I really enjoyed presenting at this webinar with Tony Medrano of RapportBoost and my friend Nate Brown, co-founder of CX Accelerator, the online CX learning community I’m proud to help facilitate.
We chatted about customer preferences, channels, employee engagement and more!
Listen to the recording here.
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.
Live chat communications continue to trend upwards in importance. No surprise here. eMarketer predicts that in just one year from now, 80 percent of the world’s smartphone users will use messaging apps. We’re more connected than ever, and that provides challenges for modern sales and service organizations. Today’s online customers want and expect a fast response time to their customer service query, plus a frictionless way to initiate support.
Forrester reports that 55 percent of adults will abandon online purchases if they can’t find a quick answer to a question, with 77 percent stating that good online customer service is the most important thing a company can do for them. It’s clear that in today’s climate of consumer choice, organizations who provide support at point of sale through live chat stand to gain the most in customer loyalty and reduced cart abandonments.
Connecting with website visitors through live chat also takes less time and human resources than phone support to consumers, raising productivity and profitability. As chat agents are expected by their organizations to be valued support partners for customers and prospects, these individuals play a larger role than ever in securing overall customer satisfaction and brand equity.
For new agents, a structured onboarding program is crucial to allow organizations to ensure that they’re getting the satisfaction outcomes they seek. Not only does effective onboarding introduce employees to processes and procedures within their new role, it also builds confidence, trust and engagement at possibly the most crucial stage of their lifecycle in the organization – a stage that largely sets the tone for the rest of their employment and their interactions with customers.
Here are some tips for managers and leaders looking to build an effective live chat agent onboarding process, or refine their existing one.
Chat systems tout their ease of use and turnkey nature. However, any technology tool requires time for operators to get familiar. Optimal use of tech by live chat agents is fluid and tacit, and even with the simplest of tools, it still takes time for agents to get to this level of mastery.
Make training hands-on, incorporate real-life exercises, and use training-ready versions of the platform to allow agents to roleplay and test common scenarios. Give agents time to play around on the platform and engage in practice runs before bringing them live. The last thing your agents need while tangling with customer issues is also battling the tech they use, so don’t assume they’ll just “pick it up”.
If your agents aren’t clear on what they’re supposed to achieve, they won’t be able to secure the outcomes you need. While this might sound common-sense, failing to clearly communicate expectations is a symptom of the “curse of knowledge” – where we can assume that agents know the ropes when that’s simply not the case.
The concept of “going above and beyond” is one area that’s often neglected in agent onboarding, as many see it as a basic tenet of customer service, or something that should be implicit in an agent’s personality. But it’s a hugely important area which should be explicitly covered in onboarding to be sure that your agents really are on the same page as you. For service organizations, not practicing this philosophy can spell CSat disaster– and for sales organizations, this equals leaving money on the table.
Don’t leave this to chance. Promote this concept and empower your new live chat agent to do more than just answer a visitor’s stated questions. Challenge them to always consider what other help they could provide, or what else could be useful if they were in the customer’s position.
In terms of lead generation, this “one step further” approach is especially vital. Teach agents early on how best to seek out potential lead opportunities. That means more than just pointing the customer to a white paper. They should also offer to pass them to an inside sales person for more in-depth discussions, or to a video that requires registration, for example. Giving customer service agents the authority to foster meaningful dialogue rather than focusing on how quickly chats are completed can support lead generation objectives as well.
Research into learning has shown that development of knowledge in onboarding is inseparably bound to learner activity in a number of different contexts – the physical (work space), the material (tools and tech) and the social (other employees).
Because of this, social aspects of learning and working should be accounted for within effective onboarding programs. Your goal should be to help your new agent learn from other seasoned agents, and empower them to build relationships within the whole team.
Before going solo, new agents should serve time as an understudy to one of the team’s top performers to glean proven tips and tactics to successfully perform the job. Document best practices to disseminate valuable “lessons from the front line” to all agents. Establishing weekly meetings to discuss events that went well, those that didn’t and trends in the field that can turn into great teaching moments for the entire live chat team.
As a bonus, creating this kind of supportive team environment will improve the productivity and success of all agents, not just those who recently joined the company.
A live chat agent can solve a majority of the customer service issues that come in, but they can’t act as a mouthpiece for every function within your company. Most likely, they can deal effectively with 80 percent to 90 percent of customer queries, with the extra 10 to 20 percent needing further checking, information or consultation with other teams.
That’s not a bad thing. If you try to force agents to deal with things that require too much improvisation or that the agent does not have authority to do, you will trigger negative customer interactions.
Set procedures for agents to quickly get assistance from a supporting team or team leader when issues are beyond the scope of their power or authority to resolve. Recognize that on paper, this sounds simple, but in practice this can be a lot tougher – even the most seasoned agents encounter situations they haven’t seen before, and deciding where the boundaries are isn’t always easy to define.
Focus on building supports to help your agents in their decision making, for example through a robust agent-facing KB, or through having team leaders and floor walkers readily available. Build a culture of communication which encourages agents to speak up when they’re not sure about something and discourages them from “winging it”.
Finally, make sure that whatever supports you use, they’re easy and quick for agents to access. Few things are more frustrating for a customer than spending 15 minutes on a live chat waiting for an answer because the agent doesn’t have the assistance they need at hand.
Technology is developing rapidly, and for many contact centers, shifting to new tech-focused service models comes with questions and risks. There’s sometimes a view that technology will end up reducing service quality, and some are even concerned that chatbots and AI will end up taking jobs away from humans.
This narrative is shifting as firms begin to recognize the best applications for this technology – and often, that means aiming to complement and enhance the work of human agents, not to replace them.
When used properly chatbots can provide great advantages to a new agent. The ability for bots to take on common customer queries cuts out questions which can be perceived as boring or repetitive, leaving your agents to focus only on the queries that need their help the most. This allows you to effectively upskill your agent pool as your agents develop expertise in longer and more complex queries. Agents enjoy connecting with customers, not answering repetitive questions.
Augmented intelligence is another exciting area through which agents can be provided with data which helps them to make better decisions. Through deep learning, natural language processing and multivariate analysis, companies are able to analyze more variables and more extensive data sets than is humanly possible to help agents perform better at their jobs. The goal of these systems should focus on arming humans with information they can use to engage the customer more effectively.
At RapportBoost and Comm100, we’ve frequently seen that the very best chat agents aren’t the ones who are naturally gifted at charming the customer. They’re the ones who possess superior emotional intelligence, situational awareness, defer to the algorithm in certain circumstances, plus use their instincts and experience to decide when different situations require different tactics.
The combination of human AND machine once again beats either one alone – and this is certainly an exciting prospect for anyone looking to help agents to do the best job that they can, through onboarding and beyond.
Originally published here.
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
I jumped at the chance to collaborate with my friend Nate Brown, co-founder of the awesome CX Accelerator community, on a blog post idea that we’d chatted about at the recent ICMI Expo.
Here we get down to the nitty-gritty of whether CX is an artistic or a scientific discipline, and how the two interact.
Continue reading →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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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