Top Trends- Gamification

By: Colin Taylor

Yesterday we examined the Top 10 Trends for 2015, according to the slightly warped mind of Colin Taylor. The Top 10 List presented was;

The 2015 Top 10 Trend List

1. Customer Experience

2. Gamification

3. Immersive Learning

4. SMS

5. Mobile

6. Video

7. Chat

8. Agent Empowerment

9. Zero Service

10. Customer Effort and Emotion

Yesterdays Trend was Customer Experience and Number two on our top trends list is Gamification

Gamification: The use or competitive ‘Game elements’ to provide rewards and increase competition in the workplace. Gamification has been a trend for the past few years and is a part of a broader wave of new solutions and approaches to reduce turnover and attrition in call and contact centers. Others in this wave include reward based solutions like Snowfly and the peer pressure leverage of Tenacity. Attrition is certainly a problem in need of a solution. With labor costs representing two-thirds of the average contact center operating expenses and turnover rates of 20%, 30% and more there is a huge win possible for any center that can rein in their turnover.

Bottom Line: Gamification is a worthwhile tool, and game elements have been proven to improve engagement and recall. However to be successful gamification has to be integrated into a centers culture, training and operational management processes and activities. Simply adding a leaderboard or ranking to your existing center metrics is not going to generate much engagement.

What is your take on Gamification? Did we hit or miss the mark? Share your perspective?

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Top Trends – Customer Experience

By: Colin Taylor

Yesterday we examined the Top 10 Trends for 2015, according to the slightly warped mind of Colin Taylor. The Top 10 List presented was;

The 2015 Top 10 Trend List

1. Customer Experience

2. Gamification

3. Immersive Learning

4. SMS

5. Mobile

6. Video

7. Chat

8. Agent Empowerment

9. Zero Service

10. Customer Effort and Emotion

The Customer Experience (CX). CX has been all the rage on the speaking circuits for the past couple of years. The importance of the experience that the customer has when interacting with your customer service or contact center organization is nothing new, it is, simply put, one of the most important indicators of future purchase and loyalty. Unfortunately few centers know where to begin and how to measure CX. Is it just CSAT, is it NPS, is it VOC or FCR or do I need a new TLA (Three Letter Acronym)? In terms of where to start, ask yourself if there is a defined or documented ‘customer experience’ that the organization is committed to deliver. If there is a documented experience, has it been communicated to customers. If the desired/expected customer experience is on your website, then customers will base their expectations on this CX, mission or vision statement. If no such documentation exists then the customers will establish their own expectations…with or without your guidance. As a manager it is hard to hit a CX target when we don’t know what you are aiming for, so a documented statement can help everyone internally focus on what is intended and expected and externally you can provide the customers with expectations that the organization will strive to meet.

The Bottom Line: The Customer Experience is important to all call and contact centers. Their ability to manifest it and deliver on it will tend to vary with the level of maturity of the center and the investment budget established by senior management to support, track and validate its delivery.

Let us know your take on this trend. How would you start on this journey? What were the stumbling blocks you encountered? How were they overcome?

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Is Customer Experience Really New

This is a video of a presentation Colin Taylor completed at a BT event in Dublin Ireland in November 2014. In this video Colin takes a contrarian Point of View on the topic of the Customer Experience

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Top 10 Trends for 2015

By: Colin Taylor

This is the time of the year when we are inundated by watch lists and trend lists of the activities, technologies and methodologies that are expected to change our world in the coming year. Unfortunately most of these lists and listed item fall on deaf ears as they are not relevant to most call/contact centers or most customer service or customer experience organizations.

So while I will succumb to the temptation to present a ‘Trends for 2015′, I will at least try to put these into context of the size, type or maturity level of the centers that can truly benefit by employing these trends.

My top 10 trends are listed below and each day for the next ten days I will be sharing an overview of each of these trends and my point of view on the bottom line as it impacts customer service call and contact centers.

The 2015 Top 10 Trend List

1. Customer Experience

2. Gamification

3. Immersive Learning

4. SMS

5. Mobile

6. Video

7. Chat

8. Agent Empowerment

9. Zero Service

10. Customer Effort and Emotion

Let us know what you think of the Top 10 list. What would have added to list and why, What would you have left off the list?

Over the next couple of weeks we will review each of the trends identified on the list, provide an overview and let you know what my ‘Bottom Line’ is for each trend.

Tomorrow the topic will be Customer Experience

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Speaking at Customer Response Summit Miami – Colin Taylor

Join Colin Taylor and other customer experience professionals at the Customer Response Summit in Miami, Feb 8-10

This looks like another great event with speakers from Amazon, GM HootSuite, Kohl’s, Walmart and Harley-Davidson to name a few.

I’ll be presenting as part of the “Customer Experience Face-Off: The Future of the Customer Experience”. Hope to see you there!

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New Digs – Our New Head Office

It has been a hectic few weeks as we have moved into our new offices. The building address is 168 Center Street South, Oshawa ON L1H 4A6. The building is listed in the Oshawa Heritage inventory as it was built in 1890. The photos shown here depict the building as we acquired it at the end of December.

We have work underway to repaint and renovate the office. We will post update and new photos as we complete the renovations.

We have installed a new phone system and have new contact coordinates;

the Main phone number is 647-428-5811 which will take you to the auto attendant. From here you can reach any member of the Taylor Reach team by extension or simply by dialing by name.

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Mobile Customer Service, That Changes Everything

By: Colin Taylor

Each year the pundits, experts and devil advocates, trot out their expectations and list of trends of what we should expect to see impacting our lives in the coming year. As I have been described by one or more of these labels on many occasions as well as being described by a few less flattering terms, I feel well qualified and compelled to join the fray.

I often think that a single year is much to narrow a time frame for many trends and shifts to emerge. This is a contributing factor to why the same trends, emerging technologies and new ways of doing things repeat on the lists year after year. I remember reading in the early 90’s that CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) was going to revolutionize the contact center industry. I kept reading about it every year for about 5 years. In fact it took close to 15 years before CTI became ubiquitous.

Unrequited Love versus New World Order

Some of the repeating trends, like CTI cited above, take some time to truly arrive, they appear on these lists year after year like an unrequited love. My nominee for the Unrequited Love award this year goes to Zero Service. The belief, to which I subscribe, that the best service is no service at all. That is to say, that a company will not need to offer a contact center or First Contact Resolution, because they anticipate all of our wants, needs, and challenges. They have eliminated these barriers to a perfect customer experience. From my perspective, while every year service gets better and better, I think this psychic level of service is still off in the future.

Other trends appear annually because they are not single ‘events’ that we can watch arrive and declare “It’s here”. Rather these trends represent a fundamental change in the world order. Social media is an example of this ‘new world order’ magnitude, it simply changed everything. This year the candidate I would suggest is Mobile. Today, 70% of contact center interactions originate on smartphones. Mobile quite simply can change everything…how we shop, buy, complain and entertain ourselves. Organizations need to ensure that the customer facing landscape they create supports and embraces mobile. If we make it hard for our customers or prospects to deal with us, they may just choose to deal with one of our competitors.

Mobile, Not a Trend, it is the New Normal

When I look at the trends that will impact contact center and customer service organizations in 2015, I must lead off with Mobile for the reasons stated above. The key challenge when looking at mobile in customer service call centers is to determine what the service delivery should be. What do you want a customer to be able to do on the smartphone, within the app and when do we want to have a ‘human to human’ interaction? Its not just about creating a mobile app. Forcing automation where human interaction will be faster and/or more effective, doesn’t make sense, if we are looking to build a long-term customer relationship and to maximize the customer experience. According to Gartner 60% of customer service interactions required human intervention in 2014. Further they expect this figure to drop by half in 24 months. With only 30% of customer service interactions requiring the human ‘touch’ in 2017, how do we ensure that we automate the ‘right’ interactions?

For my money, emotional connections build customer loyalty and automation can reduce customer effort. The human touch will be required where automation isn’t desirable or where there is emotional capital available. These are interactions that build relationships, create emotional bonds, and deliver the desired customer experience.

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Failover Strategy

If you have a call or contact center you need a failover plan. Outages happen to all organizations from time to time. Most outages are for short or very short durations. Some clients are not even aware that they have experienced an outage. Traditional carriers and equipment manufactures claimed five, nines reliability. That is to say 99.999% uptime, which on an annual basis equated to 5.27 minutes of downtime. Today’s VoIP and IP telephony systems speak of 99.9% uptime which is 8.76 hours of downtime per year.

It is essential to have a telephony failover plan to protect your contact center and deliver service to customers even when your carriers or technology suppliers have let you down.

The most common failover method redirects calls to a POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) Lines (toll or toll free) that is installed be a separate carrier or outside of the call center telephony infrastructure.

This approach involves installing traditional local lines in your call center. In the event of a carrier or telephony vendor outage you redirect the calls to these POTS lines either manually, be calling the carrier/vendor, providing direction or instruction on the carrier/partner portal or through an automated solution employing defined business rules (i.e. after 15 minutes of an outage the calls will automatically be forwarded to NPA-NNX-XXXX).

The POTS line can terminate on the local PBX or through the call center switch. If the PBX is employed remember that you will lose the additional features associated with your contact center switch. Many organizations employ the PBX and ‘hunt groups’ which are not ideal, but generally acceptable in outage situations. If you terminate within a call center switch you will likely incur a meaningful level of expense throughout the year to maintain the added capabilities a call center switch can deliver over the capabilities of the PBX. Remember that the failover solution is only employed in 0.1% of the time that the primary telephony solution is not operating.

Failover plans should be tested quarterly and reviewed annually.

For more information on developing a Failover plan or a Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery plan or strategy, please contact Taylor Reach

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Eliminating Poor Customer Service

Well another year is behind and a new fresh unblemished year stands before us. I hope that you had a good year in 2014 and that 2015 brings you all the joy and happiness you wish for. At the intersection of the years it is common for us to both look back on what we did, what we created and what we learned in the preceding year and also to look forward at what the new nascent year may have in store for us.

For our part 2014 was a very busy year for The Taylor Reach Group, Once again we failed to achieve our mission to improve all customer Service everywhere, but we did make some small in-roads and achieved some small victories over poor service.

We saw a continuation of trend that began in 2011 as more eCommerce and etail organizations sought our assistance. We continued to work with a large athletic foot-ware manufacturer and retailer, we also continued our 5 year relationship with one of the largest fashion foot-ware companies. To this base, or dare i say to this foothold, we added one on the largest home improvement retailers, one of the largest sporting goods retailers, a women-wear retailer, a major infant and child clothing retailer, we also began working with the iconic company that invented the electric guitar. Non eCommerce companies include a corporate travel agency, a major health non-profit, telecom companies in North America and Europe, a medical response company, hardware, software OEM’s and renewal organizations, and no less than 3 venture capital firms.

These projects took all over the globe with project travel to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Phoenix, Ft Lauderdale, Tampa, Pittsburgh, Denver, Nashville, Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. Internationally we worked in Liverpool, Dublin (twice), Cork, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.

The projects completed ran across our suite of services from interim management projects, to strategic assessments, technology acquisition (Telephony, CRM, email management, chat management), training curriculum design and development, outsource suitability, organizational redesign, process improvement, software and vendor assessments, benchmarking and site selection.

I am proud of the work we =did in 2014 and proud of our ability to impact and influence our clients businesses. Like the eCommerce organization that had a service delivery organization consisting of both in-house and third party partner who was looking for our assistance in rationalizing and supporting one specific strategy. When we completed our engagement with this company, they were pursuing a different strategy than the one they had originally envisioned and were well on their significantly reducing their operating costs while improving their delivery capabilities and service performance quality.

Or the footwear company which retained us to overhaul the training curriculum that they provided to their third party outsourced contact centers. . We completed an assessment of the current training, identified improvement opportunities and designed an immersive training framework that leveraged classroom, group and individual self-study employing, elearning, simulations, quizzes and assessments. We developed the training courseware and launched the new course and receive positive feedback from the trainers (if “epic homerun” is positive feedback). Better than positive feedback we exceeded the performance expectations significantly; exceeding all targets and outperforming the previous course across the board (VOC, NPS, FCR, CSAT, Resolution, etc.) and in doing so reduced handle time, reduced the mean time to competency and delivered positive return on investment in the first quarter the new training was employed.

Or the third party firm that we assisted in re-imagining their business and service delivery, which will result in significant operational efficiencies and perhaps even in entirely new services offering.

Yes we did some fantastic work (sorry, not sounding too humble here) in 2014 and I| know that we will continue to optimize and innovate with our clients in 2015. The key to our ability to deliver so much and so consistently for our clients is, in my opinion, the breadth of knowledge and experience held by every member of the Taylor Reach team. Each team member has 20+ years of hands on operational experience and has innovated customer service across virtually every vertical. This track record and knowledgebase makes us uniquely qualified to assist diverse organizations improve the quality to the customer service they deliver or to deliver the customer experience that their customer expect.

I know 2014 for you held great achievement and 2015 will offer more opportunities to exceed expectations and excel and I wish you great success in all of your endeavors in this New Year. If we can play any small role in assisting you to realize your goals and aspirations in 2015 please reach out to me for a chat or a call. Who knows, perhaps together we can rid the world of poor customer service in 2015.

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