Customer Experience

Customer Experience, Technology, Work

[Webinar] The Future of Live Chat in 2019

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This webinar was a blast.

Jeff and I are good buddies, so it’s always fun presenting with him. However, this webinar was especially significant as it aired just before we launched Comm100’s 2019 Benchmark Report, so we got to share some sneak peeks at the stats before it was even live.

As well as discussing the findings from the latest benchmark report, we chatted about the growing pains experienced by different sizes of call centers, and gave some tips for organisations of all kinds to consider in the year ahead.

All of these insights come straight from what we’ve learned from our own customer base, so it’s useful stuff for anyone looking to align their contact center with best practice and trends in 2019.

Have a listen, and I’d love to hear what you think.

Watch the webinar recording here.

Download Comm100’s 2019 Live Chat Benchmark Report here.

Customer Experience, Learning & Training, Work

From the field: Customer service skills you need today

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This Zendesk Relate article includes a snippet about my career path from customer service to learning & training.

Just like most other things on Relate, it’s a considered and interesting article with a lot of different angles on career pathing in customer service.

Here’s what I contributed, but do click through to check out the entire article, as it’s a great read.

Kaye Chapman entered the world of customer support absolutely unplanned. Fresh out of college, unsure what to do (been there, done that!), Chapman got a job in a call center to pay the bills while she figured out her next move. She never left.

After some time, she could see that there was room for improvement. Quality assurance was patchy, there was no internal knowledge base or help center, and training was subpar at best. Her overworked manager was all too happy for Kaye to step in and provide some help, so she took the bull by the horns and made improving those things her focus.

Chapman built an extensive knowledge base, strengthened quality processes, and provided training for her team, all while holding down the role of senior customer service rep. From there she realized she had a real knack for training and expressed the desire to become a full-time trainer.

The company she worked for at the time agreed to sponsor her to go back to school and she spent her evenings learning how to build effective training programs, work with adult learners, and other skills like coaching, change management, and talent development. She’s since gained plenty of experience in roles at Fortune 500 companies, startups, and nonprofits, even earning a Masters degree based off her professional qualifications, despite not having a Bachelor degree.

All of this led her to her current role as Learning & Development Manager for Comm100. In our chat, she told me, ‘In that very first customer support role, if I had shrugged off all of the things I saw that could have been improved and wrote them off as none of my business, I’d never be where I am today. I definitely see my career growth as fueled by having a real desire to drive improvement and change, even in areas that aren’t within my job description.’

Read the Zendesk article here.

Customer Experience, Learning & Training, Recognition, Work

Promotion Update & Lucep’s Top 50 Customer Experience Blogs and Influencers

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I’ve been quiet over the last few weeks – life has been busy since I got promoted 😊 I’m now Learning & Development Manager for Comm100.

Our business is growing fast and getting mature enough now that we really needed an L&D lead to drive internal and external training initiatives.

I’m extremely happy to be that person and I’m looking forward to helping Comm100 to grow and learn even better!

I wanted also to post a link to Lucep’s list of their Top 50 Customer Experience Blogs and Influencers, which I’m pleased to be a part of.

Being on the list nestled between the awesome CustomerServiceLife blog and CX & Social media expert Dan Gingiss (as well as so many other CX superstars) is just beyond awesome really, and I’m always humbled and honored when I receive recognition for my writing and ideas.

Thanks Lucep!

Read more at Lucep’s Blog

Customer Experience, Technology, Work

RapportBoost.AI Interview Part 3: Live Chat Data Is the Key to QA

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Here’s part 3 of my interview with Rapportboost.AI – you can access part 1 here and part 2 here.

This time, we discuss live chat data, quality assurance and how live chat contributes to the sales cycle.

The bounty of live chat data that this channel produces is the perfect tool for tracking the success of optimization. After all, with a sound live chat implementation, what matters most at the end of the day is how customers respond.

In our final installment of our Interview Series with Kaye Chapman, Customer Experience and Training Specialist at Comm100, we got down to the nitty-gritty of QA and chat conversion reporting – the proof that your live chat channel performs.

RB.AI: In instances where you are working with a customer who uses chat and then also has channels that are handled by a different company, how do you handle coming up with data metrics and reports?

KC: We are lucky in that we have a really strong reporting suite, so it can report on so many aspects of chat from the very basic stuff like chat volume to customer satisfaction to more advanced stuff like being able to see how productive agents are, how canned messages are being used, looking at survey fields within chat to see what their usage is as well as through our reporting API and various integrations connecting with other systems like CRM or ticketing. So we consistently found that clients like our reporting suite because it’s so comprehensive and it does allow clients to get the insights they need from chat and apply them to other channels as well.

Chat is a fantastic tool because you can get so many different reports and statistics from it. When you’re thinking about telephone service, for example, it can be a difficult process to actually gauge how effective a particular call has been. Some years ago, I was a quality assessor myself, and to really understand quality it was a very long process of call selection, call listening, checking a variety of different systems for customer and interaction data, marking things down on a separate scoresheet, and finally providing feedback to the employee.

With chat, it’s much easier because you can immediately see from the chat transcripts how the chat went, you have all the data regarding the customer and their satisfaction, you have all the data regarding how long the chat was, what resources were used, and how it was wrapped up. Most of the data you need to drive quality is built in, and I would say from a quality and continuous improvement point of view, chat is a fantastic tool to make those continuous improvements more easily than traditional channels.

RB.AI: I absolutely agree that live chat data can be leveraged to simplify QA. Earlier we spoke about using live chat for sales as opposed to customer support, and you mentioned Comm100’s conversion reporting tool. I’d love to hear your expertise in leveraging data to see how much chat contributes to the sales cycle.

KC: Absolutely, it’s important to have visibility over ROI from any communication channel you have. Chat Conversion reporting is an amazing tool that allows businesses to analyze live chat data to see straight away how chat is contributing to the sales cycle. Once a client has let us know what a conversion is for them, whether it’s a sale or a download or something different, we can link those conversions to chat records so it’s easy to see what agents contributed to a sale and how exactly they did that. Clients can then put processes in place to replicate those successful results, not only through agent coaching but by more automated processes such as using successful prompts in proactive chat invitations and canned messages, which can be personalized to particular customer segments. All in all, conversions reporting gives a lot of insight into exactly how chat drives the sales cycle and means that viewing the process of how chat drives sales as more of an art than a science just isn’t correct anymore.

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Emotional Intelligence, Technology, Work

Rapportboost.AI Interview Part 2: Chat With Emotional Intelligence

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Here’s part 2 of my interview with Rapportboost.AI – you can access part 1 here.

This time, we’re taking on the topic of emotional intelligence and discussing how technology can help in delivering emotionally intelligent customer interactions.

As Augmented Intelligence transforms the workforce, emotional understanding is proving to be an essential component of brands’ interactions with their customers. After discussing live chat agent training in Part One of our Interview Series, we asked Kaye Chapman, Customer Experience and Training Specialist at Comm100, to shed light on the best strategies for chatting with emotional intelligence.

RB.AI: Let’s talk about emotional intelligence. This concept is of special importance to us at RapportBoost.AI because we help brands use high-EQ to achieve increased revenues and conversions when using chat for sales. What are some measures you’ve found to be effective for chatting with a certain level of emotional intelligence?

KC: Regardless of use case, emotional intelligence is helpful for agents across the board, given that EI is such a cornerstone of effective personalization. It’s important for chat agents to be able to pick up on specific language and to understand how they need to adapt their behavior to suit that particular customer. When I’m thinking about how to promote communication in an emotionally intelligent way, one of the things I encourage agents to do is take full advantage of the canned message library and save those phrases that have been especially impactful. Make sure that there is a constant cycle of trying things, evaluating them for effectiveness, and using them in the future if they have been successful.

RB.AI: I think we are all excitedly watching conversational commerce take off and that has to do with so many things, such as making purchases through cell phones and the fact that millennials like to chat. For these reasons, do you think sales and chat will converge in the near future?

KC: I think sales and chat are already converging, and it’s exciting to see organizations using tactics like Account Based Chat to engage with key prospects – we liken it to “rolling out the red carpet” for customers by providing them with experiences that are deeply personalized. I do think conversational commerce is going to get bigger and it is going to be the thing that separates out the wheat from the chaff in terms of who does well in the future and who doesn’t.

RB.AI: Agreed. Along those lines, could you talk a little bit about channel optimization and some strategies you’ve used to optimize live chat?

KC: We advocate effective journey mapping to understand what types of customers are coming into which particular channels. We also encourage our clients to think about the concept of channel blending or channel pairing when they are planning different channel mixes, what channels they engage on, and how they can move customers from one channel to another. The idea behind channel blending or pairing is rather than thinking about channels in isolation, you can think about how to use the best aspects of different channels to form a great experience for your customer. For example, chat is fantastic for helping people with urgent issues in a synchronous way. But you can also enable knowledge base integration to live within the chat window, and clients can configure it so that customers go through the knowledge base before they hit an actual live chat agent. Now, that’s fantastic because, from a customer’s perspective, it might not be so easy to find out where a knowledge base is on a client’s website, it might be that your customer’s in a little bit of a rush, it is just that rush aspect that makes it easier for them to speak with an agent. Actually positioning the knowledge base within the chat window gives customers more choice to select a channel that suits them, and obviously, there are big bonuses there for clients as well in terms of deflecting unnecessary query types from chat.

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Learning & Training, Technology, Work

Winning Live Chat Training for Your Customer Service Team

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Implementing live chat for your customer service team might seem like a major decision—and it is!—but it is only the first step in modernizing your customer service strategy. Luckily, implementing a live chat system on your website is often pretty simple, but a tool isn’t useful if your teams aren’t trained to use it properly, and aren’t fully on board with its potential to make life easier.

Simply giving technical training on the new system and then letting your agents loose won’t prepare them adequately for the task. The agents might not be prepared enough to adapt their existing customer service knowledge to the live chat system—which could cause negative encounters with customers through misinterpreted comments, slow chats or grammar gaffes.

Because of this, it’s important to back up systems training with training focused on the experience of your live chat customers, helping your agents to understand the service impacts of your new channel. Here are five things to consider when giving effective chat support training to your team.

  1. Words, Tone and Body Language 
  2. Professional customer service agents understand that all face-to-face communication is made up of three different elements: words, tone and body language.Telephone communication can be tricky since agents can’t rely on assessing a customer’s body language to get more insight into what they’re thinking and feeling. Extra attention needs to be paid to words spoken, and the tone they’re spoken in, to accurately ‘read’ a customer. And when communicating back to customers, words and tone need to be delivered and moderated carefully in order to communicate in a clear way.Live chat presents extra challenges. Without being able to hear a customer speaking or see their body language, how can you read the subtleties of their communication to truly understand the meaning of what they’re saying? And how can you demonstrate listening and friendliness or build rapport by simply exchanging typed messages?Attention to wording here becomes absolutely crucial in allowing you to do all of this. Agents need to step up their communication a notch to consider sentence structure, word choice and conversation flow in building and assessing the intent of a communication.

    Top Tip    : Hold a short training session introducing the Mehrabian communication model and ask your agents to consider the impacts of not having tone or body language to help them communicate. Questions to ask include: What problems could arise through relying on just words to communicate with? How could miscommunication occur? How could this be prevented?
  3. Live Chat School If you’ve ever attended a formal, ‘classroom-based’ training session, you’ll know that the most important part of learning is actually applying the knowledge you’ve learned in the workplace. Indeed, one of the most highly regarded training models there is states that as much as 70% of learning occurs through hands-on, on-the-job work, not through structured training sessions.That’s not to say there isn’t a place for formal training sessions—just that the most effective adoption of live chat expertise comes through checking and facilitating learning while your agents are using the software. Building in an extended training period after initial live chat training is a great way to give your agents the space to experiment in their approach until they are handling the software like experts.

    Top Tip    : Introduce ‘Live Chat School’ after initial live chat training by setting standards for your team to attain, and assessing them throughout the extended training period. Once they hit targets for customer satisfaction, chat length and/or utilization, ‘graduate’ them to your regular quality assurance program.
  4. Spelling and GrammarWhen you hired your telephone-based agents, it’s unlikely that you paid much attention to their writing, spelling and grammar skills. In fact, you may have forgiven some mistakes they made on their resumes because, after all, they didn’t need top-notch writing skills.You may have held mock customer interactions with them, listening to how they sound on the telephone, their ability to reassure and assure customers through careful vocal communication.Live chat doesn’t make these skills redundant. However, it does require agents to brush up on their writing skills. Agents with sloppy writing or bad grammar reflect badly on your company, causing customers to question the abilities and professionalism of your staff.

    Top Tip    : Hold a ‘Grammar Police’ themed quiz, testing agents on common grammatical mistakes and giving a prize to the top ‘Grammar Cop.’ Back this up by ensuring that agents have access to a style guide which sets the standard for correct spelling, capitalization, punctuation and sentence structure.
  5. Live Chat ScriptsMost telephone-based agents will have a set of standard scripts they use in conversations: for example, their greeting and closing messages to customers.Live chat as a system is unique in that any of these scripts can be added as shortcuts in the agent console, saving them time in their interactions.Live chat scripts can also be used to speed up interactions and improve quality outside of these standard scenarios—for example, by adding scripts to discuss product features without missing any key details, or for giving complete instructions on how to reset a password.It’s important for you to acknowledge how important scripts can be in increasing quality and saving time, and to give your agents the chance to think creatively about how they can develop scripts that work well for them.

    Top Tip    : Hold a scripting workshop for your agents. Examine what scripts are already used, what scenarios new scripts could be written for and the advantages of these. Make sure to discuss potential time savings and the reduction in needing to repetitively type out the same statements for different customers.
  6. In the Live Chat Customer’s ShoesIn their telephone-based work, your agents will already be pretty clear on the factors of their service that impact the customer experience. Wait times, clarity of communication and transfers between departments are prime examples of situations which can destroy the customer experience if handled badly—or enhance the customer experience, if done really well.Live chat software presents extra situations that can either enhance or degrade your customers’ experience. The time taken to respond to a message, the use of canned responses and the ability to share screens all add new dimensions to the customer experience that you and your agents probably haven’t considered.

    Top Tip    : Hold an ‘In their shoes’ training session. Split your agents into two groups and ask them to take the viewpoint of one of your customers. Ask one group to imagine and script the best possible customer experience that could be had while using live chat for a range of real-life scenarios. Ask the other group to script the worst experience which could be had. Once done, ask them to share and question them on their decisions: what impact do certain agent actions have on live chat? Why do these actions occur—through accident, or intent? How can they be mitigated against (if bad) or adopted (if good)?

Implementing live chat may require your existing team to stretch their skills and capabilities to adapt to new ways of communicating with your customers. Given the right tools, the right training and the right perspective, your team will continue to deliver the top-notch service your brand is known for through this rapidly growing and heavily preferred channel.

Originally published here.

Customer Experience, Recognition, Work

I’m a CX Accelerator Community Organizer!

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Very proud to announce that I’m now a community organizer for the awesome CX Accelerator community on Slack!

I’m a big promoter of communities of practice to support professional learning, so it’s a real pleasure to be involved with this group and to be able to support the good work Nate and the team have put in to expand and share knowledge relating to CX, both inside and outside of the contact center.

If you haven’t yet checked out the community, click through to take a look at what it offers, what others say about it, and see how you can join.

I’d love to see my blog readers sign up and join in the fun and learning – please do mention that I sent you!

Customer Experience, Learning & Training, Technology, Work

RapportBoost.AI Interview Part 1: Live Chat Agent Training Drives CX

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It was awesome to have been able to spend some time chatting with Dani, Meredith and the team at RapportBoost.AI – a fantastic company working on AI and augmented intelligence for contact center agents, blending this with a strong focus on emotional intelligence.

In this interview we discuss agent training, call center customer service and AI in the contact center.

Live chat agent training is one of the most innovative spaces in today’s customer experience ecosystem. From canned responses to augmented intelligence, companies are training their live chat agents with technology more than ever before. We sat down with Kaye Chapman, Customer Experience and Training Specialist at Comm100, to talk about leveraging live chat agent training to drive customer experience and success.

RB.AI: You’re a huge advocate for implementing learning and development techniques to drive positive customer experience outcomes. Could you share some of your insights regarding effective live chat agent training?

KC: Absolutely. Effective live chat agent training has to be centered around customer needs and experiences. In the last few years, we’ve seen an incredible pace of change when it comes to the customer experience. Customer expectations are changing, new technology is being integrated into business practices and business models, and our products and offerings at Comm100 are evolving in step with the industry.

In this environment, companies need to stay agile to be able to react to customer needs. Several approaches to learning and development allow companies to do so. When helping people learn a piece of software, a golden rule of training and development that I often suggest is that live chat agents should be getting just 10% of their knowledge from formal learning experiences, 20% from colleagues, and 70% from on the job learning.

What this means for us and other vendors is it’s vital to look at a variety of different ways to help agents develop their knowledge of whatever software they’re using, not just giving initial training and relying on that to be enough. This includes making good use of knowledge bases and having a range of learning materials available for live chat agents to reference that integrate multimedia such as photos and video.

The best customer experiences are invisible – customers shouldn’t have to go out of their way to get the information they need to solve a problem, and should have ample self-serve materials at their fingertips – and the same can be said for the live chat agent’s experience of learning to use our software. We make sure they’re really well supported to be able to develop their knowledge quite organically, without much extra help being needed from us.

RB.AI: We so often think about generating a frictionless experience for the customer, but the same can be said for your customers that use live chat software, such as West Corporation, Whirlpool, and Stanford University. You want their experience of learning to use that software to be frictionless as well.

KC: That’s right.

RB.AI: When you visit a contact center, how do you assess the workspace and create a plan to provide the optimal channel ecosystem for a brand or company? I would imagine this involves a bit of specialization on a case-by-case basis.

KC: We actually don’t encourage our clients to use any particular patterns or funnel for fielding queries from multiple channels. What our platform does is support customer choice with the idea of being present whenever or wherever the visitor wants to start a chat, from any channel. We coach our clients, where possible, to let the visitor decide and not the company, which is an essential aspect of being truly customer-centric. Our platform supports multiple channels that work together with our integration of knowledge bases, social media channels, and ticketing system. We coach our clients to make use of all these resources together for a better experience for the agent and the customer as well as the use of canned messages, which help to achieve consistency and compliance of responses while reducing knowledge load for front-line agents.

RB.AI: It sounds like you’re making great strides to automate customer chat to remove the burden from the front-line agent through various technologies. I understand that Comm100 is also developing a chatbot. Could you expand on how this bot is integrated into your software environment?

KC: Chatbots are developing rapidly, their adoption is spiking, and for good reason. A correctly configured chatbot service can deflect a significant proportion of customer queries from the contact center, allowing agents to upskill and focus on the more complex questions the chatbot can’t answer.

It’s important for clients to be realistic about what exactly chatbots can handle. At the moment I’d say AI tech is capable of handling 80% of the use cases an organization would encounter. If clients are realistic about exactly what sort of queries their chatbot can handle well and the sort of training required for it to do that, chatbots can provide real cost savings for the business.

It’s good to consider that while many of us think of chatbots as being about conversations, many of the successful use cases I’ve seen involve bots undertaking transactions, such as pushing out credit card forms, confirming a customer’s account information, delivery times and the like. They can also help with resourcing, for example, when agents aren’t online chatbots can provide 24/7 coverage. Also, it’s worth considering that chatbots don’t get sick, they won’t be late for shifts, and they don’t get upset when a customer is rude – so there’s real potential there for chatbots to act as a great backup to cushion you from instances where your human agents might suffer from those issues.

One thing that’s often a concern for clients is making sure that the chatbot is well trained and it doesn’t degrade the customer experience before it improves it. A big part of what we do is working very closely with our clients to ensure chatbots are trained effectively for each business and industry, that it can be effective, it does have contextual awareness, and it’s personalized to the client’s business too.

Originally published here.