients’ valuable data. The burden is on you to protect it. Does your privacy policy clearly state how you intend to use customer data? Do you provide the option for customers to opt out of any such practices? Have you installed safeguards to prevent unauthorised access to their confidential information?…Read more.

We can help you with your customer experiences. Contact us now!

Customer satisfaction has become a hugely important metric in today’s highly competitive business environment. Those business’ that adapt to the customer’s needs and wants will survive and thrive. While, for those who don’t, failure is inevitable. For the business’ who have got it right and are thriving today. It’s clear they understand the importance of rock solid customer service. This is more than just “the customer is always right”. This is treating your customers as more than just a source of revenue. It happens by truly going out of your way for them. Also bringing some sort of added value into the scenario. If you are delivering sincere value to your customers, you have the customer’s best interests at heart and corporate greed hasn’t consumed you.

Any business that is serious about their competitive landscape and future growth needs to understand why customer satisfaction is so important. Not only is it about the obvious fiscal returns but it goes far beyond that. Delving into the very existence of who a business is and why they do the things that they do. The following five reasons outline its importance as a business metric:

• It indicates customer loyalty –

  • Customer satisfaction is the best indicator of the likelihood of a consumer to purchase. Especially from the same brand in the future. The perceived value from the product/service influences customer’s judgement in regards to their loyalty with the product/service and thus company. A high level of customer loyalty is a good indicator of the company’s future survival and growth.

• It helps retain customers –

  • Research has shown that it is up to 7 times cheaper to keep customers, rather than to acquire new ones. Not only is it more expensive but it is also more difficult to acquire new customers. As retention is so closely related to satisfaction, it is crucial that businesses take proactive measures in maintaining good relationships with the customers to ensure customer satisfaction. This will help in attaining repeat customers and earning brand advocates, thereby earning more customers down the line.

• It acts as a point of differentiation –

  • Studies have shown “89% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company after experiencing poor customer service”, exhibiting how poor customer satisfaction increases customer churn. In a saturated market where competition is high, having excellent customer service and high customer satisfaction acts as a unique selling point. It can help a business stand out from the crowd, acting as a source of competitive advantage.

• It helps in spreading good Word of Mouth –

  • Positive feedback about your company can lead to increased sales and thus revenues, whereas negative feedback can damage your reputation and lead to a decrease in profits. Therefore, maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction is critical to promote good word of mouth.

• It helps predict future revenues –

  • Satisfied customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, whereas dissatisfied customers will likely turn to competitors to purchase. In addition, satisfied customers are more likely to recommend a brand and its products/services. Therefore, knowing you have a high rate of satisfaction among customers can help you predict sales and thus revenues.

Call Pageboy has over 40 years’ experience in the provision of customer service. We ensure that all call agents are expertly trained in providing your customers with a positive customer experience and go above and beyond to maintain customer satisfaction. After all it doesn’t matter if your company sells top of the line products, if a customer doesn’t enjoy the interaction that they have with your company, you can be at risk of losing them as a customer. We offer a range of customer support services to help businesses in their goal of providing a seamless, hassle free customer experience journey. If you would like to know more about the customer services that we offer, contact us here today.

This article about omnichannel services in healthcare was originally posted by Kamna Datt on Ameyo.com on January 12th, 2018.

Traditionally, the competition between hospitals and health organisations primarily depended upon quality of service. Speciality of the treatment and the price attached to care. But today, there is a wave of change. While high quality health service is still a primary concern. Patients walking through the hospital door equally care about the overall experience they encounter throughout their stay at the facility.

From how they are greeted at the helpdesk, to wait time at the OPD, to in-patient care and experience, every nuance matter. In fact, studies have concluded that “patient experience” should be seen as one of the integral pillars of quality in healthcare. Positive patient experience is also linked to improved clinical outcomes. Given the impact of experience in the overall journey of a patient’s association with the hospital, health care providers can no longer dismiss experience as a mere subjective or mood-oriented matter.

Thankfully, technological advancements is enabling health enterprises leverage patient experience in the most comfortable way. The incorporation of Omnichannel CX healthcare solutions and deployment of IoT is putting health care providers in a better position to deliver the best health care facilities to patients and their caregivers.

What is the meaning of Omnichannel Customer Experience Solution?

Mapping patient experience with technology calls for the integration of omnichannel solution. Today, service providers across domains have no control over the choice of communication channel. Customers can communicate with their service providers via email, text, social media, web and mobile phone. However, most often than not, these channel exist in silos causing operational challenges.

For instance, a patient inquires about the impending radiology report by leaving a query on social media page of the provider instead of using the conventional channel of calling the help desk. In the absence of omnichannel customer experience solution, such queries or request may be ignored. Delayed response or query handling, especially when it comes to health care can certainly dampen “patient experience”.

Omnichannel contact solution offers features that every modern health care facility need. To understand the use case of these features, let’s identity the challenges of the current health care delivery system and how omnichannel solution addresses them…Read more.

We can help you with omnichannel services. Contact us today!

This article was originally posted on callcentrehelper on April 16th, 2018.

Customer journey mapping goes beyond the traditional sales cycle: awareness, purchase, review. It digs deeper into what the customer is experiencing at every step of the journey. Which, departments are involved during each of the customer interactions. Also, how all of this impacts the overall customer experience and revenue generated. While it may seem a tedious task to undertake, as it’s a process that seems largely logical. What it does provide is a clear overview of exactly what is happening in the organisation. When wanting to implement change or drive growth, having this information is critical. As it details on a micro-level how well the organisation is actually functioning. It is critical for decision making because it highlights the business operations from several different perspectives and provides an as-is situational analysis of the business.

The Customer Journey

With customer experience becoming increasingly important in terms of driving revenues, it’s useful to understand touchpoints in the customer journey. A touchpoint is considered any event where the customer interacts with a company. And it’s the sum of these touchpoints that creates the customer journey map.

A touchpoint could be when a customer first sees a product on social media and clicks through to a website link. It could be an advert they see on TV or a purchase made in-store or online. It may also include some technical aspects, such as installation or repairs, or post-purchase administration, such as a phone call to the accounts department. Each one of these touchpoints influences the customer experience and their overall view of the brand. Which is why it is so important that each of these interactions is positive.

The Employee

Highlighting customer touch points in terms of employees creates a greater awareness of the role they have to play in the customer experience. Where failures occur, it identifies skills or knowledge gaps that need to be remedied. Where there have been positive experiences, these can be used as building blocks for improving the customer experience further, creating opportunities for innovation. The information from customer journey mapping can be used to empower employees so that they take ownership of their part in the customer journey…Read more.

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When it comes to companies that operate within the security and alarm system industry, it is vital that they provide customers with support at all times. Due to the nature of the industry, issues can arise at any stage, day or night. Having customer support at the end of a line is necessary. Call Pageboy offer technical phone support 24/7/365. We make a commitment to provide your customers excellent service and technical support. Through our local customer service teams and technical department.

Our customer service teams assist your customers by responding to queries. This ensures that any issues are promptly resolved, and our technical helpdesk assists customers with technical problems by troubleshooting issues. In addition, we have a dedicated service team to ensure swift response to alarms. We will contact nominated key holders or the emergency services as appropriate to ensure any issues are fully resolved.

For over 40 years we have been providing security and alarm system companies with our call centre services. A call centre can offer numerous benefits to these providers in order to build upon existing customer experience and service provision:

• Security and Alarm System: Improved 24hr Customer Service –

  • Due to the nature of the security and alarm system industry, customers can encounter issues at any time of the day. Whether they are experiencing a technical problem with a malfunctioning alarm or need to change the key holders contact details, 24-hour help desk support ensures that your customers queries are answered whenever they may call.

• Flexibility –

  • Your company has low and high call volume times and your agents are at the mercy of this volume. Which may often cause them to feel either idle or overwhelmed. Utilising a call centre, particularly an overflow service ensures that call abandonment is not an issue during and between peak hours. Due to the number of staff resources available to Call Pageboy, we have the capacity to quickly manage spikes in call volumes without the long waiting times. This provides greater flexibility to companies with the opportunity to effectively manage their internal staff without sacrificing customer satisfaction levels.

• Security and Alarm System: Reduced Costs –

  • Call Pageboy provides companies with the ability to significantly reduce their operating costs. Especially, when it comes to call and administrative management. By outsourcing your security and alarm system customer service helpdesk, you are reducing the costs. The cost associated with internal staff training and infrastructure needs. Therefore, it allows your company to turn a fixed cost into a variable one; skilled labour is available to you but only when you need it most.

• Access to the latest technology –

  • Our call centre operates using the latest technology and software. This ensures that your customers receive the highest level of customer service and support. Our technology allows us to provide the industry with multi-channel support including telephone answering, email, social media, SMS text and more. We support your customers in multiple channels at all times.

• Security and Alarm System: Disaster Recovery –

  • All companies experience unforeseen periods of downtime. Whether it be due to an electricity outage or an issue with internal infrastructure. By outsourcing your helpdesk services to us, assures that in the event of a disaster your call management and technical support lines aren’t affected. Also, ultimately ensure business continuity.

Call Pageboy has over 40 years’ experience supplying service to companies in the Security and Alarm industry. We have a proven track record of delivering a quality and reliable service. All of our call agents are highly trained for your company. They can provide your customers with a positive customer experience while handling their sensitive information in accordance with data protection laws. Our after hours and helpdesk services provide administrative relief to your in-house staff and ensures that your company continues to provide unconditional support at all times. For more information on the range of services that we offer to the security and alarm systems industry, contact us here.

This article about call centre was originally posted on infiniticontact.com on January 8th, 2018.

5 Reasons Why You Need a Call Centre

Most companies think that a call centre is merely an add-on. However, it’s often seen as one of those little extras that’s earmarked for some time in an idealised future. They’d rather achieve a business milestone first, or wait to fulfil a few prerequisites like having a wider audience, a bigger market share, or a larger budget, before plunging in.

Meanwhile, companies have overwhelmed personnel scrambling to find answers that’s not readily available. Callers have to contend with being put on hold for an inordinate amount of time. Clients endure having to be transferred several times to get a simple status update. Potential buyers or repeat clients end up moving on to a competitor, and the company loses revenue in the process.

If you think a call centre is an unnecessary drain on your company finances, think again. Here are a few reasons why you’re most likely in need of a call centre for customer support now.

1. High quality customer service promotes loyalty

The main goal of customer support in a business setting is to promote customer loyalty. Taking care of your current customers is the key to a long and successful business enterprise. It’s up to seven times less expensive to keep your current buyers happy than it is to attract new buyers.

It’s no secret that the most loyal customers turn into brand evangelists. They take it upon themselves to spread the word about your company and encourage their social circle to buy from you. They become your company’s product or brand ambassadors because they are willing to buy from you repeatedly, and will not hesitate to let others know about it.

That kind of loyalty can be cultivated by making sure that every customer touch point results in a positive customer experience, and you must consistently meet their expectations to gain their full support…Read more.

We can help you with your companies call centre needs. Contact us today!

sDatabase cleansing is the process of identifying and correcting any inaccurate, incomplete, irrelevant or duplicate data. It is not only a way to maximise the accuracy of the data in a system. But it also brings consistency across the database. An organisation in a data-intensive sector such as banking, insurance, telecommunications, healthcare, and retailers should engage in thorough database cleansing on a regular basis. By doing so will ensure that errors in the data can be fixed. Enabling a business to reach their customers and establish the best possible relationship with them at a reduced cost. It is a small tool that plays into achieving successful, meaningful customer relationships.

Database cleansing has multiple benefits for a business including increased productivity, reduced spam, improved customer perception, better customer relationships, and improved data quality. A database of fewer quality leads is much preferred over abundant dead end leads. The introduction of The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will help a business achieve these.

So What Will GDPR mean for Database Cleansing?

The GDPR is designed to strengthen and unify data privacy requirements across the European Union. It reinforces citizen’s rights in the digital age. The new security requirements that accompany this era of the Internet. The introduction of the GDPR implies that all companies should revise their procedures. Companies should change how they obtain, process, store and protect data. Explicit consent is a cornerstone of the GDPR, the data owner must give explicit consent in the form of a statement or clear affirmative action for a company to include them in their customer database and must have explicitly opted in to receive marketing communications, whether by email, phone or post.

Therefore, it is more important now than ever to engage in thorough database cleansing. GDPR has serious repercussions for those who don’t apply with breaches resulting in fines of up to €20 million, or 4% of the company’s turnover, whichever figure is greater. Yet many businesses aren’t taking GDPR seriously and actively taking measures to prepare for the changes. Below are two scenarios that could occur unknowingly, in which a business has broken GDPR regulations.

Scenario 1: 

Robert O’Neill rings your business and asks for access to the personal data you have stored in regards to him. You look into his file on the CRM and find his current tittle, email address and home address. (Missing the fact that you also have his phone number listed under Rob O’Neill.) Months later, you ring Robert to inform him. This subscription to your service is due to be renewed. Robert was unaware that you had phone his phone number on file and is angered. You have unknowingly broken regulations by not giving him full access to his personal information because you had a duplicate contact in your database.

Scenario 2: 

In the same above scenario, both duplicate contacts contain his email address. You send a promotional email to Robert O’Neill. However only one of your contacts show that he has opted out of email communications from your company. Once again, Robert is angered and you have unknowingly broken GDPR regulations.

These are only two scenarios out of multiple that could unknowingly occur and leave your company breaking GDPR regulations. They highlight the importance of taking the GDPR changes with a serious outlook and the importance of employing effective database cleansing methodologies to protect your business. GDPR changes should be welcomed as an opportunity to audit, review and organise your company data, creating a clean house for the information you store.

Database cleansing is hard to do, hard to maintain, and hard to know where to even begin. Call Pageboy offers efficient data scrubbing services. Your company’s records will always be updates and maintained when you use data scrubbing services. Contact us today and leave it to our experts to take care of this essential service and bring all of your customers’ data and business processes up to the correct standard, ensuring that your business is compliant prior to the GDPR deadline.

This article about the millennial customer experience was originally posted by Chandler Galt on niceincontact.com on January 8th, 2016.

As the fastest-growing consumer demographic, Millennials are poised to make a major impact on the global economy. By 2020, the spending of Millennials— those aged from roughly 18-to-mid-30s— will rise to 1.4 trillion annually. Years before this generation’s full influence will be felt, however, millennial preferences have already changed how contact centres think about customer experience. Read on to learn the 9 things that millennials are expecting from the organisations they buy from and interact with, and how you can adjust your contact centre to exceed their customer experience expectations.

Customer Experience: Mobile & Online First

Globally, 55% of all customer service interactions now start online, and that numbers jumps to 65% for millennials. In addition, 36% of millennials start customer service situations on a mobile device rather than a desktop computer compared to 21% for consumers over the age of 55. This means that your contact information needs to be displayed clearly online (probably as part of your website header) as well as responsive so that it displays clearly on mobile devices as well.

Always-On

Millennials interact continuously with their mobile devices because it provides them access to just about everything they need including email, SMS, Social Media, banking, shopping, etc. Because of this, Millennials expect the companies and organizations they interact with to be always-on as well, and will find any means necessary to make that happen (like turning to Twitter if it is after-hours for their contact center). Even if your contact center has specific hours, make sure you have a back-up plan for how to handle customer service issues through the night.

High Expectations

68% of Millennials have higher expectations for customer service today than just a year ago. As far as what they’re looking for when they do engage with customer service representatives, 78% of Millennials want the agent to already know their contact and product information, as well as service history. While older consumers may be used to waiting on the phone while their information is retrieved, millennials expect quicker interactions with limited lag time….Read more.

We can help with your millennial customer experience. Contact us today!