Zoho presented analysts with a deep look at its strategy and roadmap at its July analyst conference, describing how it intends to meld its many business applications together through integration at the level of the platform. The company, which is privately owned and funded, has generally sought to build its own tools rather than buy or partner. This approach has allowed the firm to create a suite of tightly linked tools that share a common interface.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Data,
Customer Experience Management,
AI & Machine Learning,
customer service and support,
Digital Business
The contact center industry is reexamining how organizations engage with contact center agents. One thing that we learned from the forced movement to work-from-home was that organizations have to provide agents with appropriate tools to collaborate and communicate with peers and supervisors as well as workers in the back office who participate in all sorts of customer-facing or customer-adjacent processes. It is also important to provide supervisors with visibility into agent activity. That...
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
agent management,
Customer Experience Management,
Field Service,
customer service and support
Field service is a segment of customer experience that is dominated by two elements: the complexity of the issues handled, and the high cost of providing on-site services. It is recognized as a critical component of the service experience, especially when managing the condition of high-precision equipment in the medical, manufacturing and utility industries. It is also a high-risk moment in the customer life cycle. Consumers often experience the process as a series of disconnected visits and...
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
agent management,
Customer Experience Management,
Field Service,
customer service and support
Contact centers are undergoing a radical reshuffling of the workforce, partly because the pandemic shifted agents to remote work. But the trends were in place to reorganize the world of work long before the pandemic. Digital contact channels, which are gaining in popularity, require workers that are better informed and capable of handling more complex and interdependent interactions and processes. That’s changing the nature of training, management and even process design between departments.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
agent management,
Customer Experience Management
Customer Service and Support (CSS) software is about more than case tracking and trouble tickets. Many organizations view the service call as an opportunity to solidify a positive customer relationship and perhaps enhance the loyalty and value of the customer. That has propelled interest in the emphasis on workflows and automation that now/currently drives CSS, particularly when it comes to managing self-service and field service, and the ability to provide agents with contextually relevant...
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
Customer Experience Management,
Field Service,
customer service and support
Today’s contact center agents find themselves handling increasingly more complex interactions due to changes in consumer demand, advances in self-service and the proliferation of digital contact channels. This added complexity requires continuous agent support for successful customer experience outcomes. Intelligent software can reduce agent workload and improve customer interactions by picking up customer cues.
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Topics:
Contact Center,
AI,
Customer Experience Management
The technology underpinning customer experience (CX) is a hodgepodge of tools that have been developed for niche use cases and then expanded to fill broader roles. Examples include the old (CRM, help desk software and speech analytics) and the new (customer data platforms and conversational AI). This is because CX is a set of very specialized processes that happen in different parts of the enterprise, managed by people who often do not connect with peers handling related processes....
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Marketing,
Marketing Performance Management,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
Product Information Management,
Digital Marketing,
agent management,
intelligent marketing,
Customer Experience Management,
Field Service,
Conversational Marketing,
Digital Experience Platform,
customer service and support
In a previous Analyst Perspective, we discussed some of the big-picture trends that are bringing cost control back as a core driver of contact center operations. In this report we will tackle some of the practical ramifications: how those trends affect decision-making and operations.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
agent management,
Customer Experience Management,
Field Service,
customer service and support
Contact centers have always been very cost-centric and attuned to the kinds of constraints that they have to operate in, but many organizations were diverted from that kind of focus when the pandemic first hit. In 2020, there was a sudden need for new tools and equipment just to keep centers running, and the costs involved in enabling agents to work from home — equipping them and their supervisors with the tools they needed to collaborate and stay in sync — were unavoidable.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
agent management,
Customer Experience Management,
Field Service,
customer service and support
A formal Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is a necessity for any organization that wants to grow its customer base and differentiate from its competitors. Unfortunately, many organizations have not updated their notion of “formal” in quite a few years.
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Topics:
Customer Experience,
Marketing,
Voice of the Customer,
Contact Center,
Digital Marketing,
agent management,
Customer Experience Management,
Field Service,
Conversational Marketing,
customer service and support