Tag: All Industries

The Power of Analytics as a Service to Predict and Prevent Attrition

Posted on by Andrew Reilly

How Analytics as a Service Unlocks Insights to Reduce Attrition, Boost Retention, and Elevate CX

Ongoing advances in big data and artificial intelligence (AI) provide countless insights and opportunities to improve the customer experience. One such capability is the use of machine learning to predict employee attrition. By collecting and analyzing data to identify employees at risk of attrition, data scientists can identify opportunities to intervene and reduce employee churn. These insights provided through analytics as a service can empower operations and human resources teams to develop strategies that raise employee engagement and retain key talent, ultimately improving business outcomes and creating a more rewarding employee and customer experience. Optimize the customer experience through human-centric interaction with agents.

In this blog post, we’ll dive into the data sources and processes that make this possible along with the insights and outcomes they produce. But before we do so, let’s revisit what analytics as a service is and why it’s so valuable.

What Is Analytics as a Service?

Data-driven innovation happens when data scientists are integrated into the business culture and processes. Through analytics as a service, data scientists offer guidance and expertise to improve business outcomes that can measurably support our client’s customer support programs. A digital transformation strategy that includes analytics as a service provides access to massive amounts of data which the data scientists and operations teams dissect in order to harness its potential.

As a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions, iQor offers analytics as a service as part of our comprehensive CX solutions to some of the world’s top brands. Through iQor’s vast digital ecosystem, we harness advances in AI-powered technology along with the expertise of our data scientists and operations teams to perform data analytics that yields measurable outcomes to improve employee and customer experiences at scale.

Data-based digital technology solutions have the power to drive meaningful results specific to the operating environment. iQor’s data scientists interpret the data housed in our private CX cloud to translate technical research and statistics into actionable insights that inform operational decisions and improve business outcomes. The 10-steps of analytics as a service typically start small and gradually expand to incorporate the entire customer service program. One of the many areas in which they provide insight is employee attrition and retention.

The Process of Predicting Attrition

The ability to predict and prevent employee attrition presents opportunities for success in customer service. Retaining qualified, experienced, and high-performing customer-care agents and supervisors can make a world of difference in the quality and consistency of service provided to the end customer.

Accessing data through analytics as a service to provide insight into the causes of attrition can provide invaluable information to inform interventions that can increase retention and ultimately minimize employee churn.

Data scientists begin by introducing new data sources to the machine learning model to identify agents at risk of leaving the company. In order to do so, they follow a formal process for identifying and validating potential data sources, gathering the data, and cleansing it. This enables them to generate new variables out of the data sources and then run variable-importance testing that compares the predictive power of every potential variable. If the predictive power exceeds the threshold, it’s included in the machine learning model to yield insights into attrition.

This is an ongoing process by which data scientists continue to explore additional data sources to add to the model in order to make it as accurate as possible for the entire company population.

Expanding the Data to Power Predictions

In order for predictive analytics to accurately forecast attrition, the projections must originate from more than one data source. This helps ensure a balanced view of each employee’s experience and accounts for a lack of data points for certain employees.

For example, iQor gathers data from weekly Mood-o-Meter surveys that employees have the option of completing. The survey gauges their job satisfaction and generates a net happiness score that provides helpful insights into their experiences. However, if certain agents never respond to the optional survey it cannot serve as a data source for deciphering whether those agents are at risk of attrition.

To offset this type of feedback-driven source, data scientists cast a wide net and include additional data sources based on each agent’s environment to help assess how they interact with iQor. These environmental data sources include how much time the agent spends logged in to work, participating in trainings, and taking a break. They also include the agent’s total pay, bonus history, and the complexity of the customer support program on which they work. Coaching interactions serve as another source for deriving environmental data. When an agent participates in the iQor Coaching ecosystem, data scientists are able to harvest this critical data from internal systems versus needing to seek a direct response.

Together, these data sources provide a more comprehensive view of the agent experience to determine if they are at risk of churning.

Analytics as a Service Yields Up to 2X Retention Rate for At-Risk Agents

Analytics as a service yields powerful results in reducing employee attrition.

Over the past year, the insights provided by iQor’s data scientists led to employee retention strategies that have helped retain more than 1,000 customer service agents.

iQor’s Machine Learning algorithm correctly identifies agents at the highest risk of attrition on a weekly basis. This is evidenced by the difference in attrition rates between the control group (a 5% sample of at-risk agents who do not receive an intervention) and the experimental group (those receiving an intervention). The experimental group retention rate is consistently up to 2 times higher than the control group retention rate.

By improving retention, these data-based interventions have increased the overall tenure makeup of the enterprise, ultimately leading to enhanced performance. Indeed, when deployed enterprise-wide, these attrition prevention methods can have a positive impact on employee engagement and improve business outcomes on a large scale. This benefits the client’s customer support program while also instilling confidence in agents and supervisors, which can lead to improved recruiting efforts. Furthermore, the iterative nature of the process allows for ongoing opportunities to add data sources and improve the model to produce increasingly valuable results.

Experience the Best in Data Analytics

iQor’s analytics as a service offering uses a combination of iQor’s proprietary speech analytics platform, cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analysis to develop custom interventions for identified areas in need of improvement along the customer journey. The results produce targeted improvements for the employee, customer, and client.

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

  • A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.
  • A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.
  • A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
  • The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.
  • Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.
  • The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.
  • A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business.

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

Andrew Reilly is a data scientist on the AI & Data Science Team at iQor.

The 10 Steps of Analytics as a Service

Posted on by Andrew Reilly

Analytics as a Service Creates Custom Problem-Solving Solutions to Empower Employees and Improve CX

Seemingly endless quantities of big data offer today’s brands many opportunities for data-driven innovation. However, to make such large quantities of data relevant and accessible to inform decisions, it is essential to integrate data scientists into the business culture and processes. Indeed, through analytics as a service, data scientists can offer guidance and expertise in choosing which metrics to use to improve outcomes. But for many businesses, accessing this data is elusive and even more challenging to sort through and analyze to inform decisions, strategy, and operations to improve experiences for employees and customers.

That’s where analytics as a service comes in as part of a digital ecosystem designed to create rewarding employee and customer experiences that build brand loyalty. With analytics as a service, customer support programs have access to massive amounts of data along with the data scientists and operations teams to make sense of it.

Digital transformation strategies that include advanced data analytics can provide insight into all steps of the customer journey and provide information about challenges along the way to inform custom solutions that improve outcomes.

Culling, storing, sorting, analyzing, and using the data to develop and test interventions is a lengthy and detailed process. Business process outsourcing (BPO) companies like iQor with a vast digital ecosystem can harness advances in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solutions along with the expertise of our data scientists and operations teams to cover all aspects of data analytics, from start to finish, to create measurable outcomes that improve employee and customer experiences at scale. 

What Is Analytics as a Service?

Data-based digital technology solutions drive meaningful results. But in order to do so, that data must be analyzed effectively. In any customer service environment, when operations encounters an issue they are unable to resolve efficiently, data scientists can provide assistance. Through powerful analytics, data scientists can assess a problem and recommend how to best fix it. The solution is data-driven according to the particular operating environment.

As a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled BPO solutions, iQor offers analytics as a service as part of our comprehensive solutions to create great customer experiences that build brand loyalty.

iQor’s 12 terabytes of data stored on our private CX cloud is accessible to our data scientists for analytics. But regardless of how much data exists, in order to make data analytics useful, it must yield meaningful and pragmatic results.

Analytics as a service is a multi-step process involving strong collaboration between data scientists and operations teams to identify and solve problems that reduces costs and improves performance.

It is important for data scientists to build relationships with operations teams as part of a broader data-driven culture to best understand customer service program requirements. This enables the data scientists to structure their data analyses specific to each problem to develop purposeful and manageable interventions for each distinct group. The process typically starts small to test the analytics solution on one subgroup, and then gradually expands to incorporate the entire customer service program.

Because each project uses different technologies, algorithms, and tools, there are many opportunities for different technical connections. These enable data scientists to effectively identify risk and look for data outliers in the program by analyzing related statistics and scores specific to each program element.

Data journalism is an essential part of this process. Because of the technical nature of AI algorithm outputs, the information is not typically consumable by operations teams or anyone without data science expertise. As part of an ongoing effort to ensure strong and productive working relationships between data science and operations, iQor’s data scientists focus on the explicability of the outputs to create savvy translations from technical research and statistics into actionable insights that can inform operational decisions and improve outcomes.

The 10 Steps of Deploying Data Analytics

To understand the process and the power of harnessing data science analytics to improve the customer experience, it’s helpful to look at it through a real-world example. Over the span of one and a half years, iQor implemented a data analytics as a service solution designed to improve dialer optimization strategies to reach higher-risk customers for a prominent credit card issuer in the United States.

The analytics as a service solution yielded amazing results. The client saw a 180% increase in inbound right party contacts, a 15% reduction in dialer spend, and a 2% improvement in roll rate, savings thousands of dollars each month while simultaneously increasing revenue by thousands each month. Moreover, the analytics solution helped customers get back on track and deepened brand loyalty.

To yield such powerful results, iQor’s data scientists deployed a 10-step analytics as a service process as part of iQor’s digital technology ecosystem that creates irresistible CX solutions. By following our tried-and-true set of best practices for analytics success, we delivered strong outcomes for the customer, employee, and client.

Step 1: Pinpoint the Problem

The first step of analytics as a service is to identify the core problem that needs fixing. Using the credit card issuer case study as an example, the core problem was the challenge of reaching a certain subset of customers.

The advent of cell phones altered the effectiveness of outbound customer service calls. Caller ID empowered customers to decline calls and number blocking enabled them to prevent many calls from even going through to the customer. This made it increasingly challenging for customer service representatives to reach customers by phone. The goal was to reduce the number of outbound calls per customer while reaching the same number of customers.

Step 2: Data Discovery

Once the problem is identified, the next phase of analytics as a service involves accessing the data warehouse to cull all relevant data to support the problem-solving process. This data mining includes gathering records of customer interactions and disposition codes, customer surveys, account details, and all other relevant data points from a massive pool of data.

Step 3: Analyze Outcomes Within Data

Once the relevant data are identified, the next step in the analytics process is to analyze the data according to outcomes. In the outbound calling example, this included a variety of outcomes. Did customer service agents reach the wrong number when dialing the number associated with the customer account? Did they reach the wrong party? Did the call lead to voicemail? Did the customer service agent reach the customer? Were they able to help the customer get back on track with (or through) a payment schedule? What is the customer’s payment history?

By analyzing the data according to various relevant outcomes, data scientists are able to more clearly see patterns and trends.

Step 4: Identify Trends in the Data

By joining data tables from the different outcomes together, data scientists can make relevant associations and find valuable insights. In identifying trends and associations among all the results, they can make sense of large quantities of data to inform decision-making related to the specific goal or problem.

Step 5: Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)

With the problem named, data sorted, and trends identified, the fifth step in the analytics process involves looking closely at how the business is actually operating. Data scientists communicate openly with operations to share data and potential findings with them. Through this open and ongoing dialogue, data scientists delve into an exploratory phase and are able to gather more information to better understand the meaning of each data point, what it represents, and how to best utilize it to create solutions for the problem.

Step 6: Experimental Design for Solutions

Next, the data scientists take their analysis and use it to inform their data-backed decisions and solutions. This is a critically important phase for ensuring data scientists make a positive impact on the operating environment. The goal is to start small, implementing solutions on a micro-scale to test their results before rolling them out on a broader level. This stage can be the most challenging aspect of analytics as a service if data scientists are perceived as outsiders wanting to change business operations. But, in a data-based culture with strong relationships and open communication in place, this stage can yield powerful results.

When the data scientists and the operations team partner together to implement solutions with the goal of boosting outcomes, the collaboration can produce great improvements.

Step 7: Understand the Parameters and Group for Similarities

By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, data scientists can group the data into more specified clusters for more meaningful results. Data scientists can develop an AI algorithm to identify specified data according to certain similarities between customers, separating it into any number of clusters. The goal is to further group the data into distinct clusters that are still large enough to be meaningful. In this example for optimizing outbound calls, they separated the data into three clusters to generate the most meaningful results. The goal is then to apply the most appropriate intervention to each of these separate clusters.

Step 8: Apply the Intervention

When applying the intervention, our data scientists always start small with one of the cluster groups. This makes the interventions more manageable for operations because the solution is tested on one small group within a cluster instead of the entire program at once. This also facilitates a more focused measurement of the various impacts of the intervention.

Step 9: Measure the Impact

Once applied to the cluster group, it is essential to measure the impact of the intervention. Through careful experimental design with the test group and control group, data scientists measure and analyze results to identify differences and solve the specific problem.

Step 10: Refine Processes and Scale to the Entire Program

While testing the intervention on a small group and a control group, data scientists work with operations to optimize existing processes (adjust the intensity, timing, etc. of intervention) to make them more efficient for the entire program. It is essential that the goal for the program solution remain clear throughout this process to drive relevant results. After tweaking the intervention, data scientists and operations collaborate to scale the solution to the entire program, generating improvements and outstanding results.

Analytics as a Service Improves CX and Increases Revenue

Analytics as a service powered by AI and clearly defined processes by data scientists can yield tremendous results in the customer experience. In this example, to improve outbound processes for a major credit card issuer, the team of data scientists identified a way to dial less while still reaching the same number of customers. In fact, they reduced outbound dialing by almost two-thirds but still reached the same number of customers.

Moreover, using data and analytics they reduced dialing attempts from eight to four daily calls. Through analytics as a service, they determined the efficacy of leaving a voicemail message after four call attempts. Many customers that received a message called back. Inbound call volume increased from customers who then worked with customer service representatives to develop payment plans that worked for them, helping them get back on track and building brand loyalty. With analytics as a service, the program saw increased revenue through inbound channels and greater outcomes from accounts receivable management, two very difficult outcomes to achieve.

Experience the Best in Data Analytics

iQor’s analytics as a service offering uses a combination of iQor’s proprietary speech analytics platform, cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analysis to develop custom interventions for identified areas in need of improvement along the customer journey. The results produce targeted improvements for the employee, customer, and client.

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

  • A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.
  • A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.
  • A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
  • The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.
  • Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.
  • The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.
  • A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business.

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

Andrew Reilly is a data scientist on the AI & Data Science Team at iQor.

How Chatbots Can Transform the Customer Experience

Posted on by Nicole Gobbo

Using Chatbots to Improve Customer Support for the Modern Consumer

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made its way into customer support delivery in many shapes and forms. Conversational AI can handle a variety of menial tasks, from visual search to automated messages in the modern customer experience. 

One of these AI-powered technologies in the customer service space is chatbots. The objective of chatbots is to help ease customer service pressures by offloading mundane, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks. 

With intelligent automation, chatbots are able to complete these routine tasks effectively by using algorithms driven by machine learning. This article discusses the scope of a customer service chatbot and how it can use AI to improve customer satisfaction as part of a digital transformation strategy. 

Benefits of Chatbots for Customer Support Delivery

Chatbots are particularly beneficial in customer service because they can handle high volumes of standard technical queries quickly and efficiently. They create more satisfied customers with consistent outcomes and reduced handle time. Likewise, chatbots help reduce or eliminate mundane tasks so customer service agents can focus on addressing more complex customer service needs and deliver more rewarding customer experiences. 

Through chatbot conversation automation, information can easily be collated into valuable reports for better analysis and decision-making. Ultimately, chatbots can help eliminate human error, reduce unnecessary spend, and increase productivity.

Why Are Chatbots Necessary for Customer Service?

BPOs like iQor that deliver customized solutions can deploy automation where it matters most for creating happy customers. Solutions that include chatbots can help do the following: 

  • Offer 24/7 customer service. If customers don’t get an instant response to their questions, they may take their business elsewhere. Chatbots allow customers to access support whenever they want, irrespective of their time zone or geographical location. 
  • Speed up problem resolution. Chatbots offer an instant personalized experience, responding to customers faster than human agents can. They can access databases and existing knowledge bases and provide quick answers to all sorts of questions. 
  • Provide multi-language support. Providing live customer support in different languages can increase costs. Chatbots can offer multi-language support and resolve customer queries in the customer’s language of choice, serving a broader customer base while reducing spend. 
  • Remain accurate and consistent. A sudden influx in customer support requests has the potential to increase average handle time (AHT) and leave room for human error. On the other hand, an AI-powered customer service chatbot ensures prompt responses with a high level of accuracy and consistency. 
  • Gather data. Human agents may find it challenging to recall all details shared in a conversation and satisfy the customers’ expectations. Chatbots, however, collect analytics on the fly and remember them forever. This helps them provide accurate data to customers. Chatbots remember what customers like and dislike and act accordingly when they get relevant requests. 
  • Offer better self-service. Chatbots can help direct customers to self-service options, such as web pages and documents, that customers can use to solve their problems themselves. Along with reducing the number of support tickets, this also maintains high customer satisfaction. 
  • Reduce channel sprawl. Customers often switch between different channels to get the information they want. For example, a connected omnichannel experience enables customers to start with a live chat option and, after some time, drop it for email support if they don’t get satisfactory answers. With chatbots, customers can use the same channel for the majority of their support needs. 
  • Lower interactive voice response (IVR) frustrations. The IVR devices used in customer service can sometimes be challenging for certain customers, especially if they don’t get a personalized response. BPO solutions that include chatbots can replace this technology and send customers to the appropriate response team without the need for a human agent. 

How Chatbots Can Empower a Customer Support Team

Research shows that 67% of global consumers have interacted with a chatbot in the past year. This means that more and more companies are using customer support chatbots to improve their customer service in remote work and in-office operations. 

Chatbots can provide 24/7/365 support and don’t need sick days or vacations. In this way, customers can reach support agents anytime and anywhere through messaging apps and mobile devices. 

According to Drift’s 2020 State of Conversational Marketing report, chatbot use has grown by 92% since 2019. The global chatbot market is expected to reach a value of $10.5 billion by 2026. 

It’s easy to see that conversational marketing and AI-based customer support optimize your customer experience and foster stronger and more satisfying interactions with your brand. 

How Do Chatbots Assist the Customer Support Team?

BPOs like iQor can develop custom CX solutions that include an AI chatbot to empower customer service teams resulting in less time spent on repetitive tasks. For example, a chatbot can help teams sort through and respond to customer requests. 

Here are some other ways in which an AI chatbot empowers customer support representatives to create meaningful experiences. 

  • Improving accuracy. Chatbots can send tickets to the right person in seconds while filtering out duplicates and irrelevant messages. They can also flag conversations that need more attention from human agents. This means that live agents can answer tickets more accurately, resulting in better service for customers. 
  • Speeding up customer service. AI chatbots can help customer service teams process many more requests simultaneously by automatically routing tickets to the right person and helping agents prioritize conversation threads based on their contents. This reduces wait times for customers, which can help boost their satisfaction and brand loyalty. 
  • Upselling and cross-selling. Even though chatbots can’t replace human beings, they can upsell and cross-sell customers by answering questions and suggesting related products or services. Chatbots can help sell everything from merchandise to travel packages to keep customer service agents focused on more complicated requests, such as refunding a purchase or offering technical support.
  • Self-service solutions. Although some customers prefer talking to customer support representatives, 70% of them would rather use a self-service document or site. Chatbots can help steer customers to self-service resources. This is a win-win with customers receiving support in their preferred channel and customer support agents spending their time working on more complex service requests. 

Additionally, chatbots can understand different languages because they run on natural language processing (NLP).  NLP is a group of technologies that enables computers to understand the tone and context of human language and interact naturally, making it easier (and faster) for humans to interact with them. 

Moreover, according to Intercom, 29% of businesses report having lost customers due to a lack of multilingual support. Being able to provide support in as many as 20 languages is a huge selling point for chatbots without the need to hire multilingual agents. Although there may still be a need for multilingual agents, multilingual chatbots can reduce the number of agents needed. This need is also influenced by the dominance of customers requiring multilingual support. For example, programs that support companies based in Europe may need to staff customer service agents in multiple languages.

How Much Time Does a Customer Service Chatbot Save?

A custom solution with a conversational bot like the ones offered at iQor can reduce the average handle time for customer service interactions. This key performance indicator (KPI) measures the average amount of time it takes to resolve a support or service request. Improving AHT metrics by fulfilling customer needs with less time spent on hold, delays, or follow-up actions results in a better overall customer experience.

Suppose a CX program receives 30,000 calls per year. If the human agent spends an average of five minutes on each customer call, this equates to 2,500 hours on the phone every year. While some of these calls require human assistance, many contain questions that a bot can answer easily, reducing average handle time, which is a measurable saving. 

Indeed, a custom solution that includes a customer support chatbot can save agents hundreds of hours and enable them to focus on other more high-value tasks.

How Customers View Customer Support Chatbots

Research shows that customers are on board with digital transformation across their business. Customers actually like using chatbots due to how quickly they can get answers to their questions. 

Customer support chatbots are particularly useful for quick customer service and answering repetitive queries. 

According to Tidio, about 48.78% of female customers like chatbots and use them for communication when making online purchases. Meanwhile, 47.92% of men use chatbots if they can’t find answers to simple questions.

What Reasons Do Customers Give for Using Customer Service Chatbots?

Customers like using chatbots for the following reasons: 

  • Instant response. Customers can reach a customer service agent immediately and 24/7. 
  • Availability of information. Chatbots can provide detailed information right away. For instance, if a customer wants to know about a new product, they can get the information immediately instead of waiting for the agent’s response. 
  • Intuitive interface. Customers are very familiar with using messaging apps on mobile devices. They’re used to typing in questions and receiving immediate responses. 
  • Fast checkout processes. Customers appreciate that chatbots can conduct transactions faster than agents. 

Considering customers’ interest in using chatbots, businesses can use them to address many customer engagement opportunities. 

Best Practices for Deploying Customer Service Chatbots

When developing a chatbot as part of a digital transformation journey, iQor follows multiple best practices in forming its custom solution. 

Define Objectives

Determine the objectives for a chatbot to provide an interface for customers to make customer service requests. 

Will the chatbot resolve customer issues faster or gather more information about the problem? Will it be used for lead generation? Will it help customers find products? BPOs like iQor will make sure there’s a clear role for the chatbot from the beginning. 

Give It a Personality

Even when talking to a chatbot, people want some degree of human touch. The chatbot is an extension of the client’s brand and should have a personality so customers don’t feel like they’re talking to a machine. Meaningful chatbot experiences reinforce the brand and show empathy toward customers. 

Chatbot stats show that customers prefer interacting with bots with a persona and personality.  This enables chatbots to have more humanlike conversations, ultimately providing better customer care. 

Chatbot interactions should be evaluated with the same level of importance as interactions with human agents.

Have an Option for Directing to a Human Agent

Chatbots should be part of a seamless omnichannel experience with an option to switch to a human agent at any time if customers need more assistance. This enables customers to benefit from a consistent customer experience through the channel of their choice, while also ensuring they conveniently receive help from a human agent when needed.

Use Fallbacks

In some cases, a chatbot won’t be able to come up with a response to the customer query because it’s not programmed for that. Maybe the customer typed in a query that doesn’t match the chatbot’s purpose. 

For instance, when Siri or Alexa don’t understand what you’re saying, they respond with something to the effect of, “I’m not sure I understand.” All chatbots should have a fallback option for such cases. 

A fallback option such as asking the customer to clarify their query helps counter this issue to meet the customers’ needs. The iQor advantage takes this a step further to ensure customer needs are met by enabling live agents to jump in when the chatbot is unable to sufficiently address the issue. This creates an excellent customer experience without frustration.

Use Analytics to Improve the Chatbot

Solutions that include chatbots will also track the chatbot’s performance through analytics and use this data to make improvements. 

Analytics is a way of measuring the progress and performance of the chatbot through key metrics such as chat volume, number of conversations, and average message length. 

Just like any other form of software, chatbots need regular maintenance and updates. BPO’s like iQor will use data to make ongoing adjustments to ensure chatbots meet the individual needs of clients and their customers.

How Does Measuring Chatbot Performance Improve the Customer Experience?

Ongoing measurements of a chatbot’s performance are essential for ensuring the chatbot provides the best possible experience for customers. 

For example, if a customer support chatbot has an average response time of seven minutes, analytics can identify when there are peaks in conversation. The project team can plan accordingly to ensure sufficient resources are in place to reduce wait times and provide prompt service that improves customer loyalty. 

Final Words

All in all, a solution that includes a customer support chatbot can help automate mundane aspects of the customer journey while still providing an amazing digital customer service experience and freeing up agents’ time to work on creating more meaningful experiences. They also provide a collection of data on customer interactions to help inform and improve customer service.

Experience the iQor Difference

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

  • A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.
  • A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.
  • A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
  • The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.
  • Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.
  • The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.
  • A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business.

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

How RPA Solutions Improve Productivity and Enhance Customer Service

Posted on by Ada Smith

RPA Creates More Rewarding Customer Service Experiences and Helps Employees Perform at Their Best 

Customer service is of the utmost importance in helping businesses strengthen their brand, stand out from their competition, and ensure customer loyalty. However, it can sometimes be hard to keep up with the large number of customer support tasks. That’s where robotic process automation (RPA) can help.

Solutions based on the strategic and effective use of custom-written RPA technology help businesses improve their workflows and achieve outstanding results, ultimately supporting better customer service. Through custom RPA solutions, employees can go beyond meeting their productivity goals and customer-facing employees can focus on creating more rewarding customer experiences.

Below, we discuss RPA solutions and their importance in ensuring a rewarding customer experience as part of a comprehensive digital transformation strategy that enhances the customer journey. 

What Is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic process automation is a technology that allows computer systems to perform tasks typically handled by humans. It helps companies boost their productivity, decrease costs, and be more competitive by automating menial and repetitive tasks, all while maintaining accuracy and high levels of customer service. 

RPA uses intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) to handle an organization’s most basic and time-consuming activities. These include tasks such as collecting data from different sources, updating spreadsheets and databases, and filling out forms.

In customer service, solutions that utilize RPA technology can simplify processes like responding to commonly asked questions and directing customers toward self-service pages as part of a seamless omnichannel experience.

While traditional automation uses application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate systems, robotic process automation makes use of software bots to understand the actions of users at the user interface level. An RPA developer must be thoroughly familiar with the target system.

The Goal of RPA 

The goal of RPA is to eliminate low-value tasks and free employees to spend more time on work with greater impact—like interacting with customers—to achieve better business results.

Intelligent automation can significantly advance customer experiences with your brand given that Americans are willing to pay 17% more to do business with companies with excellent reputations in customer service. Indeed, 90% of Americans consider customer service an important factor in determining whether or not they want to be associated with a company at all.

RPA bots offload the weight of inefficient processes across any business vertical or industry so employees can focus on what matters most. Tasks that check the following boxes can be optimized by RPA software to support your business: 

  • Time-sensitive 
  • Labor-intensive or high-volume 
  • Repetitive 
  • Rule-based 
  • Highly structured 
  • Prone to human error 

Understanding RPA is imperative for today’s businesses. Solutions that use RPA enable efficient automation of routine tasks in customer service, such as: 

  • Loading and changing data. 
  • Filling out forms. 
  • Streamlining information on different systems. 
  • Screening application forms and documents. 
  • Managing people requests. 

How RPA Solutions Help Improve the Customer Service Experience

Solutions that employ RPA software improve the customer service experience in multiple ways.

For one, it speeds up processes and reduces repetition, which enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty. Intelligent automation creates positive outcomes and improves customer service by providing quick and consistent support with reduced handle time for customer service agents.

Second, it helps create happier, more focused employees. On average, 40% of employees’ time is wasted on repetitive manual tasks, according to an Automation Anywhere study—and 75% of employees believe spending time on tasks that can easily be automated is a poor use of their skills.  By using automated processes to reduce or eliminate mundane tasks, employees can spend more time creating more meaningful customer experiences.

Third, RPA solutions increase productivity and accuracy. Through streamlined workflows, customer service teams can complete tasks faster and more accurately. UiPath’s 2021 Office Worker Survey found that 67% of global workers feel crushed by repetitive tasks. Intelligent automation of repetitive tasks can help people find fulfillment and attain higher productivity at work. 

Automated processes, such as conversational artificial intelligence (AI), have a lower margin of error which helps businesses meet customer expectations. RPA solutions eliminate potential human errors entering customer data, providing streamlined service and saving companies time and money.

Additionally, RPA solutions reduce costs and increase revenue. They provide early visibility into trends, creating opportunities to eliminate human error, reduce unnecessary spend, and improve productivity.

Finally, RPA solutions help maintain best practices by providing consistency in service delivery throughout the contact center. They also ensure that all employees use customer information effectively and efficiently. 

Ultimately, RPA solutions allow for better tracking of tasks, knowledge sharing, and consistent service delivery, thus helping employees provide better customer service through the contact center. They can generate remarkable benefits for multi-national corporations as well as local small businesses by offering significant time-savings for completing repetitive tasks and better utilizing employees’ skills on more meaningful work.

How to Measure and Optimize Customer Support Effectiveness With RPA Solutions

As a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions, iQor creates RPA solutions for our clients. After implementing process automation in customer service, BPOs like iQor can measure its effectiveness for their clients in the following ways. 

  • Increased revenue: How much money are you saving or making thanks to BPO solutions with intelligent virtual assistants? Your business may open up a new revenue stream by reassigning teams and workflows or adding new projects to expand operations. With higher customer satisfaction, you’re also bound to get new customers through word of mouth, ultimately increasing profits.
  • Velocity: Velocity is the time it takes for an automated process to complete a task. BPOs can save their clients time and increase velocity by removing manual processes through RPA solutions. 

BPOs like iQor can use these aforementioned metrics to identify opportunities to deploy RPA solutions to further enhance customer support strategies for their clients. Additionally, they can use intelligent automation to inform social media monitoring and respond to customer reviews and feedback to better meet customer needs.

How Can You Make the Best Use of RPA Solutions in Customer Support? 

Here are some ways to get the most out of RPA solutions: 

  • Start by automating simple tasks. 
  • Upskill customer support agents as RPA deployments mature. 
  • Automate customer service across all touchpoints and omnichannel platforms for a connected experience. 
  • Focus on specific metrics and determine how well RPA is doing in those aspects. 

It’s also imperative that the solution implemented by your BPO provides RPA security so automation and convenience align with cybersecurity protocols. In addition to a CX private cloud, here are four ways to accomplish this: 

  • Implement change control and review for RPA technology scripts. 
  • Ensure the RPA bot has audit capabilities. 
  • Avoid fraud and abuse by enabling privileged session management. 
  • Rotate bot credentials frequently to ensure accountability for the actions of the RPA solution. 

Typical Use Cases for RPA

Research indicates that 20% of organizations have adopted robotic process automation as of 2021, a noteworthy jump from just 13% in 2020.

At iQor, our cognitive RPA custom solutions have yielded outstanding results for clients. iQor developed an RPA bot that simplified the voucher program for a major airline carrier, saving time and significantly improving productivity. The airline program saved 1,965 hours per year by reducing handle time by two minutes per voucher request. They saw a 29% reduction in overall handle time and were able to process 36,400 transactions per year.

iQor’s RPA solution has generated improved outcomes across other business processes as well. It has been used to simplify processes for a global HR team, automating HR-based workflow requests. In checking for accuracy, providing real-time visibility into staffing metrics, and offering other payroll and benefits improvements it has saved 650 hours per employee each year. With 100% process automation it completes 75 complex HR transactions per hour, supercharging the HR workforce.

Some additional use cases for RPA technology solutions in customer support to improve contact center analytics include: 

Update CRM Data 

RPA solutions can cull customer data from a CRM solution and update it with the latest information. In this way, it frees up the customer support team to focus on helping customers instead of updating common data, such as cold calls, interactions with customer support employees, reports, documents, and emails. 

Root Cause Analysis 

When an incident occurs, the RPA solution can be used to gather data automatically so that your team can quickly identify the root cause. Once they know why an incident occurred, they can more easily solve the problem. 

Assist Customer Support Agents 

According to Salesforce, 63% of customers expect customer service agents to be familiar with their expectations and unique needs.  

An RPA solution can fetch customer data, such as purchases, previous complaints, demographics, and tickets, for the customer service rep to help them better deal with customer inquiries. 

Instant Response 

RPA solutions can be used to automate simple customer service functions, such as sending customers on hold new information about their order or shipping status. RPA is also great for generating responses to common requests or questions from customers, saving time and helping to provide better service.   

Final Words 

In sum, custom RPA solutions offered by BPOs like iQor can be immensely helpful in enhancing customer service and the customer experience for clients of all sizes. Whether large or small, companies can benefit from the enhanced productivity, cost savings, and improved customer service that RPA solutions provide.

Experience the iQor Difference 

iQor’s intelligent automation delivers better customer experiences and helps employees perform at their best. Our cognitive RPA software solutions are customized to client needs. We use AI and machine learning to handle high-volume, repetitive, or slow, time-consuming tasks. With streamlined workflows using RPAs, our team completes tasks faster and more accurately to provide amazing customer experiences.

If you’re considering outsourcing customer support, explore partnering with iQor. We are an award-winning global BPO, purpose-built to deliver omnichannel customer service through our work-at-home and in-office agents spread across more than 50 locations worldwide.

We know how to maximize RPA for superior customer service, efficiency, and cost-saving. To learn more about how we can help you achieve your goals, listen to our podcasts or contact us here.

Ada Smith is director of analytics at iQor.

How to Optimize Your Digital Customer Experience Through Digital Transformation

Posted on by Nicole Gobbo

Designing the Digital Customer Experience Within Your Digital Transformation Strategy

Digital transformation is the purposeful integration of technology into all areas of your business. The digital customer experience (DCX) is one element of this transformation that generates a big impact on your business. Indeed, with clear leadership and consistent vision, digital transformation can improve efficiencies and experiences with your brand in today’s digital economy. The digital customer experience is foundational to digital transformation strategies with these common elements: 

  1. Customer experience.
  2. Operational agility.
  3. Culture and leadership. 
  4. Workforce enablement.
  5. Digital technology integration.

In this post, we focus on the digital customer experience component of a comprehensive digital transformation strategy. Digital CX is the sum total of all online interactions a customer has with your brand and how those interactions make them feel about your brand. It could be exclusive to your company website, but often the experience also includes mobile apps, chatbots, social media, email, and any other digital customer touchpoints you employ. All of these elements work in unison to create the overall experience customers have with your brand.  

That experience is valuable to you. It defines how likely customers are to turn to you when they need a product or service like yours, if they will tell others about you, and if they will leave a positive online review. Your business is made up of a multitude of elements that together influence your customers’ experiences one way or the other: website, product and service offerings, pricing model, marketing campaigns, customer support, billing, collection and more are all vital parts of the customer experience. 

As your business continues to evolve and incorporate new technologies, implementing the right digital customer experience strategy for your brand will grow more important. In fact, Gartner predicts that 70% of customer interactions will involve emerging technologies this year. Digital technology can improve your brand’s ability to understand and serve its customers, but the customer experience is a human experience and the essence of human connectivity should remain at the heart of every customer interaction. 

Why Is the Digital Customer Experience So Important?

With CX driving over two-thirds of customer loyalty (more than brand and price combined), it has an enormous impact on the growth potential of your business. In the digital age, more and more customers expect to access your customer support services across a variety of digital platforms. The digital customer experience is about creating smiles through frictionless virtual interactions at each step of the journey. 

Digital CX is the greatest opportunity for engagement, advocacy, acquisition, and retention. It is increasingly important in the midst of changing preferences and expectations due to COVD-19. In fact, the top 5% of brands that scored the highest across industries on Forrester’s U.S. 2021 Customer Experience Index adjusted their DCX strategy during the pandemic to meet core customer needs. They outperformed other brands in effectiveness and ease to create enjoyable customer experiences that generated more goodwill towards their brands.   

With so many touchpoints through which you can offer your product or service, it’s crucial that you strategize early on about how best to execute a CX strategy that integrates them all effectively. But what exactly does it mean for brands today to have an effective digital CX strategy? 

In practice, digital customer experience strategies are both data- and people-driven. The whole point of digital CX is to provide customers with more choice, greater convenience, and speed while maintaining the human touch so customers feel appreciated. Data helps you do that by providing insight into how customers are interacting with your brand as well as why they aren’t choosing to do so at certain times or in certain ways. 

When the data shows unwelcome trends cropping up in the customer journey, you can use it to develop strategies for optimizing the digital touchpoints that contribute to the gap. Data helps you prioritize mission-critical tasks and leave less important optimizations for later. It can also help you identify and modify or eliminate digital optimizations that don’t produce positive outcomes for the customer. Ensuring these positive outcomes is essential to prevent customer churn. According to customer experience research by PwC, even when customers in the U.S. have positive impressions of a company or product, 59% will walk away after several bad experiences and 17% will leave after one bad experience. 

Digital Customer Experiences Improve Your Relationships With Customers

Digital transformation means modernizing every aspect of your business, starting with customer interactions. You can accomplish this by providing new digital customer service options that better connect you with customers and improve their overall experience while maintaining a consistent and clear brand voice across channels. 

Chatbots and other artificial intelligence-powered technologies (AI) can play a key role in the digital customer experience. The point is not to remove the human customer service agent from the customer journey entirely. Rather, AI offers an opportunity to empower agents to focus their attention on higher-value tasks—not frequently asked questions that can be adequately handled by digital customer service solutions that extend beyond your company’s knowledge base. Hybrid human and AI-enabled contact centers, for example, can greatly improve the speed, efficiency, and satisfaction of customer interactions. To this end, Juniper research forecasts that this year chatbots will provide an annual savings of more than $8 billion across industries. 

In the retail industry alone, brands are harnessing the competitive advantages of AI to automate time-consuming, routine tasks and increase operational efficiencies. The adaptive and time-saving features of chatbots have led about 80% of brands globally to use chatbots or plan to use them in the future. Their uses extend beyond answering customer questions to engage consumers and provide personalized service as well. Retailers are innovating the use of AI to improve customer experiences in a multitude of ways, from customized recommendations and personalized digital product displays to auto-generated shopping lists and digital support to answer customer questions while in the store. 

At iQor, we create personalized experiences like these through a combination of digital technology solutions and contact center agents. We foster amazing human-centered digital customer experiences around the globe to provide a faster and more efficient service across multiple digital channels on behalf of our clients spanning industries such as healthcare, telecom, retail, insurance, energy, banking, and others. Our contact center agents are efficient and happy because our digital transformation model integrates internal or third-party data sources along with an AI infrastructure to rapidly feed information to our human agents on the frontline of customer support. With this model, easy, frequent tasks are resolved faster, while more complicated problems are handled by human agents. The result is a more cost-effective customer experience model with happy agents and most importantly, satisfied customers.  

Digital Customer Experiences Improve Efficiencies 

Today’s consumer wants to access your customer service options through the digital channel of their choice, and they will do so at all hours of the day. Many companies have a global customer base, which makes it necessary to serve customers across all time zones at scale. 

Digital transformation is your commitment to revolutionize the digital customer experience allowing you to fulfill customer expectations at every stage of the customer journey, resulting in enhanced brand loyalty and immense productivity benefits. At a high level, your digital transformation strategy needs these four basic elements for an optimized DCX:  

  • Understand the evolving needs of your customers. 
  • Enable customers to engage with you easily on digital channels of their choice. 
  • Respond to and resolve customer inquiries quickly. 
  • Integrate human-centric support with digital support. 

It’s essential that your digital customer experience is as frictionless as possible. Done right, your digital transformation strategy empowers you to deliver greater speed and convenience to your customers. You can also scale it as you grow, which is your reward for providing an outstanding customer journey. For example, a retail client is able to scale their customer service during peak seasons by 750%. 

Digital transformation will make your organization more productive and help drive customer loyalty. Many customer inquiries can be resolved through digital technologies such as interactive voice response (IVR) that can provide quick and convenient answers to simple questions like “what is the status of my order?” A digital customer experience lets customers self-serve issues on their own with ease. Once they receive an answer to their question or complete their transaction, they’re more likely to be a satisfied customer, increasing their loyalty and your ability to sell more or earn a referral.  

The Benefits of Integrating Data Into the Digital Customer Experience 

The two cornerstones of data integration in the digital customer experience are analytics and insights. While analytics lets you identify patterns in need of optimization, insights point to actual customer behaviors and trends in real-time. As a result, you’ll be better prepared to make decisions about how to optimize your customer experience.  

Data integration, analytics, and insights help you quickly identify trends and obstacles in your customer experience journey. Once you’ve identified them, you can decide how best to prioritize areas of improvement to maximize their impact on customer satisfaction. iQor, for example, utilizes a unified workforce management (WFM) solution to reduce labor waste through intelligent forecasting and scheduling while eliminating mundane tasks and enabling agents to focus on value-added tasks for meaningful customer engagements with more timely results.  

Data integration into the digital customer experience allows you to:  

  • Deliver targeted and relevant content to customers at just the right moment. 
  • Create a continuous customer experience across all media channels and touchpoints. 
  • Keep an up-to-date profile for each customer, so that you know their history and can predict their future needs. 
  • Resolve questions and complaints faster while enhancing customer satisfaction.  

Why a Digital Customer Experience Is Imperative

From requesting a quote or paying a bill to signing up for a service, we live in an increasingly digital world; offering your customers speed and convenience through multiple channels will advance your brand’s reputation. Now more than ever, companies must optimize the digital customer experience to meet and exceed customer expectations.  

The Digital Customer Experience Improves Outcomes 

The pillars of digital customer experience management are intelligent automation, digitization of CX infrastructure, and improved customer service agent interactions. An effective digital transformation strategy simplifies the customer experience at every turn. For example, call deflection using intelligent chatbots can save time and money while providing a great customer experience at virtually any time of day, for any time zone.  

The digital customer experience is all about streamlining processes to create a smooth and convenient journey for customers. They must be able to find what they need, when they need it, without having to jump through unnecessary hoops. Thanks to business intelligence powered by data, you’re able to predict customer needs and wants better than ever before and use that data to optimize results.  

This streamlined approach is not just a matter of convenience. By providing omnichannel marketing and digital interaction, brands can attract new customers while keeping current ones. If consumers engage with a brand’s marketing through their preferred channel, they should also be able to interact with the brand through their chosen channel for customer service. Ultimately, the path to satisfied customers (and more business) centers on making the journey as efficient as possible—digital customer experience management provides the means to do just that.  

Digital Solutions to Streamline Customer Experiences

The digital customer experience paradigm requires businesses to step up their game to deliver an empowered customer journey across all digital channels relevant to their customer base. One of the best ways to impact the customer experience is by closely monitoring and proactively responding to what customers say about your brand or products across social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. 

How exactly do you do this?  

It’s no secret that consumers are active on social media. Customer care agents can monitor a diverse range of digital channels to derive insight into customer needs and expectations. Your agents can answer questions, respond to complaints, and redirect customer comments to the relevant support channels.  

Social media monitoring can improve customer satisfaction and elevate the reputation of your brand. For example, a telecom provider ramped up their social media support by 400%, jumping from 10 to 40 specialized agents to support new promotional programs. iQor trained experienced agents to maximize their impact on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram while utilizing digital social media monitoring solutions to streamline their responses at scale. Agents outperformed their 6-minute response time SLA, averaging 5.3 minutes per response, while also nearly doubling net promoter scores (NPS). Instead of focusing on concurrence (measuring how many conversations an agent can handle at once), overall customer experience and satisfaction served as the primary metric because of the increased exposure social media affords.

But social media monitoring is just one possibility. You can also use automation to send out personalized thank you messages to your customers or in some cases use face-to-face teleconferencing to interact with a customer directly. Contemporary customer communications technology enables you to engage your customers and enhance their experiences in as many ways as you can imagine.  

Choosing among various digital solutions that could improve the customer experience depends largely on your industry. The key is to use data to determine the best ways of connecting with customers on their terms.  

How to Optimize Digital Solutions for the Best Customer Experience 

Optimizing the digital customer experience is an ongoing and ever-evolving endeavor. There will always be opportunities to ensure your omnichannel customer experience options are available in an intuitive, hassle-free interface that’s fast and easy to use. Just because your customer services are accessible during normal operating hours doesn’t mean they’ll work the same way outside of business hours. In fact, sudden surges of customer interest have the potential to overwhelm any of your digital channels if their infrastructure isn’t optimized.  

In particular, data can help you identify areas for improvement in your digital customer experience offerings. Every digital marketing experience you create can provoke a customer response, be it impressions, clicks, or conversions. As customers interact with your brand, their encounters will be logged in your system as customer data, allowing you to build up a repository of information and insights about customer support questions and resolutions. This provides an excellent source of data that you can mine for long-term business advantages. Assessing value-added service offerings to determine where else you can provide efficiencies, increase customer satisfaction, or improve employee retention and engagement facilitates the continuous improvement of customer experiences. 

Some of the key standards to use when measuring the effectiveness of digital solutions for customer experience management are:  

  • Convenience
  • Customizability
  • Performance
  • Omnichannel availability

At iQor, we deploy digitally-enabled intelligent technology that meets these standards and empowers agents to elevate customer experiences. Our unified omnichannel CRM provides a 360-degree view of the customer and their interactions, allowing agents to deliver highly personalized, seamless, and efficient resolutions to create a consistent brand experience.

iQor’s Unified Desktop technology bundles multiple applications, tools, and screens into one simple user interface regardless of the media type. Seeing only the necessary scripts and customer interaction history, agents can more easily provide fast, efficient, and exceptional service.

We also use real-time AI that mimics human perception to detect speech patterns, tone, dead air, and word choices. It provides agents with immediate digital alerts or recommendations so they can respond to customers with a higher degree of empathy. Without engaging a live supervisor, AI coaching provides emotional intelligence to take CX to the next level.

In sum, proper DCX needs to meet customers where they are, at any time of day. You’ll need to analyze which digital channels are most effective for your business, such as your website, social media platforms, mobile apps, etc., and adapt your customer experience options accordingly. Maintaining up-to-date CX technology infrastructure that operates at high availability in response to customer requests is necessary for an optimized digital customer experience.  

How to Keep Data Secure Off-Site and in the Office 

The shift to digital channels has made customer experiences more convenient while simultaneously leading companies to take a more comprehensive approach to cybersecurity. With global malware attacks on the rise, remote workers logging in from more endpoints, and customers buying and interacting in new ways, businesses must extend their endpoint protections to reduce risk. John O’Malley, senior vice president of platforms and desktops at iQor, recently wrote about the importance of a comprehensive work-at-home endpoint security ecosystem for globally distributed access points. This is one of the multiple layers we employ to provide world-class security for our clients.

Investing in and maintaining cybersecurity infrastructure promotes better customer experiences, improved trust and loyalty, and protects your brand reputation. One way of accomplishing this in today’s landscape is through software specialized for remote work environments that enables BPOs to secure agents’ company-issued thin clients, PCs, or personal machines, at scale. iQor uses Secure Remote Worker (SRW) software to temporarily lock access to personal programs on work-at-home agents’ personal devices while providing access to the same secure cloud environment they use when onsite in support of the client’s customer experience program.

The Bottom Line

The digital customer experience is here to stay. Even if your business has a significant offline component, it is evident that digital customer interactions are rapidly outpacing offline ones in many industries. A total digital transformation of your customer experience is essential to help you keep pace as new technologies continue to evolve. 

A successful digital CX strategy is one that accounts for all the customer experience variables relevant to your brand. These are not the same for every business, and you don’t have to do everything at once. Rather, examine your current customer experience options and look for touchpoints that can be optimized for digital, provided they improve the customer experience. With customer data and predictive analytics, you can refine your customer service options and provide a better experience for each customer while also creating a supportive environment for employees on the frontline serving your customers. 

If you’re ready to take your digital customer experience to the next level, partner with iQor. We’re purpose-built to deliver the world’s most sought-after customer service. Learn more by listening to our podcasts. Schedule a call with a customer experience expert today to explore how we can help you create more smiles. Contact us here.

How Self-Service Support Can Improve Customer Interactions and Build Brand Loyalty

Posted on by Nicole Gobbo

Self-Service Support Solutions for Superior Customer Service

In today’s digital world, a key component of customer engagement hinges on fast, accurate, and readily available solutions for customers. According to Salesforce Research, 63% of consumers expect companies to know their unique expectations and needs. Our digital age necessitates instant access to information, meaning customers increasingly want digital-first conveniences for more personalized and empathetic experiences immediately without wait times or obstacles in their way. These expectations from today’s consumers require companies to innovate and provide quick, accurate responses across channels to sustain a competitive edge, maintain customer satisfaction, and improve brand loyalty. This need for instant 24/7/365 support has the potential to overwhelm employees and lead to decreased employee engagement but can also serve as an opportunity for companies to adapt and better meet the needs of their customers and staff. Self-service support solutions offer convenience—giving consumers access to rewarding customer experiences while on the go and freeing up agents to address more complex inquiries.

As a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions, iQor creates self-service support capabilities on behalf of our clients. In this post, we share our expertise and best practices for incorporating customer self-service options as one element of a comprehensive digital customer experience journey companies can employ as they evolve to meet and exceed customer expectations of today and into the future.

BPOs like iQor employ experts to design self-service solutions that preserve your most precious relationships with customers. Self-service capabilities facilitate online support without ongoing assistance from customer service agents to enable consumers to connect with your brand on their terms. Examples of these self-service options include digital frequently asked questions (FAQs), knowledge bases, online discussion forums, how-to tutorials, and flexible automation features such as intelligent IVRs, chatbots, and access to seamless omnichannel support so customers can escalate their issue with ease if more support is needed. Self-service features enable your customers to work on their own behalf to obtain quick and accurate answers while also allowing frontline employees to focus more time on high-value customer support engagement.

Read on to learn more about the benefits of various types of self-service customer support options iQor can personalize for your brand to create the best customer experiences your industry has to offer.

What Is Self-Service Customer Support?

Self-service customer support represents any activity in which the customer proactively acts on their own behalf without the assistance of a customer service representative. It has become a baseline customer service solution expected by most customers as their first course of action when seeking solutions to questions or concerns. It empowers customers to find answers to their questions through tutorials, FAQs, videos, knowledge bases, conversational AI and other support platforms without the need for a live support agent. These digital transformation self-service solutions typically combine automation of basic tasks like informing a customer of the status of an order, with more advanced answers that customers can access through knowledge bases, forums, videos, and the like. As part of an integrated solution to customer support, self-service options must be optimized for easy access both online and through mobile devices. Businesses don’t have to go it alone. BPOs like iQor provide integrated solutions based on experience and data to offer the most effective and comprehensive self-service approach for your brand.

The Benefits of Self-Service Customer Support

Customer self-service offers a wide range of benefits for customers, companies, and employees alike. They can be scaled and integrated into your omnichannel experience to ensure self-service options align with customers’ needs while delivering seamless interactions across channels to deliver efficient solutions so customers stay connected and engaged.

Optimized customer experience

According to Microsoft, a whopping 90% of Americans consider customer service an important factor when choosing a brand. Customers often prefer feeling empowered to answer their own questions on demand without contacting support. Self-service customer support puts them in control from anywhere, any time of day or night and doesn’t require wait times to speak to an agent.

Increased sales

Self-service solutions may also boost your sales since customers can resolve their own issues 24/7/365, making them less likely to abandon a transaction if they can quickly answer their own question. This positive experience with your brand can improve response rates to your sales offers and may prompt a positive review or recommendation. Data-driven self-service engagement builds brand loyalty through improved customer experiences that create more satisfied customers through consistent outcomes and reduced handle time, increasing Net Promoter Scores (NPS).

On the other hand, when customers only have the option to contact live agents for most inquiries, they can encounter high call wait times, particularly at peak times. This can lead to customer dissatisfaction and increase a company’s call abandonment rate.

Lower operating costs

Self-service options not only provide what customers want, but they enable you to do so for large numbers of customers at a fraction of the cost for live support. Intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) can offer additional solutions when needed while live representatives enjoy more time to focus on assisting customers with complex issues, reducing unnecessary spend. These channel optimization strategies make the customer journey a win-win for your bottom line.

Improved employee morale and productivity

Self-service solutions can also help make your customer service representatives happier and more productive. Research has shown that live agents find as much as 40% of support tickets to be repetitive and mind-numbing. Implementing self-service support options and automated processes helps reduce the repetitive tasks and mundane questions human agents encounter and gives them more time to handle complex situations that require human expertise and compassion. Incorporate self-service options to deliver amazing customer experiences that make frontline employees and customers smile.

Competitive advantage

Finally, self-service solutions can help your brand remain competitive. Statista finds that 88% of consumers in the U.S. and around the world expect an organization to offer online self-service support. 

Additionally, Gartner predicts that automated personal technologies will be the default user experience delivery method by 2030. By then, Generation Z—those born between 1995 and 2009—will make up the largest portion of the customer base. More than previous generations, Generation Z digital natives have embraced the flexibility technology offers, choosing what to consume, when, and through what platform. By knowing their customer base and gathering data across channels to use automation where it matters most, brands can design better experiences to promote meaningful customer interactions.

Self-Service Platforms That Work

As one of the world’s largest business process outsourcing companies, iQor specializes in helping businesses assess data-based metrics to better understand customer preferences and needs and develop the most effective self-service options for their brand. The best self-service support strategies often include the following offerings, while also providing integrated resources backed by human support for customers to access with ease if needed. Self-service options that reduce effort and promote positive and accurate results with fast response times make for happy, satisfied customers.

1. Automated chat and messaging support

Intelligent automation customer experience solutions are an essential component of comprehensive self-service support offerings. In fact, 69% of consumers prefer to use chatbots because they deliver quick answers to simple questions. Moreover, utilizing live agents to respond to each individual customer’s digital messages is costly, inefficient, and unrealistic.

To boost your return on investment (ROI), iQor has extensive experience designing, implementing, and managing intelligent automation customer experience solutions that provide cost-effective, efficient means of helping customers self-serve to resolve their own issues. Robotic process automation (RPA) software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to handle high-volume, repetitive, or slow time-consuming tasks reduces human error and enables customer-facing employees to focus on building more rewarding customer experiences. These cost-effective virtual agents that form an integral part of your customer retention strategy include simple and smart chatbots. Although both are able to complete similar tasks, smart IVA chatbots do so with finesse and personalization. Their differences become clearer when we compare how they complete tasks.

  • Simple chatbots handle basic, routine queries. They are available through live messaging tools and can be trained to follow a script to give fast answers to FAQs. Chatbots can simulate a conversational experience to a certain extent but are ultimately constrained by having to work from a limited script—lacking the ability to make contextual adaptations and learn over time.

Examples of support a simple chatbot can provide:

    • Generic product recommendations and availability.
    • Status of returns and exchanges based on inputs from the customer.
    • How can I reset my password? Provide basic instructions.
  • Smart chatbots or Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) are more advanced AI-powered chat assistants that communicate with customers through their preferred communication channels via text or text-to-speech. Equipped with natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, IVAs are able to understand and retain context to have more productive conversations. By combining cognitive computing and analytics, they give customers personalized responses through friendly and humanlike dialogues that align with your brand. Although they can’t resolve complex tasks, they can gather information to refer to later, help human agents interface with customers, and answer simple questions.

Examples of topics an IVA chatbot can assist with:

    • Personalized product recommendations and availability.
    • When will my order arrive? What is the tracking number for this order?
    • Reset passwords—can complete the task for the customer.

Utilizing conversational AI in these ways enables your company to proactively interact with customers through their preferred channels and receive immediate responses at their convenience to drive operational efficiency at scale.

2. Email support

Asking frontline employees to reply to every email can be a taxing and error-prone process. Many emails can easily get lost, particularly after weekends, holidays, and peak seasons. 

Integrating automated help desks and ticketing solutions into your workflow can help human agents gather, organize, and track support tickets through a dashboard. Adding rule-based routing to the inquiries can automatically generate a new ticket when a customer’s self-service attempts go unfilled, seamlessly escalating the request to prompt human engagement. The ticket will contain background information with the customer’s name, email address, and the history of their self-service attempt to ensure an integrated and satisfying experience when the customer speaks to a live agent.

3. Online knowledge base

Besides directly interacting with your site through a chatbot or IVA or sending an email, customers often use your website to find answers to their questions. A strong self-service strategy incorporates a well-organized and user-friendly knowledge base to help customers educate themselves on how to use your website, app, or product.

Your knowledge base can include:

  • How-to guides.
  • FAQs.
  • Video tutorials.
  • Pre-recorded classes and webinars.
  • Free product trainings.
  • Step-by-step instructions.
  • Glossaries.
  • Troubleshooting instructions.

The knowledge base should be clearly organized and accessible. It should include:

  • Categories such as “Account Settings” and “How to Use Our App” to facilitate easy navigation to desired content.
  • A search bar to help customers locate answers instantly, even when they don’t know the overarching category.
  • Different media such as text, video, audio, and annotated images to accommodate customers’ different learning styles.
  • Good SEO to make content easily accessible through search engine queries while also boosting your site’s ranking and attracting new customers.

4. Social media support

Although social media moderation is managed by human agents, it enables customers to access your brand’s support on their terms. It equips you to resolve customer concerns quickly and engage with your followers more effectively than would be possible otherwise. With social media moderation like iQor’s, you can maintain accurate information on your social channels for customers to self-serve for essentials like hours of operation, contact information, menus, service descriptions, pictures, and so much more. It facilitates a seamless, branded customer experience through social media channels at scale.

5. Interactive and community-based discussion forums

Another self-service option is an online community or public discussion forum where customers can interact and help each other. Empowering customers who are experts on your products to answer questions in a digital community is a powerful self-service model that builds brand loyalty. These online communities can be hosted on your website or through third-party platforms.

It’s important to monitor and reinforce the discussion forum with a support team or moderators to help guide customers who may not find answers to their questions or who need assistance navigating the community. Like the other self-service solutions on this list, interactive communities and forums should offer a clear option to contact live agents when the self-service tool does not offer solutions to a customer’s particular need.

Requirements for Self-Service Customer Support

An effective self-service customer support strategy gives customers control. It offers fast access to the information they need through intuitive and accessible platforms with clear paths to a live representative or omnichannel support if needed. iQor can help you develop a strategic self-service customer support solution based on your brand, budget, and customer needs.

When developing a personalized self-service approach for your brand we assess a variety of metrics to partner with you to create a solution that brings smiles to you and your customers. If you are going to strengthen your customer support through self-service options, these are some questions to consider.

1. What resources are necessary to implement self-service customer support?

Adding self-service customer support to your business model may necessitate the addition of new resources, some of which include:

  • Utilizing customer support chatbots and IVAs.
  • Creating a knowledge base and online community of resources.
  • Producing videos and blog posts for your knowledge base.
  • Employing subject matter experts to moderate online communities and help customers help themselves.

After listing the resources needed to implement self-service, consider the impact on your budget. You may find that outsourcing self-service customer support to iQor makes the customer journey a win-win for your bottom line.

2. How many of your consumers currently use customer support channels?

If you have the budget and your customers already use multiple self-service support channels (e.g., email, online chat, existing knowledge base articles, etc.), you are ready to consider implementing self-service options. Seize the opportunity to stand out from your competitors. Provide memorable and optimized customer experiences through unique self-service channels personalized for your brand.

3. How will self-service support impact live customer service representatives?

The primary goal of self-service support is to meet the demands of the modern customer who expects to have access to support through digital methods 24/7/365. iQor can help you meet these expectations while realizing the benefits of providing the quality experiences customers seek and reducing your costs for customer care. It’s our business to set up and manage integrated customer support experiences so you don’t have to create new processes, utilize new resources or train frontline staff.

Experience the iQor Difference

This post provides insights into self-service customer support and its role in providing a great customer experience. Many customers’ first course of action is to turn to a digital tool to search for their own solution before reaching out to a live agent. Brands must meet customers on their digital platforms of choice with the information they seek. With the expanding role of digital in the customer experience regardless of age, this model of support is going to prove invaluable in the years to come.

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences through these and other support options. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

  • A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.
  • A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.
  • A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
  • The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.
  • Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.
  • The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers. 

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us directly to learn more about how we can help you create more smiles.

How to Increase Employee Retention and Engagement with Leadership Training

Posted on by Blake Graves

When BPOs invest in leadership development, they inspire improvement across the organization. From frontline call center agents to operations directors, clear and effective leadership can motivate, energize, and inspire employees at every level.  

One study showed that companies displayed the following results from leadership training: 

  • Return on investment was nearly six times the program cost. 
  • Workplace relationships improved by 77 percent. 
  • Teamwork improved by 67 percent. 
  • Fifty-one percent of employees reported greater job satisfaction. 
  • Overall quality improved by 48 percent. 

The takeaway? Effective leadership bolsters employee job performance, and leadership training is a highly successful way to ensure leaders at all levels can bring out the best in their teams. 

Leadership Development Drives Retention, Engagement, and Employee Satisfaction 

Starting off on the right foot is critical to new leaders and their teams. When leadership training only occurs post promotion, it can be difficult for new leaders to transition into management. And without the proper knowledge of how to coach, support, and engage with team members in a way that’s aligned with company culture and values, leaders can veer off course and develop habits that can lead to unsatisfied employees. 

At iQor, we have challenged ourselves by revolutionizing professional development throughout our global footprint via our award-winning sQholar program. This 6-month program provides future leaders with the training needed to successfully execute and perform at a level that allows their team to meet or exceed performance expectations from the minute they hit the floor. Every quarter, the Corporate Training Team progresses a batch of leader-ready employees and, in turn, accepts new applicants into the program.  

We train sQholars to be supportive and how to build trust and provide constructive feedback. As employees pick up on these skills, there is less turnover and more engaged agents who are equipped to handle customer service issues.  

What is iQor’s Leadership Development Program, sQholar? 

The sQholar program is for high-potential employees with exceptional leadership skills who are team-oriented and want to progress in their careers. The program consists of nine to eleven hours of eLearning and team-building activities that align with the organization’s leadership competency model. 

The program includes our four-day workshop — PeaQ Performance Qoaching –that teaches agents to identify and document behaviors that lead to strong performance and how best to coach team members based on their individual needs. 

Then, employees start the sQholar curriculum, which includes a 2-day orientation, shadowing call center management, and completing a research paper before graduation that details their plan to improve retention and increase employee engagement. 

Employees Love Leadership Training and Development 

More than 2,400 of our current supervisors have completed one if not all of the learning modules and courses within the sQholar program. Additionally, employees are exposed to iQor’s management culture, and real-time challenges that managers face every day, giving them a new appreciation for those who lead and develop their own personal leadership style.  

Since its launch in 2017, more than 700 iQor employees have finished the sQholar training, and nearly 300 have been promoted. On average, 41 percent of sQholar participants are promoted to a supervisor role within their first year of completing the program. Our program has grown to well over 465 active sQholars working their way towards a leadership position.   

The sQholar program is now a mandatory prerequisite for all internal promotions, with hundreds of applicants applying every quarter. External hires must now complete the courses and curriculum as well.    

The sQholar program has been recognized by HR.com as a LEAD award winner in several categories placing 2nd as Best Global Leadership Program in 2020, and also won the 2019 Bronze Stevie Award for Sales & Customer Service.  

In total, iQor has received 30 awards from Hr.com’s LEAD Awards over the last seven years, and 39 training awards in total for our unique and innovative career development offerings for CX leadership in our global call centers and work-at-home environment. 

Leadership Development is Good for Business Too 

We hire approximately 30 new call center supervisors every month.  New supervisors take time to understand iQor’s unique culture, performance drivers, and supervisory challenges. Additionally, our exit survey data and company surveys indicate that career growth paths are an important factor in employee retention. 

The courses and curriculum a sQholar completes during their training period are proven performance accelerators. Employees who have this knowledge have less of a learning curve and are more likely to succeed than employees hired from outside. 

A sQholar is selected by their work history, personal initiative, and the recommendations of their peers. They are expected to maintain their current performance levels. For that reason, sQholar graduates typically have significant leverage over their externally hired counterparts, thus lowering agent attrition and improving retention and employee engagement. 

sQholar supervisors who are well trained and highly engaged have the most significant impact on lowering agent attrition. For every 1% reduction in yearly agent attrition, our company saves about $500,000 a year. 

What Lies Ahead for iQor’s Leadership Training Programs? 

iQor has a long history of promoting from within. Some of our most senior managers started as agents. Our General Manager and SVP of Operations for Retail and Residential Services, Tone Holmen, has had a similar journey. 

iQor believes the sQholar program offers a groundbreaking opportunity that benefits both its company and its employees. We are continuously improving the program to provide more career choices along the supervisor and manager development paths. 

Discover iQor career opportunities at jobs.iqor.com. 

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) simplifies processes for a global HR Team

Posted on by Blake Graves

Processes Automation

Manual review and approval of
HR process

Industry

Human Resources

The Challenge

Manual data entry processes slowed down critical human resource functions and reduce staffing visibility in the business. The repetitive HR task required a multi-step manual review and approval process from across several parts of the organization. As a result, long queues of HR tasks in the HRIS system took up hours per day.

The Solution

iQor developed a robotic process automation (RPA) bot to automate all manual data entry points and workflows within the cloud-based software for human capital management. The RPA incorporated human review procedures for exceptions

RPA supercharges your workforce

  • Complete processes and requests faster
  • Eliminate human error Increase productivity and streamline functions
  • Shift employees’ time to revenue-focused activities

The Results

The RPA bot, without the need for any human interaction, automates HR-based workflow requests by reviewing each request to fixed criteria. If the requirements are met, the bot automatically approves the request. If not, the system automatically alerts the requester for comments and changes. HR management can start and stop the RPA bot anytime through a simple email notification process. Additionally, the bot increased system record accuracy, provided real-time visibility into staffing metrics, and offered other payroll and benefits improvements.

650 hours saved per employee per year

75 complex HR transactions completed per hour

100% process automation

Part 2: Recruiting, Three Pillars of Seasonal Staffing in the BPO Industry

Posted on by Blake Graves

For most businesses, it is a normal expectation to bring in extra support for seasonal staffing. This is especially true for call centers that need to increase staff to meet the demands during peak holidays and event-driven periods. But for this hiring process to be successful, companies need the right combination of technology, people, and recruiting and training strategies so they can manage high call volumes without sacrificing quality or their bottom line. 

In this three-part blog series, we dive into the details of what the right combination of tools, people, and strategies looks like so you can partner with your next BPO partner with confidence.  

In part one, we focused on CX technology. In part two, we’ll dive more into hiring, training, and retention strategies.

This blog post shows you:  

  • Best recruiting techniques to find the best-fitting employees fast 
  • Best training strategies and tools to increase speed-to-proficiency 
  • Innovative retention strategies for contact center employees  

Let’s dive in. 

How to Recruit, Train, and Retain Employees for Busy Season Contact Center Staffing

To bring in as many candidates as possible, your BPO partner should be able to recruit as many qualified call center agents as possible — fast.

Recruiting: When you need to hire right and hire fast

Go Big on Referrals

By far, the biggest candidate pool for iQor comes from employee referrals. Referred employees are more likely to stay throughout the season — and longer– because they know what’s needed and expected.

Year-round, we encourage referrals through our Talent Referral Incentive Program (TRIP). TRIP is a unique rewards program that provides employees with cash incentives for bringing in employee referrals.

Referred employees can account for as much as 60-70 percent of our seasonal hires for seasonal events. Some of our programs will hold “resume parties” where employees invite their friends and family members to see what iQor is all about.

Here are three other ways iQor hires right and hires fast: 

  • Leverage Pool of Candidates and Social Channels. At iQor, we draw upon our existing pool of pre-qualified candidates and our recruitment automation platform. We use social media channels like Facebook to find and engage candidates automatically. We build relationships with our employees so many come back year after year while others to continue working. So when one client’s peak season ends, iQor is able to allocate employees to another client who is in need of additional support.
  • Automate Pre-Screening. From there, we send an automatic mobile link for our customized pre-screening questionnaire. If the candidate meets the criteria, our recruiter reaches out to them within the hour via text message and phone call. 
  • Track Candidates Like They’re Your Best Leads. One key difference in our recruiting process is that we track candidates like we would sales leads. We then staff our recruiters accordingly to contact every pre-screened candidate and ensure we get them set up for interviews as soon as possible. 

Once the candidate finishes the final round of interviews (in-person or virtual), they are extended an offer. In combination with our private cloud technology, this recruiting system instantly allows your company to ramp up agents in any location. 

iQor deployed this methodology for our eCommerce client and successfully hired 1,500 customer support experts in just two months. 

Training: Proactive Development of Next Generation Leaders to Support the Influx of Seasonal Hires

Around two to three months before a seasonal ramp, iQor begins developing high-potential frontline agents for leadership roles. These new leaders will serve as team leads, trainers, and subject matter experts to provide additional support for the large number of new employees. This helps reduce burnout, mitigate stress, and aid in speed-to-proficiency as employees dive into a call center environment experiencing some of the busiest times of the year.

Some of our award-winning leadership development courses include:

  • PeaQ Performance Qoaching (PPQ) training. PeaQ is a coaching leadership workshop that aims to coach and develop current iQor leaders with a focus on driving team performance and positive engagement in both physical call centers and work-at-home environments. Participants learn how to identify and coach to an agent’s root cause behavior using multiple techniques.
  • sQholar program. The sQholar program is a series that provides a clear path to leadership roles through training and skill development. sQholar’s are trained to be supportive, they learn how to build trust and provide constructive feedback which will result in less turnover, increased retention, and highly engaged team members leading to higher Net Promoter Scores, client satisfaction and increased ROI.

Retaining: Seasonal Contact Center Employees 

Now more than ever, employees expect more from their employers. So, reducing turnover will take more than a few performance-based incentives – it’s going to take an employee-centric approach that celebrates successes, promotes transparency, and shows proof that the company values and appreciates its workforce. 

Here’s what we found are four sure-fire ways to increase retention for peak seasonal staffing: 

Use employee-centric data analysis 

At iQor, we track retention by many attributes, including recruiter, lead source, work type, geo, and many more, to analyze winning retention combinations and where we can tweak areas for success. Our recruiting teams also employ a simulation and talent prediction toolset better to understand a potential recruit’s strengths and characteristics. We have found that better hires coupled with increased employee engagement result in improved retention.  

We utilize a recruiting analytics tool to enable operations and human resources to report on each recruiting source, applicant, hire, and retention rate at 30 and 60 days, by location and the program. Sites identify successful recruiting sources and will target future recruiting dollars in those areas. This analytics tool allows us to predict future turnover to take proactive steps to improve retention and identify our best employees for better-targeted marketing. 

Celebrate success 

We celebrate employees’ achievements and top performers through regular events such as giveaways, contests, and celebrations to foster a team spirit and create positive energy. We also incorporate retention bonuses and provide extra resources to support resources through their coaching and development. Currently, we host our global iQor Recognize Awards, where employees and leaders can nominate fellow iQorians throughout the year for their exceptional work and achievements.

One of our favorite ways to connect with employees is through our Engagement Champions, who plan and lead activities that engage and recognize employees. These individuals are outgoing, charismatic types that help energize teams, reduce stress, and create a welcoming environment through acts of kindness and genuine care.

Surveys 

Surveys are great tools for gauging contact center agents’ level of satisfaction and helping you find out the best ways to improve their work environment. 

Every week, we survey every employee through our employee portal with a simple five (5) – star question “How’s life for you at iQor?” The results are confidential and roll up to provide each line of business a score between one and five. The trend enables us to measure the impact of change and identify opportunities for more engagement and retention. 

Keep work-at-home an option 

According to Gartner, seventy percent of customer service and support employees want to continue to work at home (WAH) at least once a week after the pandemic ends. Despite growing concerns for the future of organizational culture from some service leaders, Gartner’s data indicates that WAH has not posed too great a challenge to organizational culture. In fact, most customer service employees who work remotely say that organizational culture has remained relatively unchanged – and more than 7 out of 10 think it’s improved since their shift to WAH.  

At iQor, our work-at-home solution allows the onsite experience to be easily mirrored at the agent’s home and improves agent performance and retention. 

Finding the best-fitting employees fast, building a solid talent pipeline, and retaining employees throughout the busy season can be a challenge. Organizations need to go beyond the standard practices and start using automation, data, and employee-centric strategies to better impact their contact center operations. If you’re outsourcing seasonal staff during peak times, look for a partner that can imbed this mindset across recruiting, training, and retention strategies so that you can navigate spikes in customer care volumes with confidence in your teams and your bottom line. 

Are you ready for the next big holiday or promotional event? Let us help you optimize your seasonal staffing needs with digital tools and irresistible people to give your customers the best experience.   

Learn more about iQor’s seasonal staffing solutions. 

How to Build a Gamification Platform

Posted on by Blake Graves

According to Gallup’s “State of the Global Workplace,” over two-thirds of US employees are not actively engaged in their jobs.

That’s bad news for the bottom line as well as 60 million unhappy workers. Disengaged employees drag down production levels and can erode morale with negativity. By contrast, employees who are actively involved with their jobs are more motivated, which makes them more productive.

To boost engagement levels, businesses are continually experimenting with different strategies. One innovative approach is gamification, aka digital motivation. Gamification mixes work with play by applying game elements and techniques to non-game situations. It has proven effective in education and as a customer retention tactic. Now the enterprise has gotten in the game.

However, as with most technology, the success of your gamification efforts will depend on your people, processes, and the objectives you want to achieve. Through trial and error, we’ve learned some rules of what works and doesn’t to engage your players and keep them competing to win on the metrics that matter.

Gamification Innovation at iQor

Many of our gamification efforts have been developed in iQor’s Experience Innovation Lab and led by Ada Smith, an iQor IT professional. To build their successful program, Ada and her team created and played by clear-cut rules from the start. Use them or make up new ones to turn your own company into a power player.

1. Have a Clear Objective

Early on, you need to nail down the top goals for the program. “We wanted to focus on changing behaviors and driving outcomes,” Ada explains. “All our content addresses three major contact center Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs—Average Handle Time, NPS Score and Quality Assurance. At iQor’s huge volumes, even a slight improvement in any of these areas makes a tremendous impact, especially in mid- or low-level performers.”

2. Choose the Right Technology

There are a number of game mechanics apps out there. Choose the one that best fits your objective and integrates easily with your existing software. Look for scalability and simplicity of use, and make sure you’ll be able to add features and customize later. iQor’s team picked Centrical as the basis for their colorful, dashboard-driven program.

3. Bite-Size the Content

Chunk the content so agents can fit in a “game” whenever they have a few minutes. “Agents can play games, read articles, and take quizzes between calls or on breaks,” says Ada. “We have a mobile app so they can play on their own time.” iQor’s program uses Jeopardy-style trivia matches, contests, challenges, missions, quizzes, and other short, engaging activities.

4. Make Progress Trackable

Color-coded graphic devices measure and define performance so participants can see their progress and track it over time. “Measurement influences behavior,” Ada comments.

5. Build in Rewards. Lots of Rewards.

As anyone who has run a customer loyalty program knows, people love free stuff. iQor’s incentive program works on a scoring system where solo agents and teams earn points for wins. The software collects and calculates the points automatically, and players can redeem them for gift cards or “iQor bucks” to spend at the company’s virtual store. Free lunches are also a popular prize.

6. Ditto for Recognition

Badges, employee-of-the-month honors, pop-up tokens of encouragement, birthday and anniversary shout-outs: It’s crucial to give people plenty of moments to shine. Research shows that workers who feel ignored and unimportant have little motivation to excel.

7. Keep It Competitive . . .

“Like rewards and recognition, competition motivates people,” says Ada. “It builds excitement and encourages them to participate.” A leader board shows participants where they rank relative to each other on various activities, providing an incentive to climb higher—along with positive feedback and recognition when they do.

8. . . . While Building Community

“We keep our program competitive, but we also want to encourage team spirit and community-building,” Ada explains. She recommends a Community page to share information, congratulate special achievers, or just reach out and connect—a kind of virtual bulletin board.

9. Don’t Forget the Human “App”

The best technology is only a tool. It takes a skilled human application to be of real use. “Our management dashboard shows supervisors agent by agent and team by team exactly how everyone is performing,” says Ada Smith. “Our leaders can quickly identify opportunities and generate content and challenges to address and improve metrics and behaviors.”

10. Change the Rules When You Need to

See what works and don’t be afraid to ditch what doesn’t. Every tweak could be a game-changer.

And the Golden Rule of Gamification: Make it fun!