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How to Optimize Your Digital Customer Experience Through Digital Transformation

Posted on January 26, 2022September 13, 2023 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:

Customer experience.
Operational agility.
Culture and leadership.
Workforce enablement.
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.

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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.

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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.

Ep. 31 The Power of Coaching in Building Employee Loyalty

Posted on December 16, 2021June 7, 2023 by Bernie Borges

This week’s guest is Ingrid Ceballos. Ingrid has an impressive 16-year career journey at iQor, personifying employee loyalty and the coaching culture that makes iQor a leading employer in the BPO industry. She began her career with iQor as a call center agent and progressed through different roles as a direct benefit from the coaching she received and accepted throughout her tenure. Today she runs the iQor center in South Florida. Her scope of responsibility includes guiding more than 100 work-in-office and work-at-home employees’ performance and well-being as well as P&L responsibility for a client customer-care program. In this episode, we discuss the role that coaching has played in her career journey and the role coaching still plays for Ingrid as the Director of Operations at her site.

Ingrid’s career at iQor began sixteen years ago as a call center agent. She enjoyed talking to customers from around the country and excelled at building customer loyalty by responding to their needs. Her talents were quickly recognized, and she was promoted to senior agent. In that role, she was responsible for supporting fellow employees with complex customer service situations, improving employee performance and loyalty. Her journey continued along a career path that led her to serve as a call center supervisor and as a member of the training and quality departments. Her well-rounded experience in all facets of managing the success of contact center agents and cultivating engaged employees led her to advance to her current position.

Director of Operations in South Florida

As Director of Operations in South Florida Ingrid has to understand the client’s products, how they message in the market, and what the customer expectations are as well as many other characteristics of the client’s go-to-market strategy. She runs the day-to-day operations of her center based on the iQorian values she embodies. She ensures that the client’s KPIs are met to achieve the client’s goals and objectives. She also places a high priority on supporting her fellow iQor employees, improving their engagement, loyalty, and performance. She refers to her team as her work family, a sentiment that carries over in all that she does for her employees.

Leadership Perspective

Ingrid’s leadership perspective is shaped by her tenure and education. Her strategies extend beyond managing results to include supporting the foundational elements that make success possible. She views herself as having three client categories: 1) the iQor client whose customer-care program she oversees, 2) iQor (her employer), and 3) her team of employees (agents, supervisors, trainers, etc.). She maintains this perspective in all her decision making.

Coaching has played a significant role in Ingrid’s career development and advancement. In fact, she attributes the coaching culture at iQor to being the most influential factor in employee loyalty as well as her own career advancement. She sees it as an essential component to growth in any career, from iQor to professional sports.

Ingrid expresses gratitude for all the team members that coached her during her formative years. She considers them a mix of helpers, mentors, and teachers. She vividly recalls how valuable coaching was during her time as a call center agent, guiding her on how to provide superior service on customer calls. She relied on the advice she received with an open mind and implemented it in her work. Not surprisingly, her leadership style exemplifies her mission to ensure that all agents have coaches available to them to provide balanced feedback. Indeed her track record shows that coaching supports employee development and sustains strong employee engagement, loyalty, and retention.

To this end, Ingrid’s commitment to continually strengthen her ability to best support her clients prompted her to complete external leadership development training and participate in iQor’s leadership development program to develop her coaching skills. She celebrates when employees on her team get promoted–a direct benefit of the coaching they received on their own journey. She acknowledges how coaching can help those around her in their own career advancement.

Digital Technology to Support the Power of Coaching

Ingrid revels in the role that coaching technology plays in performance management, providing real-time information and analytics to help supervisors coach employees on the frontlines of customer service for iQor’s client programs. iQor’s speech analytics technology – VALDI – enables supervisors to listen to agents’ calls and study the words that were used along with the tone of the conversation. VALDI provides insight to help coaches better understand how words are being used when resolving customer concerns. It empowers coaches with timely data to inform and guide their coaching conversations with their employees, playing into individual strengths and areas for improvement. These coaching tools and strategies directly benefit employee engagement and loyalty.

Coaching for Education and Growth

Committed to lifelong learning and growth, Ingrid has earned three college degrees during her 16-year career with iQor. The company culture and human resources initiatives at iQor provided a multitude of support to Ingrid over the eight years it took to complete her degrees. Her internal coaches guided her to find balance between school and work. Through this, she was able to adjust her schedule so she could continue working while taking classes in the mornings and evenings. Moreover, iQor’s tuition reimbursement program provided great assistance to Ingrid throughout her eight-year education journey.

Reflecting on her own growth and opportunities, Ingrid encourages iQorians to embrace and implement feedback in their own career journeys. She says that feedback is a well-intentioned gift that opens the door to opportunity. She recommends taking action on feedback that is received consistently, pointing out that if feedback is provided more than once on a particular topic, it probably has merit and should be acted upon. On the flip side, she also encourages leaders to mentor others to become a better version of themselves. Through teamwork the possibilities are endless.

What Ingrid Does for Fun

When Ingrid is not working, she enjoys the meditative nature of planting cacti and watching them grow. She considers herself a foodie and has embraced her inner-chef during pandemic times, experimenting with different recipes. She also enjoys playing with her four-year-old son.

Learn more about iQor digital customer experience capabilities.

Ep. 29 Digital Transformation Starts with Customer Experience

Posted on December 2, 2021October 3, 2023 by Bernie Borges

Your Customer is on Their Own Digital Transformation Journey

This week’s guest is Howard Tiersky, Wall Street Journal best-selling author and founder and CEO of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency. His latest book is Winning Digital Customers – The Antidote to Irrelevance. IDG says that Howard is “One of The Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers to Follow Today.” The Digitally Irresistible podcast is focused on the integration of digital technology and customer experience. Hence, this episode features Howard’s thought leadership on the premise that digital transformation starts with customer experience.

Howard began his career in theater and quickly got involved in the technology side of production. He became immersed in it and soon found himself consulting for businesses in the 1990s on digital strategies. Over the last twenty years, he has consulted with companies such as Airbus, GE, GM, Office Depot, NBC, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and others guiding them in their digital transformation strategy.

Howard says that today’s most successful companies are aligned with their customer’s digital transformation. He observes this across several industries in his client base with patterns common across large enterprises that are challenged in driving transformation.

A Proven Approach to Digital Transformation

Howard says his approach is not the only approach to successful digital transformation, but it is proven to work. It starts with a binary perspective of the challenge.

The first layer starts with understanding that your customer is undergoing a digital transformation of their own. All consumers have an increasingly digital lifestyle. We shop, plan vacations, and connect with friends digitally.

The other layer is internal. Every business needs to know how to transform to stay relevant to the customer. About fifteen years ago, Sears was the number one retailer in the U.S., representing 1% of GDP. Today Sears has just a few hundred stores compared to more than 30,000 stores in the height of their glory. Sears didn’t adapt to the changing behavior of their customer fast enough. This layer is about understanding how to be more relevant to your customer. That’s why the subtitle of his book is The Antidote to Irrelevance.

What is Meant by The Customer Experience?

The customer experience is everything the customer experiences when they interact with your brand. It starts with your marketing. Customers see your ads, pass by your store, hear about you from a friend, read a review, and use your website or your mobile app. Everything a customer does in the context of your product or service gives them a reason to interact. The entire customer journey is often made up of many touchpoints, some of which you can control and some you cannot. Howard says that improving the customer experience is the single most important thing any business can do to impact success.

Omnichannel Customer Experience

We know the biggest trend in customer experience is the use of digital channels to interact with the brands they buy from, often referred to as the omnichannel customer experience. Howard’s book explains the “strategic customer experience model.”

The model enables executives to architect the customer experience in a manner that explains why it’s important to the business to get the funding needed to deliver ROI in CX. It explains how the customer experience delivers business results.

The model answers the question what difference does customer experience make to the business? Start by looking at your company’s revenue and profit goals. Then, examine what are the causes of the results? Consider how we can get customers to behave the way we want them to behave to create the results we seek.

The Psychology of Customer Behavior

Customer behavior is driven by the same two things that drive human behavior: thoughts and feelings. We’re all consumers. We think we need a product to meet a need and we consider how it makes us feel when the need is met. The business strategy tied to this psychology is to determine what are the thoughts and feelings our customers have that influence their behavior with our business?

If you can create experiences that produce the thoughts and feelings which result in the behavior that results in the purchase outcome we seek, we stay relevant with the customer and enjoy success. For example, homeowners need insurance to protect against catastrophic events such as fire or inclement weather. A common feeling associated with a homeowner’s insurance policy is peace of mind.

It takes research to determine the thoughts and feelings of your customer. For example, if you’re a provider of homeowner’s insurance, research what thoughts people have about companies in this space. Research what emotions they feel when planning to purchase homeowner’s insurance. Once you have completed research, the creative process begins to produce ideas to influence those thoughts and feelings and test them to learn how they impact the customer’s behavior.

When the people who make these decisions determine which touchpoints influence the customer’s behavior this insight has the potential to drive the desired business results.

Maximizing the Opportunity

Your customer research should also help you understand where the customer experiences friction in their journey with your brand. It’s critical that stakeholders internalize the importance of customer experience to achieve the company’s goals. Embracing proven practices such as design thinking and agile dev-ops can enable companies to go from understanding customer behavior to creating the kind of experiences that customers desire. New ideas should be tested.

Howard points out that companies are made up of people and they need to have the right people on board through good hiring and training on practices such as services-based architecture, design thinking, and agile dev-ops.

Howard’s book: Winning Digital Customers – The Antidote to Irrelevance is available wherever you buy books. You can download a free chapter at his website: https://winningdigitalcustomers.com/

Howard’s Passion for Scuba Diving

What Howard does for fun is adventurous. He is an avid scuba diver. He has five kids, most of whom follow in his footsteps. His 19-year-old is certified and has traveled the world with him to explore deep waters. He describes scuba diving as “flying underwater.” That’s a transformative experience of its own.

Learn more about iQor’s digital customer experience capabilities.

Ep. 28 The Three Pillars of Digital Transformation in the Customer Experience

Posted on November 18, 2021June 7, 2023 by Bernie Borges

Keeping the Agent at the Center of Digital Transformation in Customer Experience

Today’s featured guest is Tarn Shant, Senior Vice President, Transformation and Governance at iQor. Tarn leads a team of digital customer experience experts, engineers, and security analysts focused on building out the technology infrastructure by which iQor delivers outsourced customer services for our clients.

Tarn has been in the BPO industry for more than twenty years. He began his career as an agent handling customer phone calls. This background inspires Tarn to keep the agent at the center of the conversation when planning technologies that enable them to deliver great customer service.

As Tarn’s career has progressed, he’s held different roles achieving a Certified Black Belt Six Sigma along the way. Many of his roles were business-centric responsibilities while leading large-scale operations. About seven years ago he got the opportunity to move into technology, which he embraced.

Earlier in 2021, Tarn was heading up infrastructure and operations technology. Around the middle of 2021, he got the opportunity to lead transformation and governance. His team is devoted to helping customers optimize the CX experience for their end customers.

iQor’s Approach to Digital Experience Transformation

Tarn’s team is focused on deploying technology that results in a great customer experience along with a happy and productive contact center agent. Their approach to building CX technology is built on these three pillars.

Call Deflection

This entails creating an end customer experience that is as effective as possible through self-service to reduce the chance of a customer calling to speak with an agent to resolve simple questions such as “where is my shipment?” This can be achieved through intelligent automation such as IVR technology, chatbots, in-app messaging, etc. The result is a great experience for the end customer that also benefits the agent by resolving simple questions before they get to an agent through a voice call. This allows agents to get more fulfillment from their customer interaction by helping them solve more complex issues.

Digitization of the infrastructure that enables the CX experience.

Tarn is extremely proud of the iQor private CX cloud. It provides stability and scalability that delivers great value for our clients and for our business.

He explains further that we are moving toward a hybrid cloud that enables us to choose workloads that can be executed better in a public cloud, and keep certain workloads on our private cloud, within our data centers. We are accelerating the hybrid cloud model because it’s paying dividends for our clients.

The Agent Experience

Every decision we make considers the impact on the contact center agent. We ask how will this technology impact the agent? It starts with the hiring process.

Once an agent is hired, the onboarding process is all about training the agent. There are technologies that help agents train faster, reducing their learning curve. Once training is completed, the focus is ensuring that we enable them to perform well. Agents want to be productive, meeting the KPIs established by and for our clients.

Agents benefit from tools such as chatbots, knowledge management tools, speech analytics and AI-powered coaching as well as feedback from their supervisors. The combination of these tools and the human supervisor element enables our agents to perform at a high level of performance and job satisfaction.

The iQor Differentiator is Speed and Security

Tarn points out that successful execution comes down to speed and security. When it comes to speed, he shares an example of a client who had a need to stand up 500 agents in 7 days. Due to our established technology infrastructure coupled with our robust and proven recruiting processes, we got it done, much to the thrill of the client.

Naturally, clients want to know that our customer care service delivery is secure. In today’s hybrid CX delivery model where some frontline staff are located in an iQor facility and others are work-at-home agents, security is paramount. Tarn explains our approach to data security is partnering with best-of-breed partners such as Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, NICE and Thinscale to deliver endpoint security that scales.

He ensures that his staff gets proper training, so they are up to speed on the technology ensuring effective deployment of secure CX service delivery regardless of an agent’s location. Collaboration with our partner’s security team ensures the right controls are in place for us to deliver highly secure customer service to our client’s end customers.

Balancing People with The Technology Infrastructure

Another element that exists as a layer above the four pillars is change management. As technology is planned, Tarn works closely with his team to ensure that cultural change is inclusive so that everyone is part of the common story.

For Tarn, it’s always been about people, making sure everyone understands what they are trying to achieve. People ask is each technology initiative aligned to the company goals? Investing in people’s skills development, giving them the proper tools and an environment where they can share their ideas and flourish is an important part of the culture. He regularly reaches out to frontline staff to have skip-level meetings to give them an opportunity to be heard.

Another important consideration is technology training. Whenever we sign up for a new technology, we ensure the partner offers training directly or through an authorized partner to train our team.

What Tarn Does for Fun

Tarn started playing tennis for exercise and fun during COVID. Since he lives in the northeastern U.S. where outdoor tennis is not available six months of the year, he also enjoys going for long walks and listening to podcasts to stay up-to-date on topics of interest.

Learn more about iQor digital customer experience capabilities.

How to Use Social Media Monitoring to Create Exceptional Customer Experiences

Posted on November 3, 2021June 7, 2023 by Bernie Borges

Customers now have the power to shape public opinion, which they can use to their advantage. They can use social media platforms to shape customer experiences in ways that would not have been possible 15 years ago. And with the proper social media monitoring plan in place, businesses have access to a goldmine of opportunities to strengthen customer relationships along their journey. Do you know how successful your brand is using social media to provide an exceptional customer service experience?

Many brands struggle to respond in a timely manner on social media, and sometimes, at all. The response rates across industries are well, a bit abysmal, with the highest rate going to legal and real estate at 29 percent.

Part of the challenge of low response rates could be the fact that the number of social media users just keeps growing. In 2021, it was reported that there are 4.5 billion social media users throughout the world, with nine out of ten internet users visiting social media every month. And with that number set to increase every day, it’s ever so critical for businesses to have a solid social media presence and make the most of the platforms when engaging with their customers.

The takeaway? Brands that can exceed the industry-wide benchmarks can bet that they will beat out the competition and win more loyal customers. The challenge, however, is that many companies don’t always understand how to monitor social media for meaningful customer interactions or its implications for not doing it well or at all.

In this post, we dive deep into the importance of social media monitoring in supporting current customers and some of the social media tools available. Your brand can improve customer interactions on social media channels and better understand which issues matter to your customers by understanding social media monitoring in the customer experience.

In essence, social media monitoring is a brand’s way of providing customer support over social media. With social media monitoring, customer care agents monitor your company’s social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram and respond to customer posts and comments.

Social media monitoring also enables businesses to monitor mentions even if a hashtag isn’t used, as some consumers may refer to your company without calling out your brand by name. By tracking these references, companies can respond to customers promptly and address concerns before they get escalated to the customer helpline or before they become the next trending topic on Twitter.

Despite several significant distinctions, “social media monitoring” and “social media listening” are frequently used interchangeably. From a high level, the processes are comparable, although they’re done for different reasons.

For instance, customer support teams frequently employ social media monitoring to react to what customers are saying, respond to complaints, and answer questions. Social listening, on the other hand, aims to listen to customer experience insights from a broader level to potentially make enhancements to the brand’s services and products.

Both are valuable processes to a brand, but for the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on social media monitoring as this is what brands primarily use within their customer care programs.

While there are many types of metrics you can track in a social media conversation, here are some of the essential marks to keep an eye on:

Branded terms and brand mentions: The easiest way to stay tuned into social media conversations concerning your business is to track all brand mentions your brand receives on social media. This includes tagged and untagged mentions.
Customer sentiment: Not only do you want to know how often your brand is mentioned, but you want to know if customers are happy or upset with your brand.
Reviews: Social media monitoring can help you track what people say about your company on native social media review sites, including Facebook, Yelp, and Google. This gives you opportunities to respond directly to mitigate negative reviews and thank those who post positive reviews.
Hashtags: You’ll want to track hashtags that are relevant to your business and industry so you can get a sense of how your target audience perceives your company and competitors.
Competition: Speaking of such, use social media monitoring to see how people talk about your competitors and how competitors are engaging with their customers.

Social media monitoring tools can help brands respond to consumers faster. Not only does this allow your customers to feel heard, but it’s good for revenue too. A study by Harvard Business Review found that customers who have a complaint handled in less than five minutes go on to spend more on future purchases.

In the same study, simply receiving a response, any response at all, increased the customer’s willingness to pay later even in cases where customers were extremely frustrated. For airlines, providing any response resulted in the customer paying almost $9 more for a ticket on that airline in the future. For that same airline, successfully solving an issue can create more value by about $6.

For wireless carriers, customers who got any response to their negative tweet were on average willing to pay $7 per month more for a wireless plan from that company than customers who got no response. For cases where the issue was resolved, they were willing to pay $8 more. And even if the agent couldn’t resolve the issue, simply responding resulted in a customer’s willingness to pay $6 more.

Receiving a response from customer care also improved Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 37 points for airlines and 59 points for wireless carriers.

The lesson here is that no matter how frustrated, customers always appreciate a response, even if it’s a simple acknowledgment. By defusing their aggravation in any capacity, whether it’s an empathic response, quick answer, or problem resolution, brands can steer the customer back on the path to loyalty and satisfaction.

Responses to positive comments pay out too

The Harvard Business Review study mentioned above also found that the highest increases in a customer’s willingness to pay came when brands responded to a positive comment about its company. Receiving a response to a positive comment generated $28 more for a future airline ticket and $12 more per month for wireless plans.

The takeaway here is that customers who say good things about your business on social media are highly valuable. They are your advocates and brand loyalists. By acknowledging them and thanking them for their kind words, you are generating happy customers and more revenue.

1. Answer Questions

Let’s assume you run customer support at an airline and a person tags your brand name on social media to determine the price of checking a bag. If your company uses effective social media monitoring, a customer support rep will respond promptly to that customer with up-to-date pricing information and any other information they may need. The customer may have follow-up issues, so the representative should stick around to respond quickly if there is anything else the customer needs help with.

A great example is the gaming brand, Xbox. The company is actually a winner of the Guinness World Record for “Most Responsive Brand on Twitter” (yes, that’s a thing!). They were noted for being able to reply to their customers in less than three minutes on average, contributing to their dedicated customer service handle @XboxSupport.

Social media monitoring tools can also be used to respond to suggestions which can lead to making improvements to your products or services. When someone made a product suggestion on Twitter to Tesla, they implemented the change within a couple of weeks. Way to show your customers that you’re listening!

2. Resolve issues or complaints

Although not all concerns are critical, problems and complaints must be addressed promptly to assist distressed consumers and limit the spread of negative sentiment on social media.

Imagine the same customer is later upset that the plane’s in-flight Wi-Fi didn’t work correctly in the airline scenario. In today’s connected world, the airline has the opportunity to address the issue quickly before the comment negatively affects their brand’s reputation.

Leaving complaints unattended is like abandoning calls at your contact center, but worse. Not only do customers not get the help they need, but you also now have thousands of people who see that you ignored a customer.

Social media monitoring can help agents prioritize customer complaints so they can respond quickly or invite the customer to a private interaction to prevent the exchange from escalating publicly.

Brands can also use social media monitoring to triage complaints and avoid crises with broader messaging. If there’s a common issue springing up, you can bring in your public relations or communications team to minimize the potential of negative press.

3. Thank customers for positive feedback

While it’s true that some customers voice negative comments on social media platforms, there is also good to be found as well! Keep an eye out for the positive comments people make about your business on social media. Too often, these postings go unnoticed because customer support teams don’t react. Not responding to positive customer comments is akin to hanging up on a happy customer without saying thank you.

Best social media monitoring practices say you should respond promptly to the customer. For example, “We’re happy to have helped; please let us know if there’s anything else we can do to assist you further…” Or, say thank you in a way that’s true to your brand’s personality, like Zappos:

4. Promote more products and services through replies

People are typically extremely honest on social media, so when someone is excited about a product or an excellent service experience, brands should take advantage of the opportunity to engage with them.

You can use what you know about a customer’s recent purchase to offer them (and your other followers) related products and experiences in an organic way.

Take Airbnb, for instance. When a customer announces on Twitter that they’re taking a trip using Airbnb, the company will usually follow up with a friendly conversation like, “Where are you heading?” If the customer responds with the destination of Miami, for example, Airbnb will reply with their featured experiences in that city.

When Airbnb customer support staff makes these kinds of interactions, they are essentially getting free marketing. Its replies also show up in the mentions of other friends tagged in the response, further multiplying the reach of this tweet-by-tweet campaign.

5. Increase customer engagement

If you want more people talking about your business or receiving more reviews, then social media monitoring is a great way to engage with customers and provide calls to action. Like the Airbnb example, you can invite customers to engage with your brand through online surveys and even tweeting out discounts and promotions.

The food grocer giant Whole Foods is a notable example. Not only does it share healthy recipes and relevant stories, but it also routinely hosts Twitter chats too. It also gets followers talking about the brand by frequently sending out calls to action, such as asking Twitter users interesting questions or encouraging them to share or vote for favorite recipes.

Now that the benefits of social media monitoring are clear, you’re probably wondering how to do it. The good news is that there are plenty of tools out there to choose from. We’ve compiled a list of tools and their targeted users to help you narrow it down.

Sprout Social: A powerful, all-in-one social media management platform that customer care teams use to deliver responsive support.
Sprinklr: Prides itself in being the only unified customer experience management platform. Uses AI to create insight-driven strategies across 30+ channels.
Hootsuite: Provides a dashboard to oversee your social media management and marketing while creating a one-stop shop for your social media marketing needs.
TweetDeck: This Twitter-owned social media monitoring and management tool allows you to schedule tweets and track hashtag mentions. And it’s free!
Talkwalker: Provides actionable social media analytics and monitoring using AI.
Geofeedia: Integrates location-based analytics into its social media management strategies.
Snaptrends: Another geo-based social media management tool that turns location-based insights into suggestions for next steps and actions.
Oktopost: Designed specifically for LinkedIn, this tool automatically tracks groups and discussions.

This is a partial list of social media monitoring tools. For a complete list of tools visit the G2 page on this topic.

The tools listed above are extremely useful. That said, your strategy for interacting with customers on social channels should be the first step. A customer experience program that leverages social media monitoring is a valuable way to respond to customers and prospective customers whether they’re expressing negative or positive sentiment. And when it comes to customer care, providing a meaningful digital customer experience should be a baseline part of your strategy. Let us know if we can help.

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