So You’re a New CX Leader? 5 Tips to Succeed in Your Role

Posted: September 26, 2019

We’ve all been there. It’s your first day on a new job and you’re trying to figure out how things work. There’s lots to be done – relationships to be built, goals to be set and plans to be drafted. You’re learning how to work in a new environment, and trying to battle the exhaustion that comes with that while remembering everyone’s names and figuring…

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The Telephone is a Dying Communication Channel. And It’s Being Killed by Robocalls

Posted: September 10, 2019

My phone rings. It’s a mobile number, and I’m expecting a call. I pick up the phone. An automated voice responds: “We are calling to inform you that the IRS has filed a lawsuit against you…” I hang up, frustrated, and block the number. I’ve heard this same message all month long. The death of the phone During the course of a normal day, I…

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How to drive customer experience through effective agent training

Posted: August 12, 2019

Picture this.  You’re managing a contact center where your agent team has received all of the information they need to serve customers perfectly. New starter training helps your agents start taking queries at precisely the point they feel confident to, armed with the skills and knowledge needed to serve customers efficiently. Training on new products or services is completely effective, and afterward, agents immediately start…

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[Webinar] Building Strategy and Confidence in Contact Center AI

Posted: August 1, 2019

If you liked mine and Matt’s article for ICMI on building Chatbot trainers in the contact centre, you’ll like our webinar too. You’ll also like this webinar if you believe in Knowledge Management as a preface for great customer experience! Click through to access the recording, and here’s a rundown of what we cover… “As a contact center leader, you’ve worked hard to grow your…

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Intelligent Assistants (+7 Insights on How Agent-Facing AI Can Accelerate Training and Onboarding)

Posted: July 8, 2019

How does your contact center handle new starter training and onboarding? Most businesses fall into three camps: Trial by fire: give agents a manual to read, then throw them on customer queries and hope for the best. Outsource to colleagues: make training another agent’s responsibility, ask the new starter to shadow them, and expect the new hire to be ready in a week or so. Actual training: devoting…

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How to Train Your Agents for the Next Generation of Contact Center Work

Posted: June 4, 2019

Since the dawn of time, humans have used technology to improve the way we live. From our earliest forays into fire-making to building the first cars, it’s human ingenuity which has helped us take raw materials around us and transform them into new inventions to make our lives easier. In the present day and the realm of the contact center, we’re on the cusp of…

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ICMI Contact Center Expo 2019 Conference Roundup

Posted: May 29, 2019

ICMI Expo 2019 took place from the 13th-16th May at the rather glamorous Diplomat Resort, Hollywood Beach, Florida. My time at the Expo was a breath of fresh air in more ways than simply letting me escape the heat outside. Expo 2019’s theme was “Navigate the tides of transformation” and as well as covering a lot of the type of best practices CX pros are familiar…

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5 Tips for Finding a CX Platform Your Agents, Customers, and Exec Team Will Love

Posted: May 28, 2019

You can’t build a house on a weak foundation. In the same way, the standard of customer experience that consumers expect isn’t achieved without technology to bring together disparate channels and make consistent, seamless experiences an easy thing to achieve. Thanks to the growth of omnichannel strategies in recent years, there’s no shortage of customer experience (CX) platforms out there. But in the same way that CX can…

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5 ways an omnichannel strategy can improve your contact center’s customer retention rates

Posted: April 17, 2019

Agent: “How can I help?” You: “Well, it’s a long story…” Have you ever uttered these words when you’ve got in touch, yet again, to ask an organisation to solve a persistent problem? If you have, you’ll know that one of two things can happen.  Either, the agent stops you right there, looks up your history, and troubleshooting carries on from where you left off.  Or you’ll need to repeat the whole sorry story to a new agent. Even then,…

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7 Benefits of Unified Communications for Contact Centers

Posted: April 3, 2019

Picture this: A screen with four applications open, arranged in windowed tiles so you can still access the other five other applications hidden behind. The click-clack sound of keyboard toggle shortcuts punctuating conversations between each back and forth. A chorus of “Hold, please” to buy time needed to manually copy and paste the customer information that was just provided via the IVR maze. Sound familiar?…

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