Jacada Blog

Don’t complain about complaining customers – they are good for your business

Good blog post by Colin Shaw on Beyond Philosophy: Building Great Customer Experiences, explaining why you should value and learn from a complaining customer. Not only resolutions to help improve your customer retention, but new insights that can lead to a better service offering or the tiniest change to a customer experience that moves it from good to great. 

Jacada's products and solutions can help you take your customer's experience from good to great. Check us out here for more information. 

Customer feedback that makes you go hmmm

Just when you think you’ve heard it all you come into work the next day and it happens all over again. Everything from, “my kitchen is on fire what do you think I should do” to, “do you think your battery powered screwdriver is strong enough to be used as a motor on my homemade airplane?” (I would hate to be that guy's insurance agent!) From the ridulous to the sublime, the things we hear in the call center often times make you laugh out loud.

One that I have to share is the guy that called in to tell us our cordless battery powered broom did not deliver air at 60mph as indicated on the box. When the agent asked him how he knew our facts to be wrong the caller gave us the following explanation:

"When I drive down the interstate with my window open and hang my head out, the breeze takes my breath away and I can’t breathe. I took the cordless broom and pointed it directly at my face, turned it on, and I could still breathe, therefore, the broom is not delivering air at 60mph!"

Help a customer service agent out - give them a unified desktop from Jacada so that at least when they log these calls, they can be efficient. 

What does commercial awareness mean to CSRs?

It’s widely acknowledged that equipping a Customer Service Representative (CSR) with a 360 degree view of the customer is fundamental to customer satisfaction and retention. This can mean the CSR having fast and easy access to a customer profile, contact history, billing, payments, subscription package, tariffs and their complaints. 

Armed with a solid understanding of the customer, the CSR is in a much better position to make recommendations and improve the customer's relationship with the organisation. But is that enough? 

Call scripting for sales-oriented CSRs is generally not a good idea as it stunts conversational selling and customers can feel they're talking to an automaton rather than a person. However, scripts are more effective when the CSR is processing an order, e.g. setting up a Direct Debit where care is required to meet financial regulatory and corporate guidelines. 

No doubt a 360 degree view adds value, but with the pressure to cross-sell and up-sell, CSR’s need commercial awareness more than ever. There’s tremendous value in knowing the net value of the customer to the organisation. Do they spend very little or a lot? What's the sales conversion rate? Sales-oriented CSRs tell us they found it helps to have statistics on their daily performance, team performance and targets on their desktop, and it also makes more competitive with other teams.

It shouldn’t stop there. There’s value in alerting the CSR to nuggets of information such as outstanding or overdue bills, customers that are close to the end of their contract, abnormally high bills, and in one case I saw, a CSR was auto alerted to the fact that the customer could benefit by being on a better contract.

There are ways to effectively bring pertinent pieces of information to the CSRs attention, rather than have them sift through many sources. Check out Jacada JumpStart for more information. 

Karnail Jita - Pre-Sales Consultant, Jacada Inc.

Sprint podcast - Journey to customer service

Interesting podcast detailing Sprint’s 3-year journey to improving customer experience.  Agent metrics, FCR, procedures and training discussed in this Customer Management IQ podcast, “Behind Sprint’s Overhauled Customer Experience Program.” 

For more information on Jacada’s products and services that address agent metrics, FCR and training, click here. 

Great Service = More Sales...Winning! (couldn't resist)

That's according to a new American Express Global Customer Service Barometer. Seven in ten Americans (70%) are willing to spend an average of 13% more with companies they believe provide excellent customer service. 

According to an article by Brendan Read on TMCnet.com, many companies are not getting the math. The study said that 60% of Americans believe businesses have not increased their customer service focus, up from 55% in 2010.  Among this group, 26% think companies are actually paying less attention to service. 

Other stats include: Some 59% of Americans would try a new brand or company for a better service experience. Customers who have a fantastic service experience say friendly representatives (65%) who are ultimately able to solve their concerns (66%) are the most influential. 

Needless to say, good customer service makes a difference! Jacada can help improve your bottom line by streamlining and unifying the agent's desktop.  Automated sign-on and notes, knowledgebase integration, broadcast messaging, quick links, single view of the customer and a unification of multiple applications are just a few of the ways Jacada WorkSpace Unified Desktop can help your company. Contact us for a demo today or click here for more information.

Survey says...

In a recent survey, nearly 70% of customer service organizations report they’ve invested in a knowledgebase for their contact center, but that same percentage report that the knowledge base does not contain the information necessary for agents to solve customer issues. For companies with more than 10,000 employees, 43% report that information that contact center agents need to access to resolve customer issues resides in more than 20 systems.

Other stats include:

• Respondents listed case handling time (50%), customer satisfaction (49%), and first contact resolution (FCR)(49%) as the top three challenges
• 30% of participants estimated the impact of knowledge base operational challenges at somewhere between $100,000 to $1 million per year, including 6% who put the cost at $1 to $5 million
• For companies with 251-500 agents, 83 percent cannot find the information in the knowledge base

These stats point to the need for a unified desktop or process optimization solution that streamlines the multiple applications a customer service rep needs. Making a few changes can lead to effective agents and satisfied customers. Check out Jacada's unified desktop solution - Jacada WorkSpace integrates across multiple channels of communication and allows your CSRs to concentrate on the customer interaction rather than the navigation of the contact center desktop applications and complicated systems.

Are you listening to me?

Much has been written about how agents communicate with customers over the phone and how the social customer is changing the game in terms of customer engagement.

But before we even begin to engage the customer, the agent must listen, process, and react (or not react at all) to the customer's pain or issue. As a customer, how many times have you thought, or even said, "you are not listening to my problem or issue." To address these matters, let's break down the art of listening into its two most basic forms: active and passive...

Read the rest of the article here (written by Brian Jameson and posted on Customer Management IQ).  Also, check out this Jacada webcast focused on how social meda and location-based services have changed the rules of customer engagement.  As always, you can find many other resources and articles at Jacada.com too.

The benefits of call center technology

I found this article on CRMsearch.com (How Call Centers Benefit from CRM Software) and it gives a good general overview of why a unified desktop system is needed by call centers.  One concept discussed is that by tracking customer information, companies can better understand the habits of their customers as well as predict future behaviors.  This is very important in customer service and can be a 'difference maker' for most companies.  Having the ability to anticipate a customer's wants and needs (as well as resolve any issues quickly and effectively) is the reason customers stay with a company for years and years. With the advent of social media, bad customer service spreads fast. 

Check out the entire article here and for more information about Jacada's desktop and process optimization products and how they can help your company, take a tour here. 

How to master the four customer experience competencies

Check out this great blog by Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience Transformist & Managing Partner, Temkin Group, posted on MyCustomer.com. 

Bruce looks at the findings from a recent survey of companies and outlines what we can learn about efforts to become more 'customer-centric.'

In a recent survey of large companies, he found that 92% of European companies are putting more focus on customer-centric culture this year than they did last year. This represents a much higher level of attention than in North America.

Read the entire article here. Also, check out a webcast featuring Bruce Temkin as part of the Jacada Analyst Series - Turning Contact Centers into Customer Experience Leaders

Don't let 'madvocates' hurt your contact center's reputation

Customers are more apt to publicize negative customer experiences than any positive experiences and those negative comments can spread like wildfire via social networks.

Read the entire blog here from Customer Contact News. Jacada products can help keep both your customers and customer service agents happy. Making your agents more productive and efficient will lead to better customer service, loyal customers and hopefully, no more 'madvocates!'