Every brand’s prior importance is designing customer experiences, keeping in mind the self service which is fast coming in trend. Gartner states 81% of the customers try finding the solutions themselves first and seek expert advice only when they can’t. Five rules for creating beneficial self-service options are:

• Making IVR options relevant which enables the customers to easily get to the option needed and can contact an agent in case of need.

• Training chatbots regularly by keeping them updated on information like brand prices, new product, product description etc. Also, availability of real time customer data which would provide assistance. Another step can be analyzing the tone of customers for providing a smoother conversation.

• Keeping agents on standby because computer programs cannot always resolve all kinds of problems.

• Updating the FAQs by analyzing customer feedback and service transcripts

• Using video tutorials so that the customer queries can be resolved having both subtitles and voiceovers in various languages.

Read more at: https://www.vocalcom.com/en/blog/digital-customer-engagement/5-rules-for-giving-customers-the-self-service-they-want/

Building good relationship with customers satisfies them with their purchases and makes them recommend it to others. With increasing competition in the online market, personalizing customer experience is one good way to attract customers. Success rates are as high as 77%. The ways to personalize experience are: • People tend to search for goods online and purchase in store. Hence, by using geological tools, customers can be notified about nearest shops and the ongoing deals which provokes them to make an early purchase. • Saving information like card details, shipping information, preferences saves time and gives customers a good experience. • Studying the customer preference and making personalized recommendations attracts more customers. • Determining the geographical location of the customers and using their native language and quoting prices in their local currencies gives the customers a clearer overview and therefore convincing them to make the purchase. • Customers are more driven by personalized videos of the products as compared to written description as watching a video involves almost no effort. Read more at https://www.vocalcom.com/en/blog/customer-experience/5-innovative-ways-to-personalize-the-customer-experience/

Call centres have started to explore new avenues using predictive analytics which improves their overall effectiveness and streamlines their operations. Traits that best prepare a person as a call centre representative are not clearly evident to officials but predictive analytics has made it possible to identify such traits. Call centres are merging CRM data into predictive analytics models as CRM has played a vital role in most organizations. The approaches used include analyzing variables contributing to customer discontent, building an automated system to transfer calls to representatives with varied expertise etc. Predictive analytics have been transforming industries and benefitting the aging ones by bolstering customer satisfaction and reducing churn rates.

Read More at: https://www.smartdatacollective.com/call-center-analytics-move-industry-21st-century/

Good leadership lies at the center of contact centre services. Customer is always prioritized over personal needs. Diligent coaching seen as one of the most effective methods of service improvement and center operation. It is the real life experience that really matters, irrespective of the amount of text book knowledge applied. Great leaders have the ability to remain calm under pressure. They should be ready to take on situations which are new and unprecedented. They should be business minded and focused on the organization’s objectives. As contact centers are dependent on technology, the leaders should have fluency over tech gadgets. Read more at: https://www.customercontactweekdigital.com/agent-engagement/articles/10-skills-all-great-contact-center-leaders-need

With people on the move all the time, it is beneficial for companies to have travel contact centers. People now prefer tickets booked over calls, instead of waiting in long queues. If companies have the knowledge of the needs of customers helps in doing the needed research and brining in, the needed technological advancements for the setup. Big Data provides an added leverage for the required data. One can personalize consumer experience for a better one on one experience. The calls for sales should be made keeping in mind the customer’s time.  Employees should be educated to ensure that they have the needed skills and technical knowhow to manage the tasks. Read more at: https://www.ameyo.com/blog/how-to-build-a-travel-contact-center

Proper call centers must have an efficient balance between customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX). UX is the experience with the product, while CX is the review of the interaction with the brand. UX is a subset of CX. CX envelopes a wider scope of experiences. A bad UX with a good CX can be seen as a good experience overall, but a bad CX and a good UX is seen as a bad experience. Despite covering wider area, CX has some dependence on UX as well. Firms should aim at optimum CX, involving best UX via its services. Read more at: https://www.ameyo.com/blog/building-a-modern-day-contact-center-where-ux-meets-cx

Automatic Call/Contact Distribution (ACD) is a software that enables contact centers to route customer inquiries to the customer support representative who has the skills to best handle their specific needs. Apart from the ability to route customers to the appropriate agent, ACDs have a variety of additional features that help in keeping efficiency high and costs down. Inbound/outbound call blending is another popular offering within an ACD. A quality ACD system imports customer data from company CRMs and passes it along to the agents so they can handle requests with all available information. An automatic call distributor takes a lot of the heavy lifting out of the routing process for contact centers, creating a more enjoyable experience for both customers and agents. Read more at: http://www.incontact.com/blog/what-is-automatic-call-distribution-acd/

Central government jobs are estimated to increase by 2.83 lakh in 2018,growing from 32.84 lakh in 2016. The major recruiter will be the Police department followed by postal service. The Ministries of Home,External Affairs,Skill Development and Entrepreneurship,Civil Aviation,Mines and many others will add substantially to their already existing workforce. The Ministry of Water Resources estimates an addition of 3632 members for River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation. The scenario is quite encouraging for the young generation of the country as the government is emphasizing on employability and enhanced skill development. Read more at:  http://indianexpress.com/article/business/budget/union-budget-2017-jaitley-about-2-83-lakh-estimated-central-government-jobs-by-2018-4520572/

Everyone wants to achieve highest connections in outbound dialing. Predictive dialers allow continuous connections. Tips to get most out of these are: beginning should be with a right list because it lays a foundations and there should be a connection between CRM and contact center, investment in automation is necessary like predictive dialing which minimizes downtimes, eliminates errors, etc. , rules and regulations should be highly adhered to, in order to avoid fines and litigations, outbound solutions keeps callers connected by giving a menu of telephone numbers to choose from and helps establishing a natural connection. Lastly, put inbound to work for outbound, all components of contact center must work in harmony. Outbond dialing solutions help in making quality connections, maximizing agent’s performance, improving customer satisfaction, etc. Read more at: http://www.incontact.com/blog/5-tips-for-a-better-outbound-dialing-strategy/

Cost per Contact includes all costs that are needed to run a contact center, like salaries, facilities, software etc. Divided by the number of contacts handled. In this blog, we go through five possible ways to reduce the cost per contact. First, optimize the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) which can provide telecom usage savings. Second, using a callback feature in the IVR can provide both telecom usage and port allocation savings. Third, overall operations cost savings can happen by utilizing skill-based routing, which can benefit all call center channels - phone, chat, email, etc. Fourth, workforce optimization tools do just that, and can help reduce costs related to staffing and telecom usage. Lastly, since it is cheaper to have a customer help themselves, so if you can provide self-service options, you should.Read more at

http://www.incontact.com/blog/reduce-cost-per-contact-5-tips/

The cloud, as we know is a strong rival for contact center technology today. In this blog, we discuss three critical steps for cloud success. First, constructing a good Statement of Work (SoW) is of utmost importance. You need to define requirements, address functionality, integration, training, etc. Here a little planning can bear fruits in the long run. Second is to explore what the vendor is committed to deliver on Service Level Agreements (SLA's), what they can and can't control, how will they respond, how will they track and report on SLA's. Lastly, it is very important to define the proper vendor management role and who will provide it, whether in the center or in IT. The Vendor Manager needs some technical aptitude and great communication skills as the liaison between the business areas, IT and vendor. Read more at: http://www.strategiccontact.com/blog/2016/08/cloud-success-in-3-easy-pieces/

Cost- per -contact should be metric that should be used by customer contact centers'  to judge efficiency .Skill- based routing(SBR) can directly connect the caller to the agent reducing time taken per call. Average abandon time (ABT) can be used as a metric also. Workforce management tools forecast the amount of calls in the future and agents' work schedule throughout the day. Workforce Intelligence deals with division of agents according to their specialization in terms of skills so that lesser time and cost are spent. Last but not the least self-service options would benefit in terms operational efficiency and overall customer satisfaction.Read more at: http://www.incontact.com/blog/reduce-cost-per-contact-5-tips/

CallMiner launches its new Engagement Optimization community. Engagement Optimization or EO is the destination for customer engagement professionals and it also provides a platform for peer-to peer networking and access to thought leadership content. EO will also help customer experience professionals from around the globe to keep pace with industry news and best practices. Read more at: https://www.callcentrehelper.com/callminer-launches-new-engagement-optimisation-community-88599.htm

The IVR system bears a very diversifying opinion among companies. Some who favors it, does so because according to them it improves call center performance, improving brand perception and a few companies believe that IVR systems enhance profitability. Those companies who do not favor the system does so because they believe that the system is too difficult to implement, it is too expensive or can't action results. A large number of companies feel that customers don’t like the IVR system. Companies who still have a misconception about the utility of the system and is not accustomed to the advanced IVR technology is, therefore, unaware of the fact that IVR systems can actually give profit through real-time analysis of data and customer alerts generated by voice-to-text services. Read more at:  https://www.callcentrehelper.com/companies-avoid-ivr-surveys-because-%E2%80%98customers-don%E2%80%99t-like-them%E2%80%99-15319.htm

Collecting data is important to make operations efficient in a company. But, it is found that collecting and storing data is not enough. Companies must connect and analyze that data across organization. The purpose of data (structured or unstructured) is to extract insights and take accurate decision. But now it is becoming important for companies to connect data, including data from the contact center with the rest of the organization for an integrated view of the customer. Companies should utilize data to combine analytics from the contact center, workforce management, CRM systems, website, social media, surveys and product engagement tools. Read more at: http://callcentertimes.com/Home/tabid/37/ctl/NewsArticle/mid/395/CategoryID/1/NewsID/1197/Default.aspx

Any business house needs to ensure effective customer service to satisfy its customers and the key characteristic of serving the customers properly is by maintaining smooth and effective communication. This effective communication can be achieved in different ways, starting from inbound and outbound phone calls to emails and messaging services and of these methods, messaging is the most cost-effective way to make sure that the customers and their queries are properly heard. Nowadays, in-app messaging systems and software products have been introduced. Companies need to invest in the best quality messaging app that will eventually boost its market potential as a messaging app can allow customer service executives and end users to interact with each other in real time. Read more at: http://callcentertimes.com/Home/tabid/37/ctl/NewsArticle/mid/395/CategoryID/1/NewsID/1191/Default.aspx

The most dynamic aspect in market is Customer. It is important for businesses to focus on customer experience. For this, not only offline experience works but digital experience is also equally important. To retain your customer and to build the brand, businesses need to think strategically:

• ·         No need to worry about price, since 56% of customers pay more to get better customer services, and are willing to pay upto 30%.
• ·          Make your website more informative and easy to access. Website is more a communication channel and not only a showroom.
• ·         Social media is ruled by customers, not marketers. Marketers need to connect with customers through social media not only for promotion but to get feedback, to get back to them as earlier as possible.
• ·         Personalization is everything. Give more personalized experience to your prospects and customers.

 We can say that marketer need to give a perfect mix, either it is offline or online experience for the customers. To know more go through the given link: http://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/create-memorable-customer-experiences-with-these-strategies/

With the expansion of Analytics, each sector is trying to utilize it to the fullest. By implementing analytics, the managers are able to identify the behaviors that lead to positive outcomes and also identify the problematic areas. Therefore, organizations must develop the best practices that can streamline the work. By applying this to the calls, customers can analyze the customer - agent interactions. So they can identify the most important factors and can even reduce the volume in maximum traffic hours. The advance speech analytics software not only means, evaluates and presents audio and textual data, but also collects information regarding reasons for calls, emotional nuances in a customer's voice and how well agents are addressing a customer's needs and expectations. This even helps them keep a check on their marketing strategies so that it can be altered for the better. These generate very meaningful insights for why a customer needs to contact the support centers and thus exposing the root cause. So this helps in decreasing the average call time and monitoring the resources spent. Read more at : http://customerthink.com/top-5-benefits-of-call-center-speech-analytics-why-your-call-centers-success-depends-on-speech-analytics-solutions/

This year social media will play a bigger role in CRM strategy than ever before. 2016 is the year that will truly test the concept of customer relationship management and as the social scene grows, CRM solutions will need to integrate with other software platforms in order to provide a continuous experience for you and your consumers. A company should look for these tools and abilities before you make any decisions: Track social interactions, Capture profile info, View mutual friends, Collaboration tools, Social behavior analysis, Brand analysis, and convert to leads. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/getting-to-know-you-is-your-crm-social-enough-for-2016-71102

Before we start discussing about Tools for Social Media Analysis, first of all we have to know what social media analytics is? Instead of thinking it as a noun, take it as a verb. Precisely, it's gathering data from social platforms to help guide marketing strategy.

# the process begins with the prioritizing goals.

# The second step is determining key performance indicators (KPIs) i.e. likes and shares your posts receives, replies and comments, and more importantly the clicks your links and content earn analysis.

Now, as the definition is clear, we will directly come to the social media analytic tools. To read more, follow: https://keyhole.co/blog/list-of-the-top-25-social-media-analytics-tools/