Unified Customer Engagement Hub Blog

Get insight, news, best practices, and other opinions on trending, industry leading, and other technology topics.

Measure What Matters Most to the Customer

In any business, your customer is always your top priority. Providing quality customer service means catering to their needs as best you can. But before you can cater to those needs, first you have to understand them. What do your customers want? What matters most to them? These may seem like simple questions, but more often than not, companies get it wrong.

  • 3 min read
  • 7/30/15 8:39 AM

Designing Exceptional Customer Experiences – Customer Experience Architecture

What experience do your customers have when they engage with your brand? On the surface, it may seem like a trick question. After all, every customer experience is different, right? Well, yes, to some extent. But even so, the experiences need to be consistent. They’re a reflection of your brand and what you stand for. Therefore, you need to do everything in your power to make sure every customer experience represents your brand in the best way possible. How can you do that? Use customer experience architecture to design exceptional customer experiences. Here are some tips:

  • 3 min read
  • 7/29/15 6:32 PM

Six Organization Traits Needed to Excel at Customer Service

“The customer is always right.” This old maxim is more than a little clichéd, but there’s still a fair amount of truth to it. If you want your company to succeed, you need to put the customer first. It has to be not just a maxim, but a way of life, throughout your organization. So how can you do it? What steps can you take and policies can you implement? Here are six traits your organization needs to excel at customer service.

  • 4 min read
  • 7/23/15 8:30 AM

Key Competencies for Customer Engagement

What’s your company’s strategy for customer engagement? What procedures do you follow? What are your goals and priorities? How you engage your customers is one of the most important aspects of your company.

  • 3 min read
  • 7/21/15 9:10 AM

Customer Care Agents Struggle Using "Alt-Tab" or Switching Applications

Contact center managers know that satisfied customers are among a company’s most valuable assets. Therefore, they know the importance of creating a helpful and rewarding experience, as well as providing a swift resolution to problems. In order their agents perform at the highest levels, most call center offer new tools to their agents, some having even invested in costly new applications.

  • 3 min read
  • 7/17/15 9:42 AM

Contact center technology provides customer care agents with the right data

An efficient, productive contact center reflects the focus on customer service. Managers, keenly aware of the needed efficiencies and essential customers’ good will, are providing more and more tools to their agents, from customer experience management, advanced helpdesk software, social media customer service tools and even individual agents metrics. Alas, these wonderful tools reside in disparate applications and do not communicate with one another. For agents, new challenges occur, the biggest obstacle being the need to handle multiple search fields.

  • 3 min read
  • 7/15/15 9:41 AM

The Cloud...Explained by Katie Couric

For those of you still struggling to understand the computing "cloud", you will enjoy this video from Katie Couric. The cloud is changing the way that people and businesses manage computers, applications and data. The cloud creates unprecendented opportunies and new challenges as well. The explosion of new cloud applications, offers new productivity and entertainment tools. But these same applications also present new security and data risks.

  • 1 min read
  • 7/7/15 8:30 AM

Contact Center Complexity is the Enemy of Customer Experience

Wise contact center leaders know the importance of customer engagement, which generates vital goodwill and drives sales. As such, it’s essential that agents have access to all the tools they need to perform at the highest levels when dealing with customers. Companies invest in knowledge management, helpdesk solutions, call routing and other technology to streamline processes and enhance the customer encounter.

  • 3 min read
  • 6/30/15 5:59 PM

Solving the problem: Data must be cut and pasted between apps

A caller’s experience with a company’s contact center can either make, or break, the customer relationship. Call center leaders appreciate the role a happy customer plays in building goodwill and eventually convert call into new business. To create an atmosphere of satisfaction and engagement, quick responses to questions and effective assistance with customer concerns are top priorities. Therefore, agents must perform promptly and efficiently.

  • 4 min read
  • 6/24/15 7:43 PM

Solving the problem: Training is required simply to navigate multiple applications

A company would not stand without its customers, a fact well known among contact center leaders who strive to create the best possible experience for those who call in with questions or problems. A supportive and rewarding agent encounter can lead to new sales and valuable goodwill; a poor agent encounter can lead a customer straight to the competitors. The person making the difference between the two encounters is the call center agent. Therefore, thorough training is absolutely essential, both on “soft skills” and on the multiple applications required for a typical customer experience.

  • 3 min read
  • 6/18/15 10:14 AM

    Related Posts

    Reducing the Impact of Technology on Training

    3 Ways to Reduce Training Time Using Technology If you really want to reduce training time, we challenge you to look at the technology your agents are using. Is it simple to use? Does it proactively help agents? Does it make their jobs easier? If you didn't answer YES to all of those questions, you could be complicating your training efforts out of the gate due to the technology your agents utilize to manage the customer journey. One of the unsung heroes of SpiceCSM's Business Process/BPM tool is the ability to reduce the amount of time agents need to start producing at the levels of longstanding employees. Typically when bringing new agents onto the team there's a period of training, usually involving some classroom knowledge transfer, exercises, role playing, and a variety of other methods to give the agents resources to solve requests efficiently. Depending on the organization and type of business, this could take anywhere from 1 - 12 weeks, or longer. In higher turnover environments this only exacerbates training challenges and emphasizes the need to make new employees more productive in less time. Here are 3 ways you can utilize technology to help reduce training efforts:

    What is iPaaS: Explaining Integration Capabilities

    What is iPaaS: Explaining Integration Capabilities What is iPaaS? iPaas is a cloud-based platform that allows businesses to connect their existing systems together. It provides a single interface where users can access their data from across different software platforms. This means they can view information from one application within another without having to switch between them. The platform also makes it easy for people to build new integrations by providing low-code tools that allow connections to be made with external systems.

    Low-Code Application Platform: What is it??

    LCAP - What is a Low-Code Application Platform The vision that SpiceCSM has from our inception was to have an application that provided the tools to customize the user experience easily and orchestrate data without the need for technical expertise. What we've been calling an "Enterprise Application Builder" is now being recognized by leading analysts as a Low-Code Application platform, or LCAP for short.