Here are nuggets of CX wisdom from the recently concluded panel discussion on “Delighting Across the Digital Experience (DX)” at the Customer Response Summit (CRS) held from March 1-3, 2023, in Austin, Texas. Key CX leaders included Carlos Castano (Microsoft), Bit Rambusch (Philips), and Monte Tomasino (Dell Technologies).

Top executives shared views and reflections from their experiences. Discussions hovered upon how brands can deliver personalization across multiple yet intersecting personas, bringing EX along on the transformation journey and the need for a common architecture.

Here’s the crux of the discussions.

Personalization Drives Better Outcomes

Personalization matters more than ever, and the business value of getting it right cannot be overstated. These days, consumers don’t just want personalization; they “demand” it.

CX wisdom #1 is that when it comes to personalization, we don’t forget that the development aspect does not interfere with the delivery side, according to Tomasino. Organizations need to rationalize around a common architecture and those personalization capabilities.

Personalization drives performance and better outcomes. It is especially effective at driving repeat engagement and loyalty over time. B2B2C enterprises that excel in personalization have a unique approach. Instead of perceiving personalization as a mere marketing or analytics issue, they regard it as an opportunity that spans the entire organization. Moreover, these companies do not concentrate solely on immediate benefits; they search for long-term growth drivers and prioritize CLV (customer lifetime value).

CX wisdom #2 is about simplifying processes around a common architecture, which is incredibly important. According to Rambush, with a common architecture, you’ll create conflicts within those channels. We tend to get siloed in approaching common ways of working together and governing to drive efficiencies. Think about the customer lifecycle holistically as it relates to managing the lifetime value of that customer.

As consumers demand more from customer support organizations, brands should focus on frictionless customer journeys impacting CX.

CX wisdom #3 is that a well-designed, efficient architecture with the customer in mind will translate into a great customer experience. According to Castano, any brand that’s been in business for 30+ years may still have legacy applications in place. Simplify processes and workflows to simplify the delivery experience.

Role of EX in Personalization Strategies

The Employee Experience (EX) plays a crucial role in the success of a company’s customer personalization strategies. Engaged, motivated, and valued support agents are more likely to deliver personalized experiences that exceed customer expectations.

CX wisdom #4 is being deliberate about the culture we create across the organization. According to Tomasino, you must model behavior and bring employees along on the transformation journey. Make curriculum and certification available to high-aptitude employees. “From a partner perspective, if you want them to be partners, you need to treat them that way. How can you balance what your employees or partners are trying to achieve versus what your brand is trying to achieve?”

Brands should take the feedback and then implement feedback from employees and partners. CX leaders need to know their customers and employees; they need to stay tuned to evolving needs in the market and personalize offerings on the front end. They need to tie this back into the customer support function on the back end.

CX wisdom #5 is to make the employee experience of support professionals as easy as possible to satisfy customers. Castino asks, “How do we remove the barriers so that customers never have to call in?”

Bringing It Home

Now, more than ever, customers are tuned toward personalized and targeted digital experiences catering to their needs and preferences. They are quick to switch to competing brands if demands are unmet. Companies surpassing customer expectations have a higher chance of succeeding, whereas those that fail, risk losing their customers and market share. The end-to-end (E2E) customer journey, from the first encounter to the purchase, follow-up assistance, and continuous engagement, is now table stakes and is crucial in establishing trust, loyalty, and advocacy.

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There’s a good chance you’ve stayed at a Marriott hotel. Marriott is the world’s largest hospitality company, with a powerful portfolio of 8,000+ hotels in 139 countries. It is also consistently voted one of the world’s top employers. Eighty-eight percent of employees say it’s a great place to work compared to 57% of employees at a typical U.S.-based company.

With 20 contact centers, 6,500 associates, 18 languages spoken, and 46 million contacts, throughout its growth, the brand has remained steadfast in its mission to put its people first.

Here’s the thing: Companies don’t deliver customer experiences — people do. More specifically, the employees do.

“Success comes down to the people who wear the badges,” Shannon explained during her keynote. These words echo what founder J. Willard Marriott said, “Take care of your associates and they’ll take care of your customers.” It’s a deeply held belief that remains the cornerstone of the company’s culture today.

“Last year, we hired 5,000 associates. We train our associates to take care of the customer but in the end, they take care of each other,” she added.

When thinking about what your associates truly want, perhaps it’s time to take a different approach to look for those moments that matter and follow Marriott International’s model of practicing employee hospitality.

5 Things You Can Learn from Marriott International About Taking Care of Employees

1. Make everyone feel part of the culture.

2. Align employees around your brand’s purpose and core business objectives.

3. Embrace change.

4. Improve the hiring process from beginning to end. Fill the funnel, simplify the application process, revisit wages and benefits, and enhance the new hire experience program to get people excited and energized to come back.

5. Take a people-first approach to service. Treat your employees exactly how you want them to treat customers.

Leaders are pulled in every direction by every aspect of a business but are especially called upon to improve employee engagement. By focusing heavily on the employee experience and CEC transformation, Marriott has continued to maintain its status as a brand that customers love.

A big thank you to Shannon for joining Execs In The Know in Austin and sharing her thought leadership with our community of CX leaders.

You can learn more about Marriott International and its unparalleled collection of brands here.

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It’s a subject Roku’s Director of Customer Care, Commerce, Mark McKercher, and VXI’s VP of CX Advisory Services, Cheryll Aganda, recently touched on during their speaking engagement at the 2023 Customer Response Summit in Austin, Texas. Their session, “How to Minimize Friction and Maximize Efficiency Through Knowledge Management,” was a case study on how to build a service improvement plan, identify experience gaps, and map both the agent and customer journeys to drive improved outcomes. Their session demonstrated how a partnership approach can augment lean customer care teams to design, build, and scale transformation initiatives within the contact center.

As part of the company that pioneered TV streaming, Mark’s customer care organization understands innovation and the importance of “outside-in” thinking to simplify the experience and deliver value to its viewers. In fact, Roku was recently recognized as one of Fast Company’s top 10 most innovative companies in North America.

Following the summit and Roku’s recent recognition, VXI had the opportunity to interview Mark on his key takeaways coming out of the event, and get his thoughts on how technology vendors, outsourced partners, and CX executives can work together to design and deploy moments that matter in 2023 and beyond.

Was this your first Customer Response Summit?

Mark: Yes, this was my first in-person Execs In The Know event. I enjoyed the size and the smaller workshops. Most conferences have become too large to facilitate meaningful conversations and best practice sharing, but I thought they did a great job of bringing together CX leaders from top brands and showcasing some of the leading technology solutions in our space.

What were your biggest takeaways coming out of the event?

Mark: I think my biggest takeaway is that AI is here. I’ve noticed some organizations have been slower to embrace it, while others are ahead of the game, deploying it at a much larger scale throughout the contact center. The challenge for everyone however is keeping pace with these advancements. There’s a new capability or technology vendor at every event. CX leaders have to stay focused on the true experience drivers and pinpoint intelligent ways of leveraging these technologies to improve key performance metrics and gain efficiencies. While customers don’t care about your technology stack, they do expect you to anticipate their needs and provide swift resolutions.

I think some of these emerging capabilities can distract from the overall strategy and vision if you aren’t careful. It’s all about measured investments.

Why do you think your session on knowledge management and experience design resonated with so many CX leaders?

Mark: Organizations talk a lot about innovation but struggle to get stakeholder buy-in. We tried to keep our session honest and grounded. Our initial problem statement was something that many customer care teams continue to struggle with today despite technological advancements. Knowledge management remains one of the largest sources of frustration within the contact center. How do you continue to improve and evolve it with limited resources? I think most people were interested in how we leveraged our partnership approach with VXI’s advisory team to overcome some of these roadblocks while realizing cost savings via handling time reductions.

Most importantly, we didn’t just talk about our successes. When you are disrupting the current state, you learn as much, if not more, from your missteps. Cheryll and I didn’t shy away from sharing our lessons learned, and how we had to clearly articulate our gaps to build the business case before layering in the technology. I know as an attendee, I’m always disappointed when the sessions and takeaways are too generic. We tried to do the opposite.

In your experience, is successful transformation achieved by people or technology? Is the future bot, brain, or both?

Mark: I think a common misconception across industries is that digital transformation is achieved by upgrading your tools and technologies. While that’s part of the equation, our journey with VXI has shown you have to do much more than that. As our case study detailed, we spent a significant amount of time building out our governance model, aligning our teams, re-engineering our processes, and creating robust standard operating procedures (SOPs) before selecting a knowledge management and automation platform.

To answer the second question, I think there will always be a need for human-assisted support. It might look different, but while technology is making our lives easier, it’s also creating more complexity behind the scenes when things go wrong. There will always be fallout, and when it comes to resolving a confusing billing or technical issue, customers gravitate to human-assisted channels. Investing in people, training, and performance management technologies to empower and upskill advisors is still a critical part of maintaining service excellence.

As the pace of innovation accelerates, what role do your outsourced partnerships need to assume to add value and stay relevant?

Mark: That’s a great question. I’ve worked with several partners over the years, and the ones that stand out in this space can build relationships and deliver exceptional experiences. For example, VXI established itself as an employer of choice in our current service location, resulting in lower-than-average attrition for our program. Through VXI’s CX advisory team, we’ve also been able to tap into unique skill sets to map out the best customer and agent journeys. When I have a problem to solve, I want to hear solutions, not sales pitches. Partners that keep you agile and focused on value creation will always be relevant. Unfortunately, not all business process outsourcers (BPOs) are set up to achieve this level of collaboration.

Which technology do you think will have the biggest impact on the contact center over the next 2-3 years?

Mark: As I mentioned, people want authentic, humanized experiences that are enabled by AI. I think ChatGPT and generative AI will have an enormous impact on our industry in the next few years. There are a few use cases already, but the one that is most intuitive for me is how this technology can help agents craft the right response the first time. I’ve seen solutions recently that can automate contextual conversations by processing data from your knowledge base, content management systems, and SOPs to best answer customer inquiries. Having partners who can bring these capabilities to our attention, build the business case, quantify ROI, and design the agent and customer experience is key. Those are the moments in a partnership that matters as the pace of change continues to accelerate.

What moments matter the most to your customers today?

Mark: When our customers need help making a purchase, getting a refund, or making subscription changes, we try to make the experience as simple as possible. It’s all about reducing opportunities for customer friction – that’s our end goal. With so many subscription options, the billing and refund process has become increasingly complex. Helping our streamers self-serve and providing fast resolutions when fallout does occur are the key moments of truth in our customers’ service journey today.

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In the competitive digital market, companies that satisfy and surpass customer expectations have a higher chance of succeeding, whereas those that fail to do so are at risk of losing their customers and market share.

The end-to-end (E2E) customer journey, starting from the first encounter to the purchase, follow-up assistance, and continuous engagement, is now table stakes and plays a crucial role in establishing trust, loyalty, and advocacy.

We heard from three CX leaders in Austin, TX, during Customer Response Summit (CRS): Bit Rambusch, Vice President, Professional Services and Delivery at Phillips; Monte Tomasino, Vice President, Digital Enablement & Engagement at Dell Technologies, and Carlos Castano, Senior Director, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft, each of whom shared their own unique journeys as it relates to delighting customers across the digital experience.

Alongside panel moderator Sid Victor, Head of Support Services at Movate, they spoke about navigating the process, what worked (and what didn’t), and how brands can deliver personalization across multiple, sometimes intersecting, customer personas, bringing employees along on the transformation journey, and driving collaboration across the organization to converse on a common architecture.

How Does Personalization Work Hand in Hand with Driving Efficiency?

Personalization matters more than ever, and the value of getting it right cannot be overstated. These days, consumers don’t just want personalization, they demand it.

“It’s important we don’t forget with personalization that the development side of things don’t interfere with the delivery side,” Tomasino said. “As an organization, you have to rationalize around a common architecture and those personalization capabilities.”

Personalization drives performance and better outcomes. It is especially effective at driving repeat engagement and loyalty over time.

Businesses that excel in personalization have a unique approach. Instead of perceiving personalization as a mere marketing or analytics issue, they regard it as an opportunity that spans across the entire organization. Moreover, these companies do not solely concentrate on immediate benefits; they search for long-term growth drivers and prioritize customer lifetime value.

“Simplifying around a common architecture is unbelievably important. With a common architecture, you’ll create conflicts within those channels,” explained Rambusch. “We get so siloed as to how to approach common ways of working together and governing to drive efficiencies. How are you thinking about the customer lifecycle journey as it relates to managing the lifetime value of that customer?”

As consumers continue to demand more from customer support organizations, brands can focus myopically across the customer experience to decrease friction.

“A well-designed efficiency with the customer in mind will translate into a great customer experience,” added Castano. “As leaders, we are always under pressure to cut costs. When you simplify processes and workflow, you simplify your delivery experience. It may be difficult to get to a common architecture. If you’re a brand that has been in the business for 30 plus years, you’re going to have a lot of legacy systems.”

What Role Does Employee Experience (EX) Play in Personalization Strategies?

The experience of employees plays a crucial role in the success of a company’s customer personalization strategies. When employees are engaged, motivated, and feel valued, they are more likely to deliver personalized experiences that exceed customer expectations.

“You have to be deliberate about the culture you create across your organization. You must model behavior and bring employees along on the transformation journey. Make curriculum and certification available to high-aptitude employees,” Tomasino said. “From a partner perspective, if you want them to be partners, you have to treat them that way. How can you strike a balance between what your employees or partners are trying to achieve versus what your brand is trying to achieve?”

Victor added that brands should take the feedback, analyze it, and then implement what their employees are saying. You should:

• Know your customers and employees
• Understand their needs
• Personalize service offerings on the front end and tie that into the support they get on the back end.

“To make the employee experience of support professionals as easy as possible to satisfy customers,” said Castano. “How do you remove the barriers so customers never have to call in?”

Before the panel discussion wrapped up, there was an audience Q&A where Alice Sesay Pope from Amazon shared what the brand is doing to delight across the digital experience.

“At Amazon, there’s one thing that’s very clear to everyone and it’s that

customer interaction is a defect. Every year, we’re deliberate about eliminating customer contact. When you think about customer effort, how many steps are there? We are constantly challenging ourselves from the customer’s perspective. How do we proactively detect the customer has a problem before the customer even knows it?”

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Our Leaders Learning from Leaders mantra came to life as we tackled topics that provided ideas for navigating CX transformation success, thinking and planning differently in today’s business environment, adoption of innovation across the organization, and so much more.

Attendees had the opportunity to discover the latest industry trends, learn from leading brands, make purposeful connections, and gain valuable insights, tools, and techniques for CX across a wide-ranging set of tracks and topics.

And, like always, there was plenty of time to connect with colleagues and make new friends in CX.

Here are some of the highlights from last week’s Summit in Austin.

The Imminent Chatbot Transformation: A New Era to Succeed a Disappointing History

Why do most chatbots disappoint? During our first-ever Tech Forum, Matt Taylor, Co-Founder & Head of Product at Knowbl, and Jay Wolcott, CEO at Knowbl, break down why limitations of previous technology yielded expensive and underwhelming conversational self-service and how the new generation of technology can bring 10x the conversational self-service capabilities with 10% of the expense in just 10% of the time.

Pre-Conference Workshops

Real-World Lessons on Leveling Up Your Customer Experience with Generative AI

Chris Wallace, Senior Vice President of Global Growth at IntouchCX, and Jeff Fettes, Founder, and CEO at Laivly, explored real-world examples of leading brands they partner with that have successfully integrated Generative AI into their contact center programs.

How to Create Legendary Social Media Customer Experiences

While social media management tools have advanced to keep pace with rising expectations, many organizations have not. Lauren Kindzierski, Consultant and CX Advisory Leader at VXI, and Lucia Albero, Senior Community Manager at LG, connected with a packed room of CX leaders to workshop how to achieve legendary social care in 2023. A big topic of discussion? How to amplify your brand by being human.

Passion on Purpose: Why Great Leadership Is Driven by Passion

Jasmine Green, Vice President Enterprise Customer Solutions and Enablement at Nationwide, kicked off the Summit with an inspiring keynote on why passion doesn’t end with your customers. She wrapped up by asking the audience, “How will you make a difference in the time that you have with what you have?”

Delighting Across the Digital Experience

How do you deliver personalization across multiple, sometimes intersecting, customer personas? Panel moderator Sid Victor, Head of Support Services at Movate, sat down with Bit Rambusch, Vice President, Professional Services and Delivery at Phillips; Monte Tomasino, Vice President, Digital Enablement & Engagement at Dell Technologies, and Carlos Castano, Senior Director, Customer Experience and Success at Microsoft to discuss bringing employees along on the transformation journey, personalization strategies, and driving collaboration to converse on a common architecture.

Customer Shop Talks

Customer Shop Talk sessions are small, industry-expert-led discussions on a laser-focused topic.

In Austin, Greg Petersen, Global Connect Sales Specialist at AWS; Dima Cichi, Senior Principal Customer Success Manager at Nuance; Andrea Salerno, Director of Content and Research at Kustomer; and Karen Inbar, Product Marketing Director at NICE, addressed a variety of CX hot topics, including AI-ML-powered customer experience improvements, CX best practices, the modern age of social messaging, and the intelligent tools that should be in your tech stack.

Creating a Culture Ready for Innovation

Panel moderator Connie Workman, Head of CXE Sales, AMER at AWS, spoke with Melissa Archambault, Executive Director, Customer Experience Advocacy & Strategy at CVS Health; Kimberly Masters, Senior Director, Contact Center at Sam’s Club; and Lori Stewart, Director of International Reservations at American Airlines, about the biggest challenges their teams face with CX transformation today. This powerhouse panel dug its heels into that question — among many others.

“You have to find a way to make experiences across disparate brands consistent, which isn’t easy,” said Archambault.

Roku Demonstrates How to Minimize Friction and Maximize Happiness Efficiency Through Knowledge

Cheryll Aganda, Vice President for Customer Experience Advisory for VXI, and Mark McKercher, Director of Customer Care, Commerce at Roku, took center stage to speak about navigating the process and what worked (and what didn’t) when it came to improving Roku’s customer experience with knowledgeable, efficient service interactions at scale.

Leveraging Customer Data and Insights to Design, Build, and Run a Winning CX Program

Many organizations have a lot of data but are constrained by limited access to it and the inability to turn it into intelligence with speed and at scale. Panel moderator Reagan Miller, Global Vice President of Analytics and Voice of the Customer at Concentrix, sat down with Douglas McCann Director – Contact Center Partner Strategy at United Airlines; Jeff Ellis, Senior Director of Customer Experience Services at Vistra; and Peter Gregg, Director, Customer Care Operations at iRobot to talk about getting organized, analyzing the data, and the reasons why what you measure matters.

Leading from Any Seat: How a Culture of Empowerment and Engagement Paves the Way for Operational Excellence

Having a competitive edge begins with your people. Because happier teams equal happier customers. Keynote Wilfred Busby, Senior Vice President, Employee Experience at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, shared how his organization took HR and transformed it into employee experience (EX). “People need to feel valued, appreciated, and respected for them to be motivated,” he explained.

The Power of Putting People First: Take Care of Your People, and They’ll Take Care of Business

Shannon Patterson, SVP of Customer Engagement Centers at Marriott International, the world’s largest hospitality company, dove into what it means to engage associates and how that translates to seamless guest experiences, happier customers, and brand loyalty. “Success comes down to the people who wear the badges,” she said.

Moments of Brilliance

Moments of Brilliance are mini case-study sessions.

How Zenni Embraced a Customer-Centric Strategy to Build Loyalty and Deliver an Exceptional Service Experience

Mike McCarron, Chief Customer Officer at Gladly, and Brian Kershon, Director, Global Customer Service at Zenni, shared how they have embraced a corporate-wide customer-centered service strategy, and the successes they have seen.

Building a Resilient Contact Center with AI-Driven Performance Intelligence

Lauren England, Director of Customer Success at Pathlight and Stephane Grossi, Senior Manager – Strategy & Analytics – Member Services at Ancestry.com discussed staying ahead of agent performance, optimizing operational efficiency, and driving business outcomes with AI-driven insights.

The 7 X 24 X 365 Relay Team: Getting the Best Out of Your Digital and Live Agents

What makes up today’s best-in-class customer experiences and how can brands get the best out of their hybrid teams? Dennis Hernandez, Vice President at Inspiro, and Cosimo Trapani, Senior Director at 1-800-Flowers.com, share why live agents are still critical to success, putting agents in positions where they’ll thrive, and the need to leverage trends to be ready with solutions to solve customer needs.

Improving CX in the Face of Reduced Resources

Is your organization, like many others, already on a recession footing? Panel Moderator Monica Gupta, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Nuance, shares the stage with April Obersteller, Director of Global Experience: EX + CX at woom; Gerald Hastie, Senior Director, Trust & Safety at Roblox; Dinesh Chand, Vice President Global Client Care at Visa; and Ian Schmehl, Operations Vice President Enterprise Operations at State Farm to discuss how to start breaking down silos, the voice of the customer, and redefining the use of personalization.

The Power of Customer Obsession – It’s Beyond Being Customer Centric

Julie Weingardt, Chief Operations Officer at Turo, the world’s largest car sharing marketplace, as she puts customer obsession under the microscope and explains why building a customer-obsessed culture only happens when the customer is a key consideration in every aspect of the business. “Feedback is a driving element of our customer experience,” explained Weingardt.

Thank You to Our Community of CX Leaders

We are proud to have had the opportunity of gathering such an incredible group of CX leaders for three days of focusing on the PASSION for Customers, the POWER of Technology, and PURPOSE-Driven Leadership.

Stay tuned for more coverage on all things CRS Austin!

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The question becomes, how do brands prepare for the future of business conversations, to ensure they stay ahead of the curve and stand out from the competition?

Kustomer went out and surveyed over 3,000 global consumers to understand what changes are occurring in the customer experience landscape.

The Stickiness of Modern Messaging

 Modern messaging channels are successful for consumers and businesses alike. According to a study conducted by The University of California at Irvine, people check their mobile devices once every 43 seconds — totaling 600 times over the typical eight-hour workday. Younger generations have been conditioned to look at those little red notifications as soon as they pop up.

While consumers report checking their emails most frequently, chronic inbox fatigue can oftentimes hinder business conversations. By 2025 it is predicted that 376.4 billion emails will be sent daily, worldwide. That is up by nearly 23% over five years. When measuring average handle time, and ensuring that your brand conversations make it through the noise, email may not always be the smartest choice.

As the data below shows, consumers are much more likely to respond to business messages via text than they are via email, multiple times per day.

Both checking of notifications and responding to messages on social channels is also significantly higher for Gen Z consumers than any other age range, with 52% reporting they check their social notifications multiple times a day, vs only 20% of consumers 65+. Conversely, less than half of Gen Z consumers say they check their email multiple times a day, compared to 72% of consumers 65+.

What a Great Customer Experience Looks Like

As generational preferences continue to shift towards more modern, digital and instantaneous communication channels, it’s important to ensure that you aren’t just showing up on a channel, but actually building long-lasting customer relationships. Here’s what the data tells us businesses should be prioritizing, and how to achieve exceptional CX at scale.

Convenience Is Paramount

Eighty-nine percent of consumers think contacting customer service should be easier and more convenient, and 87% of consumers appreciate immediate resolution to their problems, only any channel they prefer. The question becomes, how can you deliver on this need for speed? Support teams are often bogged down with manual, routine tasks that consume agents’ time and effort, and result in long response and resolution times that frustrate customers. Currently 50% of customer service agents’ time is spent searching for information and performing repetitive, manual tasks. This is no longer sustainable.

Businesses need to tap into technology tools and AI to eliminate the menial, repetitive, and time consuming tasks, with intelligent automations that can detect intent, collect relevant information, automate agent interactions, and route conversations. Intelligent chatbots are now able to deliver contextual and personalized information that feels human, and can seamlessly hand off to agents when necessary. With the right technology, agents can focus on building relationships with customers and fixing complex issues in a timely manner.

Create Connections

While speed is always appreciated in customer service interactions, modern day consumers want to build a connection with your brand. For simple questions and low level inquiries, self-service may be ideal — especially for younger consumers who have grown up with Google in the palm of their hands. But in a digital-first environment, customer service teams may be the sole, human face of your brand.

In fact, 83% of consumers expect customer service reps to reflect the brand’s ethos and values, and 82% appreciate when businesses communicate with them in a friendly, conversational manner. They no longer want to feel like a number in a queue, or a transaction on a spreadsheet. They want to be a part of a brand’s community, and establish a true connection with the business.

Continue the Conversation

Many customer experience platforms on the market today are ticket-based, meaning they identify the customer as an attribute of an inbound or outbound message and build the communication around that ticket. These systems prioritize the metric of a “done ticket” over a customer relationship. It is abundantly clear that customers no longer find this acceptable.

Eighty percent of consumers expect customer service agents to know about their orders and history, without communicating it to them, and 69% of consumers appreciate being able to switch customer service channels without losing context. This number only grows when we look at younger consumers.

And consumers don’t want the conversation to end once a ticket is closed. Eighty-one percent of consumers report that they appreciate proactive support, and 73% of consumers appreciate followup after their problem is solved.

Businesses must leverage a modern day customer service CRM, that focuses on the customer at the center of each interaction. A single and full view of the customer, and an integrated data system, gives you the complete context of that customer’s history so that you can take the right next action, at scale.

Want to learn more about the modern age of CX messaging? Access the full research report here.

Guest blog post written by Andrea Paul Salerno, Director of Content and Research at Kustomer. To learn more about the Modern Age of Messaging, go to kustomer.com

To learn more about this topic and others, visit the events page to check out all of our upcoming events.

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If Amazon can make it possible for us to find and order products in seconds and receive them on our doorstep the very next day, why should getting service on those products still be an exercise in old-school frustration? Automation in manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution is what makes the Amazon experience so effortless.

It’s time to turn up the emphasis on automation in the contact center and make the service experience as quick and easy as the Amazon product experience.

Create a Virtuous Circle

As organizations explore ways to bolster the performance of their contact centers in 2023, it’s critical to focus on technology that empowers agents to fully leverage their human skills. Paying more attention to the needs of customer service agents will not only increase their loyalty (no small matter, now or ever!); but it will also equip them to deliver those near-perfect customer experiences.

One way to deliver this is through a “people first” principle. Promoting the well-being of our employees—both at work and on their own time—helps encourage them to create innovative technology that keeps contact center teams engaged, productive, and better able to satisfy their own customers.

Focus Innovation on Service

Traditionally generators of cost rather than revenue, customer service departments attract minimal attention or budget for innovation. But for many organizations, the contact center has become a key customer touch point and brand reputation driver since the pandemic forced a retreat from in-person business.

Suddenly, the contact center’s lack of innovation is a real weakness. Standard technologies that worked well enough in the pre-pandemic office were often overwhelmed by unusually high call volume routed to agents—fewer in number and working from makeshift home offices—who were often under-equipped and poorly supported, impacting the ability to resolve customer issues.

Cultivate a “Problem-Out Approach”

Many technology providers take a “product-out” approach— creating or acquiring a product and convincing a target market that they have a problem that can only be solved by this new product.

Instead, these providers should be using a “problem-out” approach—asking customers to help us understand their business problems, exploring potential solutions together, getting their feedback throughout the product development phase, and creating solutions that specifically address those business problems.

This is a laborious process. It requires employees willing to listen to and learn from customers each day. It requires dozens of people to contribute their talents, ingenuity, and dedication over an extended period. I don’t believe geniuses are pre-formed; I think talent is partly innate, but it always needs to be properly cultivated to realize its full potential.

The cultivation of talented people is the key to successful innovation. For example, eliminating employee distractions will lead to better end results. If employees are worried about a health plan that doesn’t cover their needs or a schedule that doesn’t permit an afternoon off to watch their kid’s soccer match, they won’t be able to fully focus on customer problems and innovating solutions to those problems.

Tie It All Together

Loyalty and commitment to excellence thrive in a climate of respect, and innovation is tough to achieve without them. I’ve found it’s incredibly beneficial to make sure employees understand that the company “has their back,” so they can focus on their “front”—i.e., the challenge of creating innovative solutions that drive our customers’ success.

The key to successful innovation is not coding skills or big-name university degrees—it’s properly cultivating the people who imagine and create those innovations. Providing them with the resources, support, time, and space they need to be successful is central to leadership. I believe it’s the only way that true innovation can take root and thrive within an organization.

Like many other business functions, contact centers continue to struggle with the ongoing labor shortage. Many believe that more technology can solve the problem. I agree, but with an important caveat: Technology must be conceived and designed to fortify—not replace—human agents.

Guest blog post written by Matt McConnell, CEO at Intradiem. To learn more visit Intradiem.com.

To learn more about this topic and others, visit the events page to check out all of our upcoming events.

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Despite uncertain economic times, contact centers can save money by implementing the following four strategies focused on increasing efficiency without sacrificing customer experience.

Implement Automation

Automation, such as Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVA), can handle routine inquiries, reduce agents’ workload, and free up their time to manage more complex customer issues.

To underscore this point, HFS Research found that automation is the number one initiative currently underway to support enterprises in meeting their strategic priorities.

Vistra Energy, one of the ten largest electric companies in the U.S., is one example. Vistra used an IVA to handle its large call volume, resulting in a 20% increase in call containment and reduced operation and IT costs.

Provide Self-Service Options

Self-service options reduce the need for customers to interact with an agent, saving the contact center money.

Such was the case with Salt River Project, a large public power utility. The company needed a flexible customer care solution to help reduce customer service costs. It deployed a conversational virtual solution that increased customer satisfaction, reduced dependence on costly seasonal live agents, and improved self-service rates to 35%.

Optimize Staffing Levels

Automation alone is insufficient to ensure excellent customer experience; humans are needed, too. However, contact centers can save money by optimizing staffing levels, ensuring enough agents are available to handle customer inquiries while minimizing the number of idle agents.

Improve Call Routing

Contact centers can use intelligent call routing to quickly direct calls to the most appropriate agent or department, reducing AHT and increasing CSAT.

The email marketing company, Constant Contact, needed a way to streamline their customer service queue and improve cost savings. The company implemented an IVA, which resulted in a 15 to 30 second decrease in AHT and freed agents to address more complex issues.

Conclusion

“This, too, shall pass” is a helpful mantra to remember during difficult economic times. Inflation is temporary. The economy will improve. In the meantime, contact centers can use these four strategies to save money and offer quality customer service.

Guest blog post written by Peter Mullen, Chief Marketing Officer, Interactions. To learn more about how Intelligent Virtual Assistants can save your company money, go to www.interactions.com.

Interactions provides Intelligent Virtual Assistants that seamlessly combine artificial intelligence and human understanding to enable businesses and consumers to engage in productive conversations. 

To learn more about this topic and others, visit the events page to check out all of our upcoming events.

The post How Contact Centers Can Save Money During Uncertain Economic Times appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Fact: 61% of tenured agents use call coaching software and those who do have higher job satisfaction and other success metrics across the board.

While it’s true that tenured agents have certain best practices down pat, they benefit from call coaching software too — just for different reasons than new agents do.

The best call coaching software is flexible in this way and tailored to every stage in the agent lifecycle so it can provide value to all users.

How Does Call Coaching Software Help New Agents?

Starting a new job nearly always means information overload. To get agents on the phones as soon as possible, contact centers can use call coaching software to support this ramp period.

It makes sense: Instead of memorizing tomes of company knowledge, agents can use guidance and coaching software to surface the right information at the right time so they deliver a consistent and valuable experience to their customers right away.

Specifically, call coaching software can benefit new agents by:

• Decreasing onboarding time
• Decreasing shadowing or “nesting periods” before agents can take calls independently
• Decreasing reliance on memorization so agents can be more present during calls
• Decreasing average handle time by surfacing the right information to agents, and therefore to customers, instantly

A report from Balto’s Conversation Excellence Lab found that 66% of mistakes on calls could be attributed to human error (21% boredom, 24% forgetfulness, and 21% nervousness). The newest agents reported forgetfulness as their most common reason for making mistakes, and call coaching software can address this core need very effectively.

How Does Call Coaching Software Help Tenured Agents?

In that report, tenured agents ranked boredom as their leading cause of mistakes. They know their talk track inside and out — which is when slips up happen. So how can they keep things interesting for themselves on calls?

The Conversation Excellence Lab surveyed over 600 agents to see what they thought of call coaching software today versus what they thought of it when they first started in their roles.

They found that the value of call coaching software changed but didn’t diminish over time. Sometimes the opposite was true as well: At key points in an agent’s tenure, they found call coaching software more helpful than they did when they were onboarding. How?

Call coaching software can benefit tenured agents by:

• Improving their experience by suggesting new and fresh improvements to their talk track to stave away feelings of boredom
• Improving their experience through gamification (leaderboards, badges, challenges, and more)
• Improving their experience with social reinforcement in the form of micro-coaching moments with their manager or supervisor
• Improving their experience by baking flexibility and improvisation into their talk track (read more in our recent report, “The Case for the Anti-Script”)

See the Difference: Call Coaching Software Helpfulness Over Time

The Conversation Excellence Lab asked over 600 agents who had been in their role for 2 or more years how helpful they found call coaching software now and how helpful they found it at the beginning of their careers.

The two lines below represent the answers to these questions. While tenured agents reported that call coaching software was slightly more helpful while they were onboarding, the reported helpfulness for both onboarding and the current period tracked closely with one another.

An important note from the Lab: the 12-14 year tenure marks had the lowest sample size and may not be statistically significant enough to analyze, which explains the volatility of the line graph at that point. Without those data points, call coaching software consistently hovered around a 4 out of 5 in helpfulness for new and tenured agents alike.

But check out the areas where tenured agents found call coaching software equally or more helpful now than they did while they were onboarding, like at the 3- and 6-year marks.

There are a variety of reasons why call coaching software might be more helpful once an agent has settled into their role. For example, onboarding can be a high-stress period, and any new tool will come with its own learning curve. Agents who have been in their role for a while have mastered this tool and may find it more useful as a result.

The biggest takeaway from this data is that call coaching software is decidedly not only helpful for agents during onboarding. Its modes of helpfulness may change over time, but its helpfulness doesn’t lessen.

How to Choose Your Call Coaching Software

The marketplace for call coaching software is vast with a variety of offerings and specialties. Do your research to understand which option is the best for you.

The good news is that, all in all, The Conversation Excellence Lab found that the usage of any call coaching software at all resulted in higher scores across a variety of metrics, including job satisfaction and promotion-seeking behavior.

Tenured agents who used call coaching software were:

• 57% more likely to be working towards a promotion
• 13% more likely to view the contact center as a great place to work
• 12% more satisfied with their job
• 10% more satisfied with their pay
• 4% more likely to feel respected by their manager
• 3% more likely to feel respected by their peers

Empower Your Agents With Balto’s Real-Time Guidance

While there are several call coaching software options, we’re partial to our Real-Time Guidance platform.

Balto is an enterprise solution that can help contact centers achieve measurable results by helping your agents satisfy more customers, retain more clients, and close more sales. We have three primary services: Real-Time Guidance for empowering agents, Real-Time QA for automatic call scoring, and Real-Time Coaching for proactive coaching.

Guest blog post written by Lior Torernberg at Balto. Balto unites agents with AI to enable better conversations that deliver results. Top-performing contact centers trust Balto’s real-time guidance enterprise solution to prevent missed sales opportunities, costly compliance mistakes, and negative customer experiences. Today, Balto has guided over 170 million calls, provided over 200 million real-time recommendations, and driven millions in increased revenue.

To learn more about this topic and others, visit the events page to check out all of our upcoming events.

The post Why 61% of Successful Agents Use Call Coaching Software appeared first on Execs In The Know.

But being present and responsive is no longer enough to meet the demands of the modern social consumer. To win in this channel, marketers and customer care associates need to come together to form an all-star team, moving the service experience from a reactive to a proactive state to champion opportunities for value creation.

Many brands operate under the assumption that this is already being achieved when in reality, very few are doing it well. Yes, social media can be a treasure trove for customer insights and brand advocacy, but if executed poorly without the proper framework and tools in place, it can also be a giant abyss, sucking up your time and resources with little ROI.

To avoid the common pitfalls and achieve legendary customer care, here are three mission-critical objectives to set for your social engagement and servicing teams this year:

Objective 1: Remove operational silos and cancel the “cost center” culture

Social media servicing teams tend to reside in either the marketing or customer care organization. While there may be a monthly meeting to debrief and review KPIs, the two functions typically operate in separate spheres. This is unfortunate because the less internal communication and collaboration between the two often results in more customer friction.

To create legendary experiences, the right supporting organization and governance structure needs to be established, combining the strengths of both departments. Marketing can help customer service teams become more proactive and targeted in their engagement strategies, while maintaining a consistent brand voice. By being more selective and strategic on the types of content that warrant a response and the level of urgency assigned to them, customer care teams can find the time to put down the firehose and focus more on joy share and suggestive selling tactics. This is also known as “conversational commerce”, a tactic brands use to respond publicly to a post or a mention with the intent of providing useful information to convert prospects or socialize cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

In return, service teams can help marketing stay ahead of changing preferences, leveraging their daily interactions as a source of truth into what customers want more or less of – including feedback for the product lifecycle, content strategy, and brand positioning. The key is that both sides become intimately acquainted with the other, working as one unified team to gain a better understanding of their customer.

Example:  Take for example a deregulated utility company. While the marketing team might be more focused on promotional campaigns featuring discounts, average savings, customer accolades, and awards, their service teams are busy responding to outage inquires, service requests, and fostering a sense of community. If the two worked as one, the content strategy would be more cohesive, focusing on personal, localized care that leverages a differentiated service experience as a key selling point compared to the traditional sales pitch. More time could then be spent targeting prospective customers through conversational commerce.

Both departments have historically been viewed as a cost center within their organization, but by working together to turn social media into a full-service channel, the number of actionable insights, conversions, customer saves, and cross-sell opportunities can be quantified to flip that perception on its head. With 71% of consumers more likely to recommend a brand to a family or friend after having a positive interaction on social media, the opportunities for value creation are exponential.

Objective 2: Make sure you are leveraging the right SaaS tool across the enterprise

Another trap that many organizations fall into is purchasing too many point solutions to help solve for individual challenges across functional areas, instead of optimizing a single tool and encouraging cross-functional collaboration.

It’s something our advisory team at VXI observes frequently when evaluating a brand’s social media technology stack. Often upwards of a million dollars can be cut from the budget by simply consolidating tools and selecting the right SaaS platform to streamline workflows. The ideal social media management platform captures conversations, filters, and sorts through the noise with the help of AI, automates workflows for determining urgency, and leverages intelligent routing to get the most impactful mentions to the right team at the right time. If your social listening and engagement platforms are two separate tools, it’s time to downsize.

To make matters worse, having too many tools can lead to disparate measurement and reporting practices across the organization. Social NPS and sentiment scores are two examples of KPIs that need to be reviewed by the collective team – not in functional silos.

Example: If a product has just been launched and sentiment scores are trending down, customer care teams are often the first line of sight into the issues that need to be addressed. While marketing and PR teams are inclined to publish public apologies, too many “I’m sorry” messages on social media will only fuel the flames when it comes to diffusing negative sentiment scores. Instead, customer care teams can assist marketing by responding with positive engagement methods and higher response rates. When operating from the same tool and reporting infrastructure, a more productive conversation can be had around how the proactive content and the reactive servicing strategies are working together to create the best experience for the customer.

Objective 3: Create a playbook for earned and owned content

Achieving the perfect response rate between owned and earned social content is somewhat of a holy grail. With an endless flow of mentions to sort through it can be one of the more challenging strategies to implement and operationalize. Every time you think you’ve mastered it; social behaviors change and the balance shifts again. Depending on the size of the servicing team, some organizations may choose only to respond to conversations on “owned” media or the content that a brand creates and shares from their proprietary pages. Others, set a goal of responding to everything.

While there is no one-size fits all approach, every functional area within the organization must answer one question – which conversations are most impactful for your customer and brand? Once that question is answered, content can be categorized, and stakeholders assigned. Luckily with the right SaaS tool, artificial intelligence (AI) can help automate many of the back-end processes to ensure only actionable content is filtered through to your customer care representatives.

Today, leveraging AI to gain efficiencies on social media extends beyond a messaging bot. For programs that engage with “earned” content, or the conversations happening outside of the brand’s direct line of sight, AI plays a pivotal role.

Example: One multinational retail brand was able to replace their social media triage team by automating the back-office workflows required to sort through the earned content, tagging and assigning functional owners based on the category and level of urgency. This included marketing insights, crisis management, and opportunities for suggestive selling and conversational commerce. By eliminating the manual triage process, their service team was able to work faster with less effort, freeing up opportunities for value creation.

With 31% of prospective customers turning to social media to make pre-sales inquiries, responding to earned content can be a great way to increase a brand’s conversion rate for online sales. For example, if a telecom customer asks about fiber internet options on Twitter, or a retailer is mentioned on a forum about an old product model that needs to be replaced, these are prime opportunities for customer care teams to jump in.

After all, supporting your customers on social media isn’t just about responding to a complaint or acknowledging accolades. It’s about proactive engagement and two-way conversations that show you care – because you can. The brands who create legendary experiences in 2023 will take their marketing and servicing teams a step further, working cross-functionally and with the help of AI to capture and retain customer attention.

Meet with our social media domain experts at Customer Response Summit (CRS) Austin

If you enjoyed our blog, make sure to attend our pre-conference workshop, “How to Create Legendary Social Media Customer Experiences.” VXI and our brand partner LG will be hosting a session to help attendees rethink, reimagine, and revive their social customer engagement strategies. Participants will gain hands-on experience running through the 7 key steps that lead to legendary social care.

Guest blog post written VXI. VXI Global Solutions is a BPO leader in customer service, customer experience, and digital solutions. Founded in 1998, the company has 40,000+ employees at more than 40 locations in North America, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. VXI delivers omnichannel and multilingual support, software development, quality assurance, and CX advisory, automation & process excellence to the world’s most respected brands.

VXI is backed by private equity investor Bain Capital and is one of the fastest growing, privately held business services organizations in the United States and the Philippines, and one of the few US-based customer-care organizations in China.

To learn more about this topic and others, visit the events page to check out all of our upcoming events.

The post Social Media as a Service Differentiator: How to Win in 2023 appeared first on Execs In The Know.