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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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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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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If you have a call or contact center you need a failover plan. 
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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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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In fact most of what we speak about when we talk about the customer experience is what we used to call customer service, or customer centicity. It seems that if we call it customer experience somehow it requires millions of dollars of investment, large teams and expansive budgets. Well from my perspective that is not the case. If we boil the Customer Experience to it’s essential nature what is it? Major elements of Customer Experience include: the customer journey (attraction, discovery, purchase etc.), customer effort in interactions and our ability to influence how customers feel about the organization…doesn’t this sound like customer service?
Now before I start to get nasty emails from practitioners who disagree with this perspective, let me state that I do believe that for mature service organizations some CX practices can improve service quality, CSAT as well as loyalty and reduce defections. However most organizations are not mature, they are still scrambling up the service quality path. For these, the majority of organizations, focusing on the basics can yield great returns. To start ask yourself how well your organization and agents;
1. Have your agents possess the product knowledge to make rational connections with your customers?
2. Do you agents possess the skills and competencies to make an emotional connection with your customers?
3. Are your systems and service levels in line with the expectations of your customers?
Your answers will distill the core of any customer experience the training, staff selection, tools and metrics.
In our next post we will discuss how you design your center to maximize the customers experience.
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The Cost of Chat Compared to Voice in the Contact Contact or Call Center
I have been asked this question more than a few times. Often people are looking at implementing chat or webchat in their call or contact center and they need to justify the ROI. In this post we will briefly provide an overview as to how you can calculate the costs and the potential savings.
On average a chat session lasts as long as a voice call, so the cost for each appears on the surface to be the same. However it is not possible to complete more than one voice call at a single time. With chat, we can support multiple chat sessions simultaneously. this is referred to as concurrency. This is possible because rather than an a voice call which is a conversation, always on and connected a chat session is really a sequence of individual interactions, call and response. The level of concurrency that can be support by a chat agent is primarily a function of the availability of short form content that they can employ and share with the consumer. If the chat agent must type all responses themselves in the dialogue window then they will constantly be responding to what the consumer has entered. If on the other hand the chat agent is able to ‘push’ or send short form text (FAQ’s, templated responses, policies etc,), links and pages to the consumer, they will gain free time, while the consumer reads, reviews or digests that information. This free time allows the chat agent to accept another incoming chat session. In center with robust short form text with embedded links can often support 2-3 chats simultaneously.
So back to the topic of cost for a chat versus a call. If a call costs based on the agent time $6.00 for the sake of this illustration and the chat agent can support 3 concurrent chats over the same time period then the costs of each chat is $2.00 ( the $6.00 cost of the agent time divided by 3, the number of concurrent sessions).
Let us know if you have any questions on this or other #callcenter , #contactcenter or #custexp related issues and we will be happy to assist you.
Colin
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