The following is a guest blog written by Sara Wright, Marketing Director, at Dialog Direct.

Last week we shared the first post in this two part series “Uber-Channel Shifts: Lessons Learned From the 2015 Holiday Season.” Get all caught up on the first two “lessons learned” by reading the first post in the series!

At Customer Response Summit Phoenix a one-of-a-kind panel involving customer experience executives from three of retail’s biggest competitors came together on the stage.  The panelists shared their firsthand experience in retail’s hottest trends, innovations, wins and lessons learned.

Here is what we learned:

3. Social Media Brings Delight and In-Store Insight

The speed of growth and change in social media, and the way that it is transforming the expectations of the customer, will continue to revolutionize the way retailers market, sell and communicate with their customers.

The most common way that retailers are engaging with their customers on social media is through two-way social media communication. The debate, however, is about who to prioritize the communication strategy around – influencers, detractors, or do you proactively reach out to all to delight? It depends on who you talk to, but the majority seem to prioritize reactive communication to the detractors or those that have an issue to resolve. One large online retailer, however, spoke up at the Customer Response Summit and stated that they believe in using social media to surprise and delight, not just react. Use vines, photos and video, not just text, to engage with a customer to create an over-the-top experience. Many retailers rely on an outsourced customer engagement partner to help monitor, engage and delight customers, especially during peak times or after hours. It has also been found that social media predictive technology can increase operational efficiencies by nearly 41% by prioritizing the most impactful conversations.

<Read: Going Above and Beyond to WOW on Social Media: Real-Life Case Study>

Other ways that top retailers are using social media is to provide store-level customer experience insights. For example, a brand can capture social media interactions made about particular stores or specific store employees and brings them back to the store. For example, if you love the customer service that Kathy Smith from the Boise, Idaho, store provided you and you tweet about it, there is a good chance that Kathy will see that recognition. If you are upset about the fitting room mess at the Shelby Township, Michigan, store, again, a good chance that the store manager from that location will be aware and take action.

The third way that retailers are using social media is to increase sales through posting about specific products with a link to purchase. It was stated that this strategy is fizzling for them as social sales only contribute to about 1%, significantly down from 2014.

4. Customers Don’t Care About Your Silos

In spite of being recognized as one of the biggest barriers in creating a seamless customer experience, departmental silos haven’t gone away. Brands are working toward breaking the silos by first identifying the silos and understanding how customers interact across them.

In the retail space, there are a growing number of channels and departments that must assume a holistic online-offline perspective; everything from physical store interactions, to marketing and customer service interactives, to departmental credit card initiatives. It was mentioned that to help create a seamless multichannel experience, retailers are integrating a CRM system that houses all departmental and channel interactions. This will give the right team member’s access to the most up-to-date customer data, eliminating some of your customers’ most frustrating experiences such as high-effort engagements and non-personal interactions.

If your brand has not yet completed the journey by tying in a robust CRM system, you may find it beneficial to rely on a customer engagement professional to help. Many outsourced customer engagement professionals have the integrated tools and processes that help bridge the CX and systems gap, helping to create a more seamless experience.

5. Customers Are Still Experiencing RAGE

In conversation over the 2015 “Customer Rage” study, the top conversation was around annoyance with customer service catchphrases. While it was agreed upon by all that the phrase “That is our policy” should never be stated in the call center or on the retail floor, the No. 1 most annoying phrase, as cited by the study, was still being used very frequently. That phrase? “Your call is important to us, please continue to hold.” 50% of all surveyed believe that is the most annoying phrase, while 17% actually want it banned completely.

One of the most controversial topics discussed regarding the Rage Study results? Whether or not to apologize to an unhappy customer. The Rage Study says that 75% of unhappy customers want an apology while only 28% received it. What do the retailers and the attendees of the Customer Response Summit think? Do you apologize or do you not? Well, that is still the debate. Some believe you do own up to the issue and apologize while others believe it comes off very insincere to say that you are sorry. Whether you apologize or not, it is a fact that complainant satisfaction will nearly double (from 37% to 73%) when a non-monetary remedy is applied with a monetary remedy.

It is important to consider that to avoid Customer Rage, it is essential to always be available, personal and effortless. This can be more difficult during high peak-volume times such as holidays and the launch of new programs when your call center is already experiencing a high volume of calls. Consider looking into an outsourced call center partner to help ease the pain of high call volume or to assist with after-hour needs.

Want even more content?

– Join a free webinar on “How to Craft a Strong Customer Service Recovery Program on May 19th. Register Here (expired).

– Interested in what was learned at the Customer Response Summit in Seattle during September 2015? Check out www.dialog-direct.com/media-room/article/crsummit-2015-6-things-we-learned/

The post Uber-Channel Shifts: Lessons Learned From the 2015 Holiday Season – Part 2 appeared first on Execs In The Know.

The following is a guest blog written by Sara Wright, Marketing Director, at Dialog Direct.

The winter Customer Response Summit may have concluded, but the excitement generated by the event still lives on. Of course, when Execs In The Know is involved, we can all expect great connections, thought-provoking panels and lots of laughs, but it’s what we didn’t expect in Phoenix that is generating the most chatter – the convergence of three of retail’s biggest competitors together on one stage. This one-of-a-kind panel involving customer experience executives was full of energy, content and friendly, competitive jabs, as the panelists shared their firsthand experience in retail’s hottest trends, innovations, wins and lessons learned.

Here is what we learned:

1. “Click-and-Collect” Shopping Has Many Challenges and Opportunities

Appealing to the omnichannel shopper who bounces back and forth between online and in-store shopping, “click-and-collect” orders are enjoyed by 42% of online shoppers, according to Forrester Research. While the concept of buying online and picking up in-store seems easy, both retailers and consumers are experiencing both the joys and the pains that go along with this new initiative – especially during the 2015 holiday season.

The introduction of buying online and picking up in-store is very complex operationally, with one major retailer expressing challenges specifically around accuracy of available stock, customers buying the reserved item in-store before it is picked, and order queuing. While challenges are observed and expected, this new fulfillment model brings many exciting revenue growth opportunities. For one, this model brings online shoppers into the stores which, according to a survey by Deloitte, omnichannel shoppers were poised to spend about 75 percent more than store-only shoppers this season on gifts, entertaining and other purchases.

Perhaps the greatest benefit to retailers? The ability to tackle their warehouse out-of-stock issues by using their stores as another fulfillment source. During the 2015 holiday season it was noted that 30% of the items that were purchased online were out of stock at the warehouses, but because of the new ship from store model, brands are now able to save all of those sales. Dubbed “smarter inventory,” retailers can now pull from stores that have higher inventory of a specific product, reducing static shelf life to maximize profits, as well as pull from the store closest to the shipping address to lower shipping costs and decrease ship time. This format greatly benefits those last-minute holiday shoppers, now giving them additional online shopping days while still receiving their packages on time.

As a retailer, be prepared for the pitfalls of not meeting customer expectations when it comes to click-and-collect, or with any new innovation, by adequately staffing your call center, or outsourcing a piece of your contact center for an increase in call volume. A customer service recovery strategy, following data-backed guidelines to deter customer rage, may also be helpful.

2. Geo-Tracking Enhances the In-Store Experience

While dot-com sites have long had the benefit of placing cookies and other tracking tools on computers to track online consumer behavior, 2015 brought a similar benefit to the brick-and-mortar operations. Thanks to cell phones, Wi-Fi and retailer apps, retailers can now personalize the in-store experience by tracking the customer location, as well as real-time store behaviors. One of the retail panelists at the Summit spoke about their use of this new technology, to enhance the customer experience with their booming grocery pickup service. The store can actually receive a ping from your cell phone, alerting them that you are in the parking lot. This then let’s the employee know that it is time to meet you outside to load up the groceries!

Another large retailer represented at the Summit uses mobile tracking to track customer behavior. If a purchase is not made in their store, they can send you a non-purchase survey and then track the competitor stores that you go to instead. The mobile app also tells the brand that you are in the store, so if you are ordering an item via your phone while in-store, the shipping charges will be automatically waived.

Geo-tracking can bring many opportunities for retailers to personalize the customer experience, giving the opportunity to deliver just-in-time ads and coupons, as well as gain a better understanding of how customers move throughout the store, providing helpful insight for store design and product display. Another option for a personalized customer experience is to work with a campaign management partner to strategically use your data, to deliver personalized and relevant digital and traditional communications that drive measurable results in real-time.

Join us next week for part two in this series, to discover three more lessons learned from the 2015 Holiday Season!

Want even more content?

– Join a free webinar on “How to Craft a Strong Customer Service Recovery Program on May 19th. Register Here.

– Interested in what was learned at the Customer Response Summit in Seattle during September 2015? Check out www.dialog-direct.com/media-room/article/crsummit-2015-6-things-we-learned/

The post Uber-Channel Shifts: Lessons Learned from the 2015 Holiday Season – Part 1 appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Digital disruption is on many corporate agendas right now, but what is it? Put simply, it’s when an idea or technological process changes the way that things are done. If the change is radical enough it can affect companies and even entire industries. Think of how Kodak once led the market for photographic film, yet didn’t see how digital photographs would change their industry.

Digital disruption divides opinion in the boardroom. Some leaders see the opportunity and some see only threats. The very concept of your entire business model being challenged by disruptive market entrants can lead to decision paralysis because no strategies or options appear to be right.

However, if you plan well and create a vision to manage digital disruption it can be exciting and empowering in the way it can reshape your business. Digital disruption often creates opportunities for companies to engage in a deeper and more meaningful way with their customers.

It’s important to appreciate that in the 21st century business environment it is often your customer that dictates the rate of change – consumer technologies have created enterprise disruption. The growth of multichannel communication between customers and brands is a great example that shows just how quickly customer expectations changed. Any customer who asks a brand a question using Twitter or Facebook today will feel ignored if they don’t get a prompt answer, but a few years ago most brands were still ignoring social networks and expecting customers to call a dedicated customer support phone number.

This is an important dynamic that all executives should appreciate – you can no longer plan your customer engagement strategy entirely in the boardroom. You just need to be flexible enough to adapt to what your customers want. I believe there are a few key areas that all executives need to be thinking of if they want to stay on top of digital disruption:

– Observe and react to your customer preferences. They have existing preferences for digital engagement and communication, but some will be exploring new channels, and any one of these channels could soon become important – just as some of the existing favorites may eventually be irrelevant.

– Plan ahead and consider which parts of your business can be digitally disrupted. Is it just the interaction with customers or is it your entire business? The hotel industry never imagined their main challenger in 2016 would be Airbnb and banks today are competing with apps. Which part of your business could change fundamentally?

– Consider how people are using digital tools today and how this affects your business, for example, are you ignoring opportunities that already exist just because you have not developed your offer? The L’Oreal Makeup Genius app didn’t exist two years ago, yet it’s now responsible for millions of purchases because it lets customers try products virtually, but they can easily buy the real thing direct from the app.

– Never stop exploring the immediate future. Many company leaders don’t know where technologies like Virtual Reality will go at present, yet it is a technology that is real, is available in stores, it is not science fiction. Make sure that you are the company exploring existing disruptors, not your competition.

– Learn from the success and mistakes of others. There is an enormous amount of experience out there. Nobody can predict a future disruption, but you can learn to spot the indicators and be ready for change.

Managers responsible for the customer experience know all of this because customers drive most disruption today. Some companies are truly innovative and far ahead of what customers think they need, but most are changing because their customers want change.

Digital disruption can be scary, but if you are ready for it the business opportunities are immense. Digital disruption is taking place, you can’t avoid it. Those who try to keep on delivering what worked last year will soon find they have no customers left.

I’m talking about this topic on a panel at the Customer Response Summit, on February 24th, in Phoenix, AZ. Please get in touch via my LinkedIn or if you are attending the summit, say hello and ask me about this blog in person!

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I was never an actual member of the armed forces, but my Father was a Lt. Colonel in the Army, so I was “sort of” in the Army too; let’s just say that by the age of 3, in knew what the words “attention” and “at ease” meant. Among the many colorful words and acronyms I needed to understand in order to survive, there was one in particular that proved to be highly valuable, it was “sit rep”. No, that’s not a description of an ab work out, it’s short for Situational Report. When my Dad asked for a sit rep, it meant I needed to state my objective, observe my surroundings, assess my location, determine my operational status, assess any threats, determine a recommended course of action, and communicate all of this as accurately and concisely as possible to my commander. This was particularly useful for a 3 year old when crossing the street.

But the idea of the sit rep is also useful for the savvy business person. In fact it’s something we do rather instinctively, although we sometimes do not deploy a disciplined approach to the task, and for my military Dad, that’s just not up to spec (specifications for you non-military types) and is likely to leave us with a “soup-sandwich”.

So how does all of this relate to my organization’s digital interaction strategy? Well, let’s take a moment and “sit rep” it. Before you start to conduct such an analysis, you’ll need a way to gauge your surroundings and look into the future, and for this purpose I’d like to propose a Digital Channels Maturity Framework.

Using this framework you can:

– understand the current consumer digital interactions landscape

– assess your current state relative to a defined maturity model

– gain insight into what the future holds for digital channels and how you can adapt, or perhaps lead among your competitors

– develop a forward looking capability roadmap

– build a business plan for future investment

There are four maturity levels; Siloed, Distributed, Connected and Federated. There are also three high level focus areas including the consumer’s perspective, the technical landscape, and business value. Let me share a few essential descriptors for each of the levels of maturity in the model.

Level 1 – Siloed: Few channels, consumer initiated, limited availability, not personalized, undetermined value

Level 2 – Distributed: Some channels, initiated by rules, availability inconsistent, not personalized, unclear value

Level 3 – Connected: Many channels, sophisticated targeting, right time, right reason, personalized with journey context, defined value

Level 4 – Federated: All channels, always on, context and personalization is persistent, all text based channels, cross channel / channel pairing, value is determined at journey level

In our engagements with some of the world’s leading consumer brands, we have found that they are in very different positions along the maturity continuum. This often has to do with the speed of change in consumer expectations, fast emerging technologies and disjointed strategies, coupled with reactionary mandates to provide service in new channels. I have also seen companies struggle to organize leadership and budget around a well thought out strategy. But there are more than a few companies who seem to have performed their sit rep, and there is a groundswell of new leadership that are making bold moves to unify their digital channels strategy.

So what’s next? Now that you have a framework for your sit rep, it’s time to act. Brush up on those acronyms, get your war paint on, be ready to be brutally honest with yourself and your team, and most importantly be ready to reshape your thinking.

[24]7 offers a workshop during which we share the 20+ key factors that define your digital maturity. We can help your team develop an understanding of the complete model and facilitate an open dialogue among your team, to develop a path forward. As I sit in my chair at my desk, I can almost hear my Father now with that stern voice saying something like, “Do you know where you are and where you’re going? No? Alright then, I need your sit rep . . . on the double.”

To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23-25, 2016.

The post The Digital Strategy Sit Rep appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Author: Cyndy Edwards, Senior Consultant, COPC Inc. Learn more about COPC Inc. at http://www.copc.com.

Today’s customer fully embraces technology and expects companies to do the same. This is especially true when it comes to providing customer service. Customers are still calling into the contact center to resolve many issues. However, two-thirds of consumers surveyed by Execs In The Know and COPC Inc. utilize multiple channels, including self-service options.

The use of multiple channels is not the whole story. Customers expect an effortless and seamless experience throughout their journey with your organization, with a convenient path to issue resolution. This means that customer engagement must be connected and relevant between your assisted and unassisted (or self-service) channels.

A key component of your self-service channel is having an effective knowledgebase, or the online library that stores and delivers your customer care content. Yes, your self-service program relies on technology to deliver information to your customers. But it is the content, organization, and search functionality within your knowledgebase that will make your self-service program a useful and reliable part of your omnichannel engagement.

Here are seven ways to design, build and maintain a knowledgebase that will meet expectations during any part of the customer journey:

1) Start by establishing a knowledgebase strategy.

If the goal of your knowledgebase is to answer customer questions and help resolve their issues, then you need to make sure you understand your customers’ needs. You can get this information by documenting questions that customers are asking when you are monitoring calls, emails or chats. Make sure to capture questions that customers escalate to Tier 2.

Also, structure your knowledgebase with “simple” in mind. Stick to fewer generalized categories so customers are not confused. Over time as more content is added, there may be opportunities to add section headings or categories. These will become clear as they are needed, so be prepared to grow your knowledgebase organically.

2) Identify and build your knowledgebase team.

While this may seem obvious, an established team with well-defined roles is key to providing relevant content to the knowledgebase, in a timely manner. This team usually includes a content and/or project leader, agents, and content authors. The leader decides how the knowledgebase will be designed and organized, which topics will be covered, and to what extent. Agents can provide suggestions for content development, while authors are those who are both technically competent and in touch with day-to-day customer contact inquiries. Usually a knowledgebase solution takes about three months to implement, after planning is completed, and includes three to four full-time staff.

3) Create an internal and external knowledgebase

Build an external version of your knowledgebase with customer-facing instructions. At the same time, build an internal version with more technical details for use by support staff only. Having two different versions of your knowledgebase allows you to use the internal version to teach new agents how to use the knowledgebase. This training gives them experience with both the detailed internal version, as well as knowing where all the content is located in the external version that the customer is using. In turn, agents can more easily advise customers where to find information in the external version of the knowledgebase.

4) Customers want quick access to information, so provide a robust search capability.

Your knowledgebase should be the fastest customer service channel you manage. Customers want to be in and out and have their solution. Do not require them to register, sign in, or enter a product or case number, as this will slow them down and cause dissatisfaction. Also, your search algorithm should be extremely accurate and automatically provide a few possible answers to each inquiry. Be sure to test your search functionality to ensure key phrases return the correct content. Confusion is one of the major reasons customers abandon and are dissatisfied with a self-service channel, so your top priority is to ensure customers get the right answers to their inquiries.

5) Consider offering a chat option in your knowledgebase.

Chat is a great way to offer on-demand help to your customers. It also provides you an excellent source of valuable feedback regarding both the customer issue and the content they are reading. You should also set up a feedback button on each piece of content for customers to respond whether they found the content useful and/or solved their issue. This information will alert the content owners which articles are helpful and which need to be improved.

6) To increase efficiency, the knowledgebase should be able to learn new questions and answers from the other customer service channels.

To allow customers to ask and suggest new questions, consider connecting your knowledgebase to your multi-channel ticketing software and customer service widgets. Then, once a question is answered by a human, automatically add that question and answer to the knowledgebase. This allows your knowledgebase to provide the same answer automatically to future customers.

7) Analyze usage of the knowledgebase.

This will help identify what customers are using, what they perceive to be the most valuable content, and what content is missing. You can do this by tracking both the most popular pages in the knowledgebase, along with trends in overall usage. You also can review search engine usage. Log all uses of the search engine and generate summary reports that show the most common searches, along with failed search terms. This will tell you both what terms people are using and how your content matches up to their searches.

Not all customer issues can be resolved through a self-service program, but having a robust self-serve system that is continually improving is both cost effective and beneficial to your customer. However, it is essential to have a clear path to issue resolution within your self-service offering and a quick way for a customer to contact a live person if their inquiry is not resolved.

If you would like more information about how to improve the operational performance of both your assisted and self-service channels, go to www.copc.com.

To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23-25, 2016.

The post Seven Ways To Ensure Your Customers Actually Use Your Self-Service System appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Today, our customers have everything they need to communicate in the palm of their hand. Mobile brings about a unique and powerful convergence of communication channels — voice, email, chat, social, SMS — in one very portable device. This has a profound impact on how our customers communicate with each other, with the world, and with brands. It creates new challenges for brands to adjust to the protocols, cadence and sheer scale for customer support.

We’ve learned, in the digital age, that it’s no longer enough to publish a toll free number and staff a call center during business hours to provide for the needs of our customers. There are many new communication channels we’ve had to embrace and new skills we’ve had to learn to provide for the needs of our customers, in a social, mobile, 24×7 global marketplace.

At Freshdesk, we look at customer engagement through the lens of what we call The Great Pyramid of Customer Support.

This framework, based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, provides a structure to help organizations assess their support capabilities and determine what to prioritize. It can be particularly useful for determining how to address a new channel. Here we will apply it to mobile support and engagement:

Chaos to Control — When you enter a new channel it’s usually chaos. There is a learning curve on how to best communicate within a channel and how to engage.  The first order of business is usually controlling the chaos: tracking and managing tickets, and delivering a consistent and effective customer experience in the channel. The reality is though that mobile is not really a new channel. It’s a new environment, but it encompasses most of the channels you’re already using. So the key for starting to support mobile is to not treat it as a separate engagement environment. You can start out by continuing to use the channels you support today. Just be present and listen. More important than adding new channels and capabilities is to maintain a single system of record across mobile and any other channels you support, to ensure you have a single view of the customer.

Reactive to Proactive — The newest channels for support have changed the paradigm. For a long time customer support has been a one-to-one interaction. With social media, conversations have moved from one-to-one– email, phone, chat – to many-to-many. On social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook your customers are announcing their desires or problems to the world. Support is no longer about reacting – waiting for the phone to ring. Your customers are taking to social, whether you want to be there or not. Similarly, being proactive in mobile means being there, delivering a native experience. It’s not just about providing access to existing tools like your knowledge base or email. You need to consider the unique qualities of mobile platforms and the habits of mobile users, to make it easy for them to get what they need, at the time and place they need it. This is also where you can insert proactive messaging in your apps to avert issues you know are likely.

Scale — As you learn the rules and idiosyncrasies of a new channel the next challenge is scale. You need to be able to extend the level of support you have on your best channels to the new channels. And, of course, you want to do this without having to hire a large new team. Technology can help here. The caveat is to leverage technology to enhance the experience rather than put more layers between you and your customer. Knowledge bases will enable your customers to find answers themselves, if you make them easy to access. Channels like in-app messaging that feel native to mobile and allow agents to handle multiple tickets at once work well here. And automations can help those agents manage that workload.

Aligning With Business — Once you’ve gotten your tools and processes in place and your mobile support is humming, then you can begin to think more broadly about making an impact across your company. Is your support organization aligned with the goals of your customers and your business? Great customer service has the ability to do much more than solve customer problems. If done right, it can extend the value of the brand and create brand advocates. It can also be your best channel to provide feedback and insights to help guide your company’s plans. Be sure to collect data and setup a feedback loop in line with other support channels, and ensure the connections with other critical parts of your organization. This is also where you should be making sure that the systems and tools in place are working for your team and that they are engaged and happy.

To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23-25, 2016.

The post Mobile Customer Support and Engagement – Where to Start? appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Customer Response Summit Phoenix is an intimate, laser focused forum, providing outstanding opportunities to directly engage with some of the brightest senior executives in customer leadership. The strength of the forum lies within the innovative design of informative sessions, relevant industry tours, specialized networking opportunities, and dynamic extracurricular activities all centered on one thing – customer service excellence. The theme of this year’s Summit is Customer Driven.

Highlights of the Summit include a behind-the-scenes interactive tour of the GoDaddy facility, and the release of the Customer Experience Management Benchmark Series 2015 Corporate Edition Report, a joint effort between Execs In The Know and COPC Inc.

“The customer should be at the heart of all that you do,” said Chad McDaniel, President and CEO of Execs In The Know. “All of the members of our community are Customer Driven. Driven to respond to customer feedback, engage with their employees, innovate their products, services, and technology, and to provide moments of magic during each and every customer interaction. Customer Response Summit is the perfect place for executives from every industry vertical and department, to gather and share best practices, to enhance not only their own brands, but the customer experience industry as a whole.”

Sample of Panelists:
Amazon – Tim Hickler, VP WW Customer Service
Target – Efrain Irizarry, Director, REDcard Guest Services & Collections
Orbitz – Carolyn Matseshe-Crawford, VP, Global Customer Experience Services
Walmart – Michele Watson, VP Customer Care & Payments & Risk 
UPS – Elias Hakim, VP Operations Global Business Services  
Kohl’s – Brian Dennis, VP Customer Experience  
Microsoft – Claudia Cristiani, General Manager, Services Operations
Michael Kors – Ebrahim Hyder, VP, Consumer Support  

To learn more about Execs In The Know Customer Response Summit Phoenix, visit the event website https://execsintheknow.com/events/crs-phoenix/ or download the full event agenda http://ow.ly/YoN2S.

About Execs In The Know

For over 15 years, Execs In The Know has built a reputation of excellence in the Customer Management Industry and a worldwide community of over 50,000 Customer Experience Professionals. Execs In The Know connects people to engaging industry content, thought leadership, current trends, peer-to-peer collaboration, networking, and industry employment opportunities. Examples of this can be seen at their Customer Response Summit events, roadshows, webinars, workshops, Blog Talk Radio segments, Industry Benchmarking Series, blogs, thought papers, and social communities.

To learn more about Execs In The Know, visit www.execsintheknow.com. For more information on their Customer Management Recruitment Solutions, visit www.justcareers.com.

Media Contact

Alyssa Pitura
Director of Marketing and Brand Experience
info@execsintheknow.com
www.execsintheknow.com
@ExecsInTheKnow

The post Shep Hyken, CIBC, Porsche & Microsoft to Keynote Execs In The Know Customer Response Summit Phoenix appeared first on Execs In The Know.

The following is a guest blog written by Matt Wheatley, VP of Customer Experience at 24-7 Intouch. Learn more about 24-7 Intouch by visiting their website.

It is no surprise that an improvement in customer experience can easily translate into hundreds of millions of dollars of incremental annual revenues. One key component to making a lasting, positive impression on your customers is through the personalization of the consumer experience.

Customers are constantly contacted by brands in the hopes of gathering as much information as they possibly can to build out customer profiles. The more effectively a company uses customer information to understand and acknowledge both the differences and similarities, the easier it will be to provide a truly personalized, highly customized experience through relevant channels in ways that drive stronger, more profitable relationships. However, if nothing is done with this data, all you’re left with is an annoyed customer and a detached experience.

Here are a few ways you can drive immediate engagement and better serve your customers by giving them exactly what they want, when and how they want it:

Solution Diversity

According to a Forrester Wave Customer Service Report, the majority of businesses are unable to support a cohesive omni-channel customer journey. In fact, only 12% can. Streamlining the omni-channel experience will allow you to become more nimble to how customers want to be served and communicated with. Rather than treating each channel as a separate, offer customers a unified, tailored service experience across every channel, whether it’s on the phone, in a chat conversation on your website, or through your Twitter account.

A Well-Equipped Workforce

The most talented and efficient customer care agents are limited by the resources they can leverage. Having the right data in front of them during the customer interaction empowers the agent to go “off script” and personalize the conversation. This could be anything from acknowledging previous purchase history and making recommendations for similar products they may be interested in, or asking how that purchase is working out for them and if they require any further assistance with it. The personalized data in front of them motivates agents to self-manage and be as resourceful as possible to every customer. Not to mention, it drives loyalty amongst your customers.

Sophisticated Data

A crucial step to personalization is to ensure the right data is available to profile customers. It’s definitely out there. You just need to understand how to analyze it to influence the processes and policies in your other departments, such as Marketing, IT, Product Development and Finance. This means targeted content, specific promotions, aligned communication channels and resolved interactions. Strategize what you’re measuring so you can effectively manage it.

As mentioned earlier – that data is all out there. Once you identify trends within your customers and layer the right insights, you will be have no problem providing that white-gloved, personalized service they expect.

To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23-25, 2016.

The post The Power of Personalizing Your Customer Experience appeared first on Execs In The Know.

The following is a guest blog written by Lorraine Schumacher, Customer Experience Evangelist at Clarabridge. Learn more about Clarabridge by visiting their website.

Starting a Customer Experience (CX) program is no small feat. For Justin MacDonald, Customer Experience Manager at Infusionsoft, he eats, breathes, and sleeps CX and is a passionate champion and change agent within his business. A Software-as-a Service (SaaS) company that serves small businesses, Infusionsoft needs to earn their customers’ loyalty each month. To keep pulse on the customer experience—whether it’s calling the support center, using the product, or any other interaction—the business relies on customer feedback from multiple sources.

MacDonald shared some key principles that he’s identified as critical to understand when building a CX program.

CX Impacts Everything

It’s critical for a CX team to work cross-functionally because CX impacts all areas of the business, and all areas of the business impact CX. A true omni-source program gathers customer feedback from all sources, on all areas of the customer experience, and then makes that information actionable.

“With entrepreneurs and small businesses, business is personal, and their experience with every element of their journeys with our company and product impacts their business, their customers, and ultimately their vote to continue business with us each month,” said MacDonald. “Customer retention, cost of acquisition, and monthly recurring revenue are all majorly impacted by customer experience. We believe we will hit our business goals because we deliver a great customer experience.”

A true believer that a strong CX program is worth its weight in gold, MacDonald adds, “You don’t make experiences better for customers so that your company benefits; your company benefits because you make customer experiences better.”

Don’t Just Serve Customers—Empower Them.

“Our top priorities around the customer experience are first to make sure they feel understood and valued,” continued MacDonald. “Because small businesses often feel unique and alone, we let them feel empowered and by their partnership with us – not just by our software, but by our services and relationship with them dedicated to their success.”

This principle also applies to B2C companies. Empowering customers to share their feedback on their preferred channel, and to truly impact the business is critical. And on an even more personal level, a process for engaging with customers and closing the loop goes a long way.

Make Data-driven Decisions.

“We implemented Clarabridge about a year ago to feed customer insights to key strategic recipients who have an appetite and an influence to affect positive change in the customer experience and product,” said MacDonald. “All the way from the C-suite to the support floor – we harness champions everywhere we identify them. We currently flow customer sentiment from our NPS surveys and our new customer kick-start transactional surveys.” But it doesn’t stop there. Infusionsoft also uploads its support call NPS surveys into the platform for analysis, so they have a better understanding of the call center experience. “This provides us valuable solicited customer feedback both holistically as well as at a specific touch point in their experience to give us context on that feedback.”

According to MacDonald, the insight that comes out of these listening posts allows the company to understand customer sentiment about their product and service experiences. “It’s eye-opening and game-changing for us to see our customer base in unique segments. It has confirmed our previous beliefs and data in some places and busted myths we once held to be true.”

Because a data-driven approach is so critical to Infusionsoft’s CX program, they’ve invested heavily in implementing more and more customer feedback data sources into their program. They’re growing and maturing their program by going from solicited (survey) feedback to unsolicited feedback that includes customers, end users, partners, and employees.

Tell Stories That Make an Impact

While data is essential, the key to impacting true change is making that data personal. Pulling out individual customer stories and telling those stories in a relatable language is immensely powerful when communicating customer pain points.

“Part of the art and science of CX and Voice of the Customer (VoC) is telling transformational stories tailored to a specific audience, and rooting those stories in the reality of your customers,” said MaDonald. “Our company is continuing to mature to embrace the need to truly put our customers at the center, and it is that shift that is the greatest accomplishment of our VOC program. We are playing the long game.”

To hear more about this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23-25, 2016.

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Customers aren’t just frustrated, they are ENRAGED! In fact, 66% of people with a brand problem have experienced rage. How does Rage affect your business? What do customers expect to benefit from complaining, versus what they believe companies actually provide?  The 10 Customer Rage Study* stats below may surprise you.

– More than 202 billion dollars were at risk to businesses as a result of problems with products/services in 2015.

– It takes an average of 4.2 contacts to satisfy a complainant.

– Only 35% of complainants are satisfied on the first contact, while only 14% actually had their problems resolved on first contact.

– 48% of complainants that become satisfied will still recommend your brand.

– When applying both non-monetary and monetary remedies, complainant satisfaction almost doubled from 37% to 73%.

– What is the number 1 most annoying customer service catchphrase? “Your call is important to us, please continue to hold.”

– The top channel for complaining is still the telephone.

– The percentage of complainants who felt they got NOTHING as a result of complaining increased from 56% in 2013 to 63% in 2015.

– 24% of complainants want revenge!

– The most frequently cited damage resulting from customer problems in 2015 was lost time (60%).

To hear more about this topic and others like it, from Dialog Direct and our other subject matter experts, join us at Customer Response Summit Phoenix, February 23rd-25th, 2016.

Want the full study? Request your complete copy of the Customer Rage Study here.

*The Customer Rage study is an independent study conducted by Dialog Direct, in partnership with CCMC and Arizona State University, in which phone interviews were conducted to 1,000 households. The study is based on one originally conducted by the White House in 1976, offering a clear comparison of customer satisfaction over the years.

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