Unlocking Customer Service

For years, digital transformation projects have topped priority lists of customer service and IT leaders looking to modernize their customer experience. Companies turn to technology to improve efficiencies, automate processes and scale their service organizations. But for every $1 billion invested in new technology, $112 million is lost to projects that fail. What’s more, contact center agents are already inundated with tools promising to make their jobs “easier.” The average contact center agent has to surf between 8.6 different screens to solve a single customer interaction. That doesn’t sound “easy.” Today we’re talking with Kevin Schatz, Sharpen’s CTO, to unpack how to invest in technology that helps, not hinders, your company's growth. Kevin chats through why you need to keep frontline employees in mind when choosing your tools, how to set reasonable project goals and what you need to vet with vendors before you sign on the dotted line.

The benefits of contact centers are crystal clear to operations executives and those who live and breathe customer service, but what about to all your other business leaders? Those who don’t deal in the day-to-day of customer service, workforce management, and customer operations can miss out on the big picture: your contact center is more than a budget line item. Contact centers serve two groups of people: Your customers and your employees. With such an impactful presence, it’s important to understand the real value a contact center has on a business and its growth potential.We’re sitting down with Meagan Thai, Director of Contact Center & UC Solutions for Telarus, to talk about how getting your contact center right is critical to improving your customer (and agent) experience. Plus, Meagan’s sharing her thoughts on where contact centers are heading in the next few years and what pain points companies seek to solve for most.

Often, the biggest threat companies face isn’t their competitors, it’s complacency. While you spend time ruminating on the next best thing in customer experience, other companies act to actually improve theirs. After a year of pause, now’s the time for action. We’re sitting down with Justin Robbins, Chief Evangelist of the CX Effect to learn the business risks of sticking to “good enough” customer experiences. Justin’s talking through what happens when companies stay the same and don’t invest in creating a better customer journey. Tune in to learn the trends leading the way in customer experience today and why it matters to foot the bill upfront, so you can make lasting improvements to your customer experience strategy.And for leaders who are ready to press start on a better customer experience, he’s touching on where today’s leaders are investing and how they’re justifying those investments - whether to co-execs, shareholders or their company’s board.

Your customer experience rides on the service your support team delivers. And that level of service is driven by your customer service managers. Turns out, your company’s managers control 70% of your employees’ engagement at work. And when your employees are more engaged, you see benefits like greater productivity, happier customers, and higher profitability (to name a few). To run a successful company, executive teams need to motivate and support their customer service managers. Then, managers can run more engaged teams and better help customers. In this episode, we’re chatting with Brennan McEachran, CEO and Co-Founder of Soapbox, which has since rebranded to Hypercontext. Hypercontext is a collaborative one-on-one and team meeting agenda app used globally by over 100,000 managers and their teams. Brennan’s talking about why supporting your company’s customer service managers and adopting a “coaching the coaches” mentality is one of the best things you can do for company success. Plus, he’s sharing actionable tips for leaders like you to make it happen.

It takes the average contact center 9 months to research and evaluate new contact center platforms to “fix” their customer experience. Yet too often, leaders invest in technology but don’t have the right strategy in place to deliver the basic tenets of good customer service. What’s more? Without a sound strategy for a better customer experience, contact center leaders wind up using their new tech that's packed with features just as they used their outdated phone system years prior. Let’s fix that. We’re talking to Cheryl Helm of Helm Communications on how to get the basics of customer service right. Cheryl’s helping call center leaders put strategies in place to deliver outstanding service with every interaction. And, she’s talking about how to discover the untapped potential of contact center technology, so you can finally break through barriers and build a customer experience fit for the modern customer.