Tag: iQor

Love at First Insight: The Romance of Understanding Customers Through Interaction Analytics

Posted on by Nicole Gobbo

Cupid’s Arrow Strikes Real-Time Speech Analytics—The Love Story of Customer Satisfaction and Brand Loyalty. 

In today’s competitive business landscape, providing exceptional customer experiences is paramount to success. AI-driven interaction analytics has emerged as a game-changer, empowering businesses with the ability to enhance customer satisfaction, optimize agent performance, and streamline operations. By leveraging the power of data and analytics in real time, brands can gain valuable insights into customer interactions, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions that promote growth. 

Discover 14 compelling reasons why speech analytics should be an integral part of your customer experience strategy. In this blog post, members of iQor’s operations, quality, and training teams across all industries and geographies share their insights into the benefits of iQor’s proprietary speech analytics platform, VALDI, designed by our global team of data science experts. VALDI is an internal tool that’s part of iQor’s digital CX infrastructure comprised of proprietary and commercial technologies focused on improving CX delivery. Read on to explore how a business process outsourcing (BPO) partnership with iQor can unlock the potential of interaction analytics to transform your business and create irresistible experiences that make your customers smile. 

Capturing Hearts With a Customer-Centric Approach 

Interaction analytics provides a wealth of information, unveiling a deeper understanding of customer interactions and preferences. This profound knowledge empowers businesses to make informed decisions, capitalizing on opportunities for growth and improvement and tailoring a customer-centric approach. By identifying trends and patterns in customer behavior, brands can anticipate customer needs, proactively address concerns, and optimize strategies to deliver exceptional experiences through personalized customer engagement that ensures customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

For example, by analyzing omnichannel customer interactions, a BPO like iQor can transform raw data into actionable insights to anticipate customer behavior, identify common customer pain points, and boost agent effectiveness. This information can be used to develop targeted solutions that improve the overall customer experience. Interaction analytics can also be used to track customer satisfaction levels over time and identify trends to guide improvements. 

Imagine identifying customers at risk of abandoning your brand and proactively taking steps to retain them or recognizing consumers poised to make a purchase and seizing the opportunity for upselling or cross-selling complementary products. Interaction analytics empowers businesses to tap into these opportunities, maximizing revenue potential and fostering customer loyalty. 

Building Everlasting Love Through Empowered Frontline Agents 

AI-driven interaction analytics like iQor’s VALDI can also be used to empower frontline agents by providing them with specific feedback and coaching to improve performance in real time. Speech analytics can also be used to provide agents with customizable dashboards and reports for personalized insights. This information can help agents track their performance, identify areas for improvement, and learn best practices from their peers. 

Additionally, interaction analytics can help identify and reward top performers. One way this can be done is through gamification techniques, such as leaderboards and rewards, to motivate agents. This can help motivate agents and create a culture of excellence within the contact center. 

iQor’s Symphony [AI]TM ecosystem further augments agent performance throughout the employee lifecycle, offering forward-thinking strategies to keep employees smiling and delivering exceptional customer service. This next-generation AI ecosystem combines advanced machine learning models with iQor’s years of accumulated process knowledge to optimize the employee experience from first contact with recruitment through the years of customer service experience they build on the production floor.

Matchmaking for Operational Efficiency

By leveraging interaction analytics to examine customer interactions, businesses can identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement. This data-driven approach empowers businesses to make informed decisions, implement targeted improvements, and streamline processes for customers and employees alike. 

Furthermore, interaction analytics plays a crucial role in optimizing workforce management. By analyzing historical data and identifying patterns in customer demand, we can accurately forecast call volumes and allocate resources accordingly. This ensures adequate staffing levels, minimizes wait times, and provides a consistent and high-quality customer experience. 

Interaction analytics serves as a powerful tool to drive operational excellence. By leveraging its insights, we can enhance customer experiences, increase agent productivity, optimize workforce management, and ultimately achieve strategic objectives. 

Interaction analytics serves as a powerful tool to drive operational excellence. By leveraging its insights, we can enhance customer experiences, increase agent productivity, optimize workforce management, and ultimately achieve strategic objectives. 

14 Reasons to Love Interaction Analytics 

Here’s a sampling of why iQor’s teams feel great about VALDI, iQor’s proprietary interaction platform that offers customizable insights that drive performance excellence and optimal CX results. 

  1. “I love VALDI for its accuracy in client audits, coaching capabilities, KPI flagging, and robust reporting tools. VALDI’s PCA feature for agent productivity and its DSL option for accurate word analytics is amazing. The seamless integration of coaching data with quality tools makes it a user-friendly platform for streamlining auditing and quality compliance processes.” – Manager, Quality 
  1. “VALDI is a value-add, offering real-time insights into customer pain points and feedback through advanced analytics. Operations employees armed with VALDI have a competitive advantage—they can identify trends and fine-tune processes in collaboration with clients for unparalleled customer satisfaction.” – Manager, Operations 
  1. “Thanks to VALDI analytics, operations teams and clients gain valuable insights into consumer behavior, leveraging data to identify trends, understand customer sentiment, and detect pain points. This advanced platform provides operational intelligence and enhances collaboration, ensuring a collective effort to deliver the best possible experience in a customer-centric environment.” – Manager, Operations 
  1. “I love the user-friendly interface and diverse filtering options in VALDI that help us pinpoint specific call types efficiently, empowering us to extract meaningful data.” – Manager, Quality 
  1. “I love VALDI because I can easily look for specific details by simply going to the filter button. The transcript option also helps me understand more about the conversations between our agents and customers.” – Analyst, Quality 
  1. “VALDI is very convenient to use. I love the transcripts and the detailed call information that is easy to find. VALDI filters are very convenient and drive improvement.” – Analyst, Quality 
  1. “I like VALDI because of its easy navigation and efficient filtering options. Its keyword search feature simplifies the process of locating specific calls.” – Manager, Operations 
  1. “VALDI ensures I can gather all the necessary call details such as NTT, masking, agent surveys, and other information that provides better insights regarding the agent’s call.” – Supervisor, Operations 
  1. “VALDI is a powerful tool that increases efficiency when reviewing and extracting information from call recordings. From sentiment detection to topic tagging combined with a user-friendly search and filtering tool, VALDI enables us to quickly drill down into the details of customer interactions without involving technical staff. The voice-to-text transcripts identifying conversations between the agent and customer make any QA team fast and effective, allowing for a rapid review of information and the ability to further filter searches based on keywords. Through the use of this tool, my team can identify trends and behaviors impacting metrics performance. Providing timely guidance to our coaches has enabled us to set new performance records on metrics like NPS and customer satisfaction.” – Director, Training and Quality 
  1. “VALDI interaction analytics is the key to understanding customer needs, optimizing workflows, and delivering a seamless customer experience. It empowers our operations teams to uncover hidden insights within customer conversations, driving operational efficiency and enhancing service delivery.” – Manager, Operations 
  1. “I love VALDI because it makes my work easier. I can filter calls for a specific supervisor down to individual agents. It also saves time when you’re looking for a certain call that needs to be evaluated since there’s a special feature you can use to find that call promptly.” – Analyst, Quality 
  1. “I love VALDI because of its actionable intelligence and the value it provides to enhance the customer experience. Its analytics help us identify trends, successes, and even pain points. And, of course, it is user-friendly!” – Manager, Quality 
  1. “I love that VALDI makes it easy for us to search the agent’s call. We can filter by name or supervisor and then find the calls we want to listen to. It helps us manage our time so we can more quickly identify agent behaviors that need coaching to ensure excellent customer service.” – Analyst, Quality 
  1. “VALDI is more than interactions analytics. It’s an innovative and reliable tool that turns data into business intelligence that operations teams can leverage to improve customer service. VALDI guides iQor’s operations teams toward proactive data-driven decision making and continuous improvement, customized for each program’s needs.” – Manager, Leadership Development 

Interaction Analytics Is the Sweetheart of Excellence 

iQor’s years of experience supporting clients in all industries have earned it a reputation for innovative strategic outsourcing solutions and ease of doing business. Our digital transformation strategies and cutting-edge customer insights help businesses achieve KPI targets and deliver more positive customer experiences.  

We integrate AI across platforms and processes to maximize success for our clients while maintaining the human element for optimal customer experiences.  

AI plays a significant role in advanced data analytics, helping businesses anticipate customer needs and preferences by analyzing substantial amounts of data. VALDI—an essential part of our digital CX infrastructure—mines customer interactions for data that provides actionable real-time insights for optimizing customer service quality.  

Experience the Best in Speech Analytics 

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. As a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions, iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX. 

iQor’s proprietary speech analytics platform uses a combination of cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to extract every customer interaction for actionable data insights delivered as a custom solution with outsourced CX services. 

Our expert teams collaborate every step of the way to develop a comprehensive AI strategy that propels your customer service into the future with AI-powered agents, in-app messaging, and intelligent analytics that create irresistible customer and frontline employee experiences. 

Our award-winning CX services include:  

  • A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.  
  • Decades of experience optimizing business processes for brands across industries and a reputation for ease of doing business. 
  • Our Symphony [AI]TM next-generation ecosystem for optimizing agent recruitment, training, nesting, onboarding, and ongoing performance and compliance. 
  • 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 agility 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 leading brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to reshape your customer service strategy with the optimal mix of AI and human performance excellence, start a conversation with one of our CX experts. 

Nicole Gobbo is director of communications at iQor. Connect with Nicole on LinkedIn.

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.

Ep. 33 Crypto Exchange Looks to Differentiate With Client Service

Posted on by Bernie Borges

Putting Client Service at the Center of a Unified Cryptocurrency Exchange

This week’s guest is George Kushner, founder and CEO of H2cryptO. With more than 28 years of experience in financial services and traditional finance, he is on a quest to use his expertise to expand access to cryptocurrency investing and trading. After extensive research, it became abundantly clear to him that tokenization is the future of investing, but a glaring gap in the market is hindering access to millions if not billions of people, namely client service.

Determined to fill this void in the market, George and his partners founded H2cryptO. This unified cryptocurrency exchange serves as a one-stop-shop for investing in and trading different cryptocurrencies. Through an accessible interface, it further sets itself apart by providing true 24/7 omnichannel support 365 days a year to ensure investors have access to the technical tools they need to learn and grow their investments.

The Path to Crypto

George’s career in the financial services sector began nearly 30 years ago on Wall Street in institutional fixed incomes and derivatives sales, working with some of the largest and most sophisticated investors in the world. George worked for more than 12 years with clients ranging from central banks and pension plans to hedge fund managers before pivoting his focus.

For the next decade, George dove into the world of alternate investments, focusing on capital raising for some of the world’s largest private equity, real estate and hedge fund managers. After years in alternate investments, George shifted to traditional finance and private banking. With nearly 30 years of growth in financial services and capital markets, George had a solid grasp on global econometrics and trading before embarking on an extensive knowledge quest to understand cryptocurrency from the ground up.

The Eureka Moment: Cryptocurrency Is the Future

George began his journey with cryptocurrency in 2015 when asked about Bitcoin while working for the investment management firm BlackRock in Manhattan. Bitcoin established the world’s first decentralized digital asset by using blockchain technology to create a decentralized digital asset managed across a network of computers instead of by a single entity.

Unlike traditional currencies, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin don’t have a country’s government backing them as fiat currency does, a central bank, interest rates, or a history of exchange rates.

Despite his initial skepticism, George researched all there was to know about this newly emerging investment and trading superpower. Starting at the foundational level, George began by developing a deeper understanding of the technology behind cryptocurrencies, learning the ins and outs of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. After hundreds and hundreds of hours of research on the power of the blockchain and decentralized finance, George discovered how cryptocurrency was on a path to change the world.

Studying the Fragmented Cryptocurrency Landscape

George describes today’s cryptocurrency landscape as a fragmented ecosystem for investing in and trading digital assets. Unlike traditional finance where firms can usually invest in various asset classes, cryptocurrency has a decentralized exchange environment. This means that investors typically need to access one exchange to buy and sell crypto, another to purchase non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and yet another for staking or borrowing and lending, for example.

There is a rapid escalation of hard assets being securitized, but it’s often a piecemeal do-it-yourself endeavor for crypto investors in this decentralized environment. Left to manage their own cryptocurrency investment strategies, jumping from one service to the next, crypto investors and traders can face challenges throughout this process frequently without true client support options.

The Problem With Doing It Yourself

We do it ourselves in so many elements of our lives, from fixing the car to tinkering with the plumbing. So, what’s the difference when it comes to investing in and trading cryptocurrencies? The painful difference is that we can’t simply pick up the phone and call in an expert to save the day if we make an error. One error in do-it-yourself cryptocurrency investing can cause an investor to lose that money forever. This can be especially risky for beginners in the cryptocurrency landscape.

George’s first-hand experience learning about cryptocurrency as a seasoned financial services professional provided him unique insights into the problems in need of solving. There was no one to turn to with technical questions, and this was not a one-off experience.

Shocked by these glaring issues when he first began trading cryptocurrencies and learning the problems other investors faced, a gap became clear: client service and support is virtually nonexistent in the current crypto exchange environment.

Solving the Cryptocurrency Investment Problem

The convoluted methods of investing and trading through various cryptocurrency exchanges combined with scarce technical client support have added to trepidations associated with cryptocurrency, contributing to a relatively low global adoption rate for this type of investment. Lack of understanding about cryptocurrency is a significant reason why the community of cryptocurrency investors is limited to about 220 million out of 8 billion people worldwide. Despite the years that have passed since cryptocurrency technology was invented in 2009, crypto is still in its infancy, comprising a small percentage of global equity.

George’s first-hand experiences, coupled with his deep financial knowledge, gave him the vision and practical know-how to make filling this gap a reality. With the need identified, George and his partners ventured to create a user-friendly exchange platform to address the cumbersome and fragmented trading environment investors often encounter with cryptocurrency.

At the heart of H2cryptO’s exchange is client service to facilitate better cryptocurrency trading and investing experiences. This sophisticated yet simplified interface makes investing and trading in cryptocurrency easy with options in English, Mandarin, and Spanish. The trading platform is accessible online and through a mobile app, both of which are designed with two-factor authentication (2FA) and multiple levels of security to ensure safe transactions.

H2cryptO is ideal for both beginners who want to make their first investments in cryptocurrency and experienced traders alike. Through an intuitive interface, investors can simply select from pre-determined denominations of currency or tokens by clicking on clear buy/sell buttons or they can customize their own token amount. The H2cryptO trading platform also offers traders more technical analyses of each crypto asset and trading volume through sophisticated modern charting capabilities.

The Power of Client Service

The need for support became abundantly clear to George. He was shocked by the widespread dearth of client support across cryptocurrency exchanges when he began crypto trading and investing. He heard horror stories from cryptocurrency investors and clients who were locked out of their accounts or couldn’t access their money or make certain selections and there was no one for them to turn to on the exchange they used.

To this end, H2cryptO was developed to provide a better way for investors from all walks of life to access the market. Its differentiated strategy through unification and client service is improving the future of cryptocurrency exchanges and how crypto is traded.

H2cryptO’s cryptocurrency exchange platform removes the fear of the unknown from trading and offers client support to its clients 24/7/365. Its service-centric approach offers a solution to investors reluctant to get involved with the goal of making H2cryptO the preferred exchange for cryptocurrency investors and traders.

Through seamless and easy omnichannel support, clients can choose the mode of communication that works best for them at any given time. Crypto investors can connect with H2cryptO on their own terms whenever, wherever. Whether it’s live chat, email, or voice, clients can receive answers to their questions in real-time.

By empowering clients to choose the mode of interaction they value most, H2cryptO can stay connected to its clients and provide the support they need. This support utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to streamline service across various channels of communication, combining human interactions with purposeful technology to create the most efficient and effective client experience possible.

Moreover, with data from omnichannel offerings all in one place, H2cryptO can better understand client behaviors and needs to make informed decisions on delivering the best investor experiences possible to optimize performance.

The Future of Cryptocurrency

Cyber trading of cryptocurrencies is still in its beginning phase and George believes we will likely see broad global adoption of trading in cryptocurrencies over the next five years as more cryptocurrency regulation takes shape. Indeed, George believes the digitization across assets is ultimately the future and everything will eventually be tokenized, from artwork to real estate.

Cryptocurrency offers people control over their financial well-being, regardless of how much they are able to invest. It has the potential to move beyond tech-savvy investors and act as the great equalizer to tackle the disadvantages felt by the unbanked and underbanked populations. This is significant considering globally 31 percent of adults are unbanked.

Crypto is available to all and is becoming increasingly accessible every day. By providing a streamlined interface and convenient client support, H2cryptO is helping to democratize the future of crypto investment.

George and his team identified a void in the market and have addressed it through an intuitive exchange that improves access to cryptocurrency investing and trading while providing comprehensive client service to increase confidence and boost outcomes. Through simple, equitable access and client service, H2cryptO’s innovations are designed to make it an exchange of choice for crypto investors and traders.

What George Does for Fun

When not working, George enjoys exercising and reading. He is a voracious reader of nonfiction, especially focused on financial services, cryptocurrency, blockchain, and the like.

Learn more at hello.h2crypto.io and sign up to receive information about this next-generation cryptocurrency exchange.

Learn more about iQor digital customer experience capabilities.

The Role of Intelligent Virtual Agents in Customer Service

Posted on by Bernie Borges

As the world becomes increasingly digitized, many forward-looking businesses have started deploying intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) in their customer service delivery model. iQor has extensive experience designing, implementing and managing intelligent automation customer experience solutions for brands. We’re sharing our expertise and best practices on IVAs in this post.

IVAs are artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chat assistants that give customers personalized responses by combining cognitive computing and analytics. Unlike chatbots, which follow a given script, IVAs start humanlike, context-based dialogues to reach out to customers. For instance, if a customer enters an order number and asks a question about the order, the IVA will save this information so it can refer to it later in the conversation.

IVAs offer many benefits. They’re cost-effective, efficient, and they form an integral part of your customer retention strategy. IVAs can also help human agents interface with customers and improve customer service and loyalty. Additionally, they can be integrated with human agents through Customer Experience as a Service (CXaaS), a cloud-based solution that empowers organizations to deliver a cost-effective and hyper-personalized customer experience.

Read on to learn more about how IVAs work, how they can improve customer service, and how you can start integrating IVAs with human agents.

How an Intelligent Virtual Agent Works

An intelligent virtual agent is an AI virtual assistant that leverages various AI technologies to understand customers’ concerns. Using natural language processing (NLP) technologies, IVAs can understand answers that they haven’t been explicitly programmed to understand. That’s because NLP technologies — which include natural language understanding (NLU), text-to-speech, transcription, and speech-to-text — enable IVAs to find insights and meanings in spoken and written conversations. They also empower IVAs to understand the meaning of conversations without a predefined syntax and build their knowledge base.

Deep learning, speech recognition, and machine learning also help IVAs build up a large vocabulary, understand different accents and colloquialisms, and provide correct and accurate answers to customers.

Because they’re powered by so many different types of advanced AI technologies, IVAs can understand:

  • Free text
  • Speech
  • Multiple-choice selection of answers

What IVAs are used for

IVAs are used to answer and resolve simple customer requests. They come in two forms:

  • Messenger apps: This form is the most common. It’s the chat box that pops up at the bottom of your screen when you land on a website.
  • Virtual customer service agents: These IVAs give interactive voice responses during customer calls. 

How an IVA can reduce operating costs

An intelligent virtual assistant can help you reduce operating costs by:

  • Reducing wait times for calls. Without IVAs, your call volumes can get increasingly high, which will lead to call abandonment and frustration for your customer. Some customers may even give up on your brand due to long wait times. To prevent customers from abandoning and get them to continue interacting with your company, you could deploy IVAs to engage with them. Giving people instant answers and possible solutions will significantly improve the customer experience.
  • Automating repetitive tasks that don’t require human ingenuity. IVAs can deal with routine tasks and inquiries to give human chat agents more time and energy to deal with more pressing issues. This frees up more time and resources for agents to address customer questions and concerns that require more effort to answer and resolve. In other words, IVAs accelerate workflows.
  • Acting as assistants for agents. If an IVA can’t resolve an issue, it can gather key information from customers and pass that along to human agents.

Ways That IVAs Help Human Agents Interface With Customers

Although IVAs can do a lot of the things that human agents can, they don’t replace human agents. There are still a number of things that only human agents can do. These include resolving complex issues that require empathy and compassion. In such scenarios, IVAs act as assistants for human agents and help human agents become augmented agents. 

Here are some ways IVAs can help human agents become better ambassadors for your brand:

  • Keep human agents in the loop: As mentioned above, an IVA can gather and pass vital customer information on to live agents. For example, if a customer wants to talk to a human agent about a warranty on her laptop, she can leave her order number with the IVA. The IVA will then pass the order number and a summary of her concern on to a human agent who has the skills, empathy, and compassion to help the customer understand her warranty better. 
  • Show human agents key metrics: Unlike chatbots and virtual assistants (VAs), IVAs have access to an entire ecosystem of software, services, data, and products. They also understand how these parts interact and how customers have interacted with them so far, thanks to machine and deep learning. This means human agents can use IVAs to:
    • Get a better and more accurate understanding of how customers have been interacting with the business so far
    • Develop a strategy to attract and retain clients based on existing statistics

How Intelligent Virtual Agents Improve Customer Service and Loyalty

IVAs can also improve customer service and loyalty. 

Due to their conversational AI capabilities, IVAs can attract and retain customers by creating positive, helpful experiences that stick in people’s minds. Think about that helpful store employee, museum guide, or IT professional who wants to guide customers to more resources. IVAs are like that, only they can work 24/7.

By creating these memorable experiences for customers, IVAs can help you improve your service design. Service design is based on the simple idea that customer service excellence is the most important concern when delivering a service or product. By putting your customers’ concerns and feelings at the forefront, you’ll be able to offer value and promote your brand every time you interact with customers. 

Integrating IVAs With Human Agents for CXaaS

Another way you can use IVAs to your advantage is to integrate them with human agents for CXaaS.

CXaaS is a cloud-based holistic solution for the design, planning, and implementation of activities that make up the customer experience. Specialty service providers such as iQor specialize in managing such cloud-based solutions for brands at scale. CXaaS solutions combine automation with customer experience (CX) strategy and data integration. In other words, CXaaS is the backbone of digital transformation. It’s not just a patchwork of the newest technologies — it’s also a foundational shift to digital. CXaaS deconstructs and re-imagines CX to ensure customer satisfaction.

What makes CXaaS special?

CXaaS leverages AI technology and massive amounts of customer data to give you a deeper understanding of customers’ specific needs in real-time by providing analytics to gather and analyze customer data, automating simple employee and customer tasks, and segmenting customers to give them personalized experiences. It also helps you create a CX roadmap that smooths out the customer journey and helps you initiate tools like automated IVAs, customer self-service apps, and proactive alerts to improve CX and customer engagement.

CXaaS also makes your brand future-proof. After you’ve created a CX roadmap and enhanced customer interaction and engagement by using CXaaS’ actionable insights, you can use CXaaS tools to expand your brand to other customer channels.

How does CXaaS work?

CXaaS comes with critical components for intelligent virtual assistants that you can integrate with human agents:

  • Online engagement: CXaaS lets your IVAs respond to customers immediately through text or text-to-speech. This allows you to keep your customers engaged, even if you can’t solve their problems immediately.
  • Personalized services: CXaaS tools let you and your agents create hyperpersonalized experiences for different types of customers. This will make customers feel cared for, so they’ll be more likely to visit your site again.
  • Cloud computing: Cloud computing makes everything more flexible and accessible. Instead of working from contact centers, your live agents can work from home and use screen sharing, Google Docs, and other cloud-based apps to communicate with customers.
  • Detailed metrics: CXaaS solutions come with detailed messaging and voice analytics to gather insights for improvement. Your human agents can access these metrics to determine:
    • Ways to improve CX
    • Prevent bad CX from happening again
    • Make adjustments to IVAs if they aren’t getting the results you want
  • Creative omnichannel experiences: CXaaS will help your IVAs and live agents reach your customers on the channels and platforms they use the most, whether it be Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or WhatsApp.

Experience the iQor Difference Today

All in all, intelligent chatbots like IVAs are a future-proof, cost-effective part of your digital customer experience strategy. IVAs can help your brand compete and stand out among your competitors and ultimately build more loyalty. Powerful, streamlined, and intuitive, IVAs can be used alone, with human agents, or as part of a full-suite CXaaS solution.

If you’re interested in improving your brand’s customer experience, consider working with iQor.  We help brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. We offer the following: 

  • A diversified technological suite that maximizes and scales performance across multiple geographies.
  • A secure private cloud platform that extends the call center experience into remote agents’ homes. This lowers costs while boosting customer satisfaction and agent loyalty.
  • Work-from-home solutions that blend IVAs with on-site and remote agents.
  • A partnership approach. Besides our agents, our Business Development Executives, C-Level Executives and Data Scientists will work with you to provide a consultative partnership focused on your success.

Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? Learn more by listening to our podcasts. If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, you can contact us directly to learn more about how we can help you create more smiles.

How Omnichannel Support Strengthens Customer Relationships

Posted on by Bernie Borges

Customer support has long been viewed as a cost to the business. This is no longer the case, however, and a customer-centric culture with omnichannel support is fast becoming a proven model that is being viewed as an asset rather than a cost center. iQor’s omnichannel support services use proven best practices to maximize results which we’re sharing with you in this post.

Customer support has changed a lot in recent years and merely having multiple customer service channels isn’t good enough for many customers. Today’s consumers no longer have just one or a couple of ways they want to use to reach your business. Social media, live chat, intelligent bots, mobile apps, email, and phone are just a few of the whole range of different platforms with which you can converse with customers.

What Is Omnichannel Customer Support?

An omnichannel solution aims to provide seamlessly connected customer interactions across various touchpoints. Omnichannel customer experience is a model whereby a business markets its products, sells them and provides customer support across multiple channels consolidated into a single, larger system. 

Omnichannel customer support differs from multiple channel support through integration so that all communications are aggregated. A customer can start their conversation on one channel, continue it on another channel and resolve it on yet another channel. This approach meets your modern customers’ expectations.

omnichannel experiences for customer support

Why Is an Omnichannel Experience Ideal for Customer Support? 

Omnichannel customer service is the adaptation of an omnichannel strategy to your company’s communication channels to provide a fluid customer experience. Social media, email, instant messaging, phone calls, and other channels are unified under one system. This enables customers to interchange channels without a drop in quality of service. 

Customer service agents have a sweeping view of all a customer’s interactions and can therefore respond to queries appropriately regardless of the channel the customer used.

For instance, a user may contact customer support via chat on a website. They can get a response via the same chat or talk to an agent without repeating themselves since the agent has the relevant context they need. Additional information can also be sent later through email or messaging; all made possible through omnichannel customer support. 

Does Your Business Need an Omnichannel Customer Support Strategy?

The importance of omnichannel support is easy to recognize from the customer’s perspective. When does your business require an omnichannel support strategy? A few scenarios that might necessitate this approach include:

  • To provide a better user experience — for example, when chatting on your app is lower cost and a better experience for your customer compared to other channels
  • To move conversations from public platforms such as social media to more private ones like email or SMS
  • To authenticate customers and share sensitive data

Omnichannel customer service offers you the chance to serve your clients conveniently and efficiently. This is just a glimpse of what omnichannel support brings to your customer service offering and why it is essential. 

Why Is Omnichannel Customer Support Important?

With omnichannel support, the customer can conveniently access services across various channels. This means that the customer experience and quality of service are consistent across platforms. 

Quick and Convenient Access to Data

An omnichannel customer support approach also means that agents can access customer data from a central system. The impact of having a central system is that they can quickly access the information they need without the need to get the context again from the customer. Agents can also share notes and questions they’ve received from the customer through the platform to offer better service. 

Improved Customer Experience

An omnichannel support solution also creates stronger relationships with your customers. The improved customer experience leads to enhanced engagement and customer retention, more predictable revenue, and higher brand loyalty compared to single-channel and multi-channel systems. When compared to single-channel businesses, ClickZ indicated in a report that customers with an omnichannel experience:

  • Show a 250% greater purchase frequency and customer engagement rate
  • Purchase 13% more
  • Were 90% more likely to interact with a brand with three or more interaction channels

Omnichannel customer support also means the experience can be customized across channels. This improves customer satisfaction, and since customers want effective customer service and a good experience, they will stick with companies that offer exactly that. 

Call Deflection Usage

Omnichannel customer support also provides a way for businesses to use call deflection to their advantage. With call deflection, a customer call can be diverted to another medium mid-call if it will benefit the customer by using a different channel. This unique aspect of omnichannel support means that customers can be presented with better options to address their concerns quickly. For example, an agent speaking with a customer can offer a link to download instructions that answer the customer’s question, reducing the call handle time significantly while satisfying the customer’s need.

Call deflection can be a gateway to better customer service, for example, when call volumes are high or the request is outside of working hours. Rather than wait until the next agent is available, customers can utilize digital channels to sort their issues before live support becomes available.

Best Practices to Consider

Omnichannel customer support can be a big improvement over a siloed customer care model, both for the customer and the support agent. Here are some best practices in providing it.

Understand the Customer Journey

Ultimately, omnichannel customer support seeks to make the customer journey as smooth as possible. An omnichannel customer journey is made up of the interactions between the customer and your business throughout the customer lifecycle. A customer’s journey is a treasure trove of data that you can use to improve the customer experience. 

Companies can position themselves to provide a better experience through mapping a customer’s journey with their brand. Knowing customer touchpoints and their intentions at each point of their journey allows you to refine your omnichannel experience and work towards providing customer service excellence.  

Respond to Customer Needs Quickly

Modern consumers expect fast responses to their inquiries regardless of the platform they have used. Without proper systems to respond to your customers, your customer service may give your company a bad reputation. 

A customer relationship management (CRM) system plays a vital role in your omnichannel customer service offering. A CRM unifies your customer interactions with all departments of your company while allowing agents to get a real-time view of all customer interactions. The customer support agents can therefore respond immediately to customer needs without compromising on speed.

A CRM also grants access to key metrics and other insights about your company’s customer support across various channels so that you can identify communication bottlenecks and work to resolve them. 

Study Customer Behavior Across Channels

Unlike in a multichannel system where communication channels are often analyzed separately, you need to observe customer behavior across the various platforms in your omnichannel strategy. How do you know which channels are effective in your omnichannel strategy? There are several ways to gain these insights, including:

  • Conducting surveys and collecting customer feedback
  • Studying the touchpoints to identify customer preferences and ease of access for each
  • Analysis of key customer support metrics such as customer satisfaction, average response time, and customer effort score 

Once you build a process to study this information, you’ll be able to identify the weaknesses in your current customer care strategy, improve your omnichannel communication, and ensure that the standard of service is the same across platforms. 

Overcoming Challenges

Omnichannel communication has evolved a lot recently. Systems have grown from phone and email-based systems to include technology like instant messaging, chatbots and mobile app support. Customer communication has also been improved through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to offer a better support experience. 

Omnichannel support has not been without its challenges, however. Some of these include the following.

Data Silos

Departmental silos are a significant challenge for both customer experience and collecting data. These silos may arise from different technology or processes across platforms, which means that the data is not standardized.

Therefore, the customer experience is not consistent across the omnichannel communication platforms. Companies can alleviate this problem by committing to collaboration across departments. 

Creating a Consistent Experience Across Platforms

Omnichannel customer support can be a challenge because there are many service delivery methods involved, and customer expectations also vary. Businesses may sometimes also offer different quality levels of service across various channels, which is not the standard that customers have come to expect.

Unifying Data

Since omnichannel support makes use of various brand channels, customer data is often spread out across different platforms. The information is often located in different databases, making it difficult to unify the data. Consequently, it is more difficult to analyze the data and get insights from it. A unified CRM resolves this problem. When agents can access customer data in one unified database it makes it easier to service customers, in turn giving agents more job satisfaction.

Ready To Implement Omnichannel Support in Your Business?

Despite the many challenges of maintaining successful omnichannel customer support, it has proven to be a valuable approach to providing a great customer experience. Many brands have overcome these challenges.

Ecommerce brands now not only use omnichannel marketing but many also have an omnichannel customer support system for their users. Customers have a variety of support methods to choose from whenever they need help, and these platforms are usually well-integrated for their convenience. 

Omnichannel support is not just for businesses on the internet — brick-and-mortar retailers are also using omnichannel strategies. Since shoppers use multiple channels to compare and purchase products as well as get customer service, retailers have had to adapt. They typically provide an omnichannel experience across all touchpoints. For some, customer service agents have tablets with a unified CRM to give personalized help while in the store and better serve repeat customers.

The financial industry is also an example of an industry that has successfully deployed omnichannel customer support. Customers can now get support via live chat, email, website mobile apps and social media, as well as by phone. 

Omnichannel customer support is here to stay. A multichannel approach isn’t enough anymore, as customers expect a seamless quality of service across platforms. Are you looking for help with omnichannel customer support? Let us help you provide your customers with intelligent omnichannel customer support systems over voice, email, chat, social and other channels to optimize their experience with your brand. 

Learn more about iQor’s omnichannel support.

Ep. 27 A Purpose Driven Leadership Customer Experience Strategy in Trinidad

Posted on by Bernie Borges

Customer Experience Strategy Goes from Academia to Real World 

William Huggins, DBA, is Vice President Operations and Country Lead at iQor Trinidad. In this episode, we discuss his purpose-driven approach to leading the iQor team in Trinidad. William recently completed his Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) with a concentration in customer experience. He explains how he is applying his previous work experience, his education and his purpose-driven approach to leading the iQor team in Trinidad.  

His Previous Experience Set the Stage for His Current Role  

William’s past roles have led him to iQor in this leadership role. He has worked in several industries in different roles including marketing, sales, business development and customer experience. Of all those roles, he attributes the most impactful in his career to roles in the contact center industry. When the VP Operations, Country Lead position in Trinidad became available at iQor, he jumped at the chance to apply his professional experience, his education, and his passion for the local economy. iQor is a dynamic and innovative customer centric organization that is passionate about its employees, its customers and the local communities in which it operates, all of which excited William.   

How His Doctoral Dissertation Aligns  

William explains that his doctoral dissertation addresses a gap in customer experience theory which he describes as a lack of constructs of the customer experience and its impact at each stage of the consumer buying process. His dissertation is a unique study that unearthed a new theory and valuable knowledge for customer experience practitioners. 

He examined over 50 years of scholastic work conducted on customer experience and concluded that any given customer experience is created by the combination of four attributes, or dimensions, explained in the acronym FACT. This is how they breakdown: 

Functionality refers to the physical aspect of a company’s core product and service offering. 

Aesthetics involves the appearance of a building or staff (the look and feel). 

Communication with customers is considered fundamental to a CX strategy. 

Talent involves the people and culture of an organization. 

How His Doctoral Dissertation Correlates to His Leadership Role at iQor Trinidad  

William points out that customer experience IS iQor’s business. We interact with customers for the brands who entrust us to answer their questions and solve their problems. Hence, having a deeper understanding of what creates an excellent customer experience enables William to lead our team in Trinidad to focus on those key dimensions and sub-dimensions in the delivery of an exceptional experience to our client’s customers. 

What It Means to be Purpose-Driven in His Leadership Role  

For many years, the Trinidad and Tobago (TT) economy was largely driven by oil and gas. While there have been many discussions about diversification of the TT economy it has been slow in coming. Because of William’s involvement in the BPO industry for several years, he has long had the desire to influence the development of the BPO industry as an alternative revenue source for the TT economy. iQor provides William the opportunity to impact diversification in TT and to create desirable jobs for his fellow Trinidadians. As a result, William’s passion is to position iQor TT as the BEST place to work and the most desirable contact center location for our clients.   

iQor Trinidad employees are all local Trinidadians. William points out that he grew up in TT. He knows firsthand how passionate, and performance-driven his fellow Trinidadians are. As an example, he boasts that a client in the home services industry has ranked iQor Trinidad as their #1 BPO in performance among ALL their contact centers globally! And he mentions with pride that this same team is currently leading the pack in 2021 with the same client. 

Why iQor is a Great Place to Work for Local Trinidadians  

William points out the obvious to me, that iQor has an irresistible culture. When you couple our irresistible culture with an abundance of opportunities for local talent, iQor is an excellent place for young people to start their careers straight out of a university. Additionally, there are many job opportunities for people further along in their career as well, ranging from frontline agents to roles in HR, IT, Facilities, Operations, Finance, etc.  

iQor is fortunate to be expanding even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are currently preparing to open our third contact center in Chaguanas, Trinidad. Our TT employee count is currently approximately 1,350 and growing rapidly with expansion from existing programs and new clients coming on board. William says that it is an exciting time to be at iQor TT. 

A Situational Leadership Style  

I asked William how he is converging his work experience, education, and purpose to lead more than 1,300 people at iQor Trinidad. 

He explains that leadership is situational. He adopts an appropriate style to suit each situation. 

However, he points out that his inherent leadership style is participative and collaborative. This style is critical to support and drive his purpose of making iQor TT:  

  1. The best destination for our clients. 
  1. The best place to work for our employees. 
  1. The best investment for owners.  
  1. A valuable partner to the local government to assist with diversification efforts. 

His Leadership Action Plan 

William explains his leadership action plan this way: 

  1. It starts with our people. We have a unique culture that is difficult to replicate. William views his job as to harness this culture and bring out the best in our people to develop them and maximize their career path potential. 
  1. Each employee has something to contribute. He encourages a free flow of ideas.  
  1. Fostering a culture of performance that surpasses client’s expectations and enables continued growth. 
  1. Collaboration with key stakeholders such as InvesTT, Minister of Trade, local universities, Chamber of Commerce all to help iQor TT diversify the economy and enhance communities through its Corporate Social Responsibilities initiatives. 

What William Does for Fun When He’s Not Working  

William enjoys his work so much that he considers it fun. He also loves traveling with his family to other countries and exploring diverse cultures and foods during non-pandemic times. Additionally, he enjoys watching sports on television, particularly football, basketball and cricket. 

Learn more about iQor digital customer experience capabilities.

Ep. 26 How iQorians Give Back through iQor Qares

Posted on by Bernie Borges

Giving Back through A Standalone 501(c)(3) Entity to Support iQorians in Need

Loren Dennis is Senior Vice President of Operations at iQor in charge of special projects. One of Loren’s favorite projects he has spearheaded is iQor Qares. In this episode, he explains what it is and why iQor has invested significant resources into it.

One of iQor’s core values is “always giving back.” In the past, when iQor employees – aka iQorians – ran into emergencies, the company organized fundraisers through events to provide financial assistance to those in need across our global population of approximately 35,000 employees. While noble, these efforts were ad hoc and only moderately effective because it was not a unified effort under one entity.

The iQor senior leadership team (SLT) decided to create a standalone philanthropic organization called iQor Qares. It was formed in Q4 2019 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit with its own board of directors (BOD). Loren sits on the BOD along with members of iQor’s SLT to oversee the direction and execution of its mission, which is to be a financial resource to iQor employees and their local communities when unforeseen hardship occurs during times of natural disasters, such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and more.

Building the Philanthropy

In 2020, the primary focus of iQor Qares was to get the entity established in the U.S. This was a new venture for all involved. Creating the organization and getting approved in every state across the U.S. required a lot of coordination with government entities.  The Board made headway across nine states, standing up the organization as a philanthropy ready to be of service to iQorians.

Soliciting Donations

 From a donation standpoint, the initial rollout of iQor Qares is in the U.S. to support any employee regardless of geographic location. iQor employees can set up donations to be made automatically from each paycheck. As is customary with a 501(c)(3), reporting is provided to the employee for tax deduction purposes. In 2021 donations began to be collected to help iQorians anywhere in the world.

Examples of iQorians Supported through iQor Qares

Loren explained that approved requests for support remain anonymous except between HR and the iQor Qares vetting committee. Beyond this group, identities are not revealed to protect their privacy.

In 2021, examples of recipients of support include an iQorian whose home caught fire, where much of the house was destroyed. iQor Qares provided support to aid with meals for the iQorian’s family while they dealt with the transition to temporary housing. iQor Qares also provided support to iQorians who were displaced by the horrific floods in Texas in mid-2021.

iQor Qares is also available to support employees and their families during times of loss. When iQor was made aware of a tragic death of our own, iQor Qares was quick to provide their family with funds to aid in funeral expenses. When an iQorian family member was battling cancer, they were met with high hospital bills that drained their finances.  iQor Qares helped cover heating costs to keep their home warm during the winter months, so the employee could focus on their health and not stress about bills.

Small Donations from Many iQorians

As you can see by these examples, life circumstances can cause financial hardship. The vision of iQor Qares is for many people to give a small amount. Loren specifically says he’s not asking for large donations. If many people regularly donate a small amount from each paycheck, the coffers are well supplied, enabling us to respond to situations in times of need.

Looking to 2022

Loren and the BOD at iQor Qares are spreading the word and expanding into other countries in 2022. Hopefully, conditions will allow for an annual charity golf event. The power of volume with many small donations will make a difference in people’s lives. The easiest way to set up automatic contributions is to visit the website iqorqares.com to configure a steady donation from each paycheck.

How to Apply for Assistance from iQor Qares

iQor Qares is set up to provide financial aid to iQor employees who are experiencing temporary financial hardship. iQor employees in need of assistance should begin by contacting their local HR representative. This individual will have a confidential conversation with the iQorian and assist with the application process at iqorqares.com.

How to Donate to iQor Qares

iQor employees can easily set up a donation commitment. It’s simple and safe.

iQor employees can donate here at iqorqares.com.

Anyone outside of iQor is welcome to make a one-time donation (or as often as they want)!

People outside of iQor can donate on this website. 

What Loren Does for Fun When He’s Not Working

For Loren, it’s all about family. Whether it’s watching a movie, having a family game night, or spending time outdoors, he cherishes each moment with his family.

Learn more about iQor digital customer experience capabilities.

Ep. 25 How Strong Language Can Be Used to Deliver Great Customer Service

Posted on by Bernie Borges

Customer Service Can Be the Easiest Use Case to Harness Language

Chris West is the Founding Partner of Verbal Identity, a leading strategy agency specializing in the power of language. His firm has guided global and national brands, relaunches, and startups from B2B and B2C to tech and luxury and everything in between. Chris is a multi-award-winning copywriter and the author of the highly acclaimed book: Strong Language: The Fastest, Smartest, Cheapest Marketing Tool You’re Not Using.  

This episode discusses the key takeaways from his book, including insights into how strong language can be deployed in customer service delivery.  

Chris is a copywriter by background. He has written in every medium ranging from short films to newspapers. He loves the power of language to share ideas and build relationships. He founded Verbal Identity to help brands harness the power of language in their business.

The Inspiration to Write the Book – Strong Language 

Chris has been running Verbal Identity for more than ten years. When his firm was a boutique advertising agency, clients frequently asked him to write copy across the spectrum of the business, not just for advertising, for example, customer service use cases. He witnessed clients becoming more aware of the need to write copy to support their entire business. This inspired Chris to focus on language. After being asked by many people how to harness language, he decided to write a book about it.

How to Know When Your Brand Voice Isn’t Working Well

How does an executive team determine if their current use of language is working for their business? It’s more accessible in customer service because the people on the front lines are closer to the customer. They’re able to observe engagement with customers in response to the language used.  Executives can observe how agents are talking to customers or communicating on social media channels when delivering omnichannel support. What they often discover is a disconnect among different channels with different voices using inconsistent language. Sometimes, they find that their brand voice sounds the same as everyone else in their space. In that situation, their brand lacks differentiation and value. This can result in customers not remaining loyal to the brand, which can result in lost revenue.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Churn, and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores can indicate how ineffectively a brand communicates during customer care delivery. Improving language can be a fast, smart, cheap way to improve customer service metrics.

How to Find Quick Wins Using Strong Language

When executives recognize they need to change their language, they usually want to find quick wins. Most companies don’t approach changing their language with the mindset of allocating a big budget, particularly assigning a lot of time to it. Chris recommends mapping out where people interact with your brand in a high-impact way to identify the areas where you can change the language to measure a change in business impact quickly. These quick wins allow teams to understand the power of language, often leading to a willingness to invest incremental budget and time in impacting other business areas ranging from marketing to sales to customer service.

How to Measure the Value of Updating Your Brand Voice 

All stakeholders want to measure the value of updating their brand voice. When considering this, Chris suggests starting with the metrics you care about most. Consider the contributing factors to those metrics. CX professionals use a different set of metrics than sales, marketing, and operations people use. Chris suggests dividing metrics into two categories: self-serve engagement and human interaction engagement.

We’re living in a time of higher staff turnover in many businesses. By shortening the learning curve to effective language among employees, we can impact the business faster. This is especially true in customer experience delivery. The more effective the language is the more effective the customer experience delivery. This has a direct correlation with contact center agent job satisfaction, which impacts employee retention metrics.

Ultimately, the best way to measure the value of language in your brand is by reverse engineering it. Start with the key metrics that are important to the business. Identify how language is used to impact the current state of those metrics. Standard metrics on an executive’s dashboard include revenue pipeline, actual sales, employee retention and attrition, inventory turns, and others unique to each business. These metrics are essential, and the use of language is a crucial factor influencing them. Changing the language to improve any one of these metrics is a great way to measure the value of revising the language.

Decision Making Process in Language Change

The decision process in language change varies for each company. In founder-led companies, all decisions get approved by the founder. In other companies, it’s more decentralized. Language programs that compare your brand to one or more competitors help get c-suite awareness and support.

Another approach is to run an internal survey to gauge the current effectiveness of language. When internal stakeholders express their opinion about the ineffectiveness of existing language in a particular use case, it can influence the c-suite’s interest in making change. Often, the c-suite appreciates calling attention to the inconsistency and the opportunity to remedy the situation to improve key business metrics.

How to Develop a Consistently Distinctive Brand Voice

Chris shares that the original title of his book was, One Business, One Voice. Executives can all agree, whether it’s marketing, customer service, investor relations, sales, or operations, the language of their brand should always sound like one voice for the company. But how does a company create one consistently distinctive brand voice?

Strong Language (the book) documents a framework made up of three levels of communication.

  1. The first level is the ten thousand foot view of what your business stands for and against (i.e., your worldview).
  2. The second level is the one thousand foot view, your brand’s personality (how you express your world view).
  3. The ground level is about your jargon, grammar, and style.

Splitting it into three levels helps people have a common framework for harnessing the power of language. Sometimes the feedback tells us that the language for the world view is great, but the personality language doesn’t support it. Or vice versa. This simple framework allows for congruency among the overarching worldview narrative, internal and ground levels. It is a simple method to enable stakeholders to agree on the language needed to guide people in language development, resulting in one business, one voice.

What Chris Does for Fun

In response to the “what do you do for fun” question, Chris has three activities that make him smile. He is an avid reader, which should not surprise anyone, given his passion for language. He is also an avid swimmer. Chris is a husband to an entrepreneur and father of two amazing kids.    

Visit VerbalIdentity.com to learn more about their approach and Chris’ book – Strong Language: The Fastest, Smartest, Cheapest Marketing Tool You’re Not Using.

Learn more about iQor digital customer experience capabilities.

Ep. 24 Patient Engagement Can Create Customer Experience in Healthcare

Posted on by Bernie Borges

Customer Experience in Healthcare Does Not Exist without Engagement

Rohan Kulkarni is the healthcare practice lead at HFS Research. HFS Research is recognized as second to Gartner in healthcare influence among decision-makers.

In this episode, we discuss the “triple aim” model, which addresses the three pillars in healthcare:

  1. Improving patient outcomes
  2. Reducing the cost of care
  3. Enhancing the care experience through engagement

In our limited time together, we reviewed the first two pillars and spoke in more detail on the third pillar, enhancing the care experience, which is equivalent to the customer experience in business.

Rohan’s background is in product management in health plans. Most recently, he was CIO at Versant Health before joining HFS Research. His extensive background in healthcare and being a consumer of health care services (as we all are) has led him to many insights on these three pillars and ways we can improve the care experience.

The Triple Aim Construct in Healthcare

The triple aim is recognized as a construct to measure how well we are doing in delivering healthcare services. In the U.S., the cost of healthcare has been increasing at twice the rate of inflation. Chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and cardiac disease are on the rise. Life expectancy in the U.S. has declined from 79 to 78 years of age, despite rapid advancements in healthcare technology. This data supports the need for a triple aim engagement model.

Enhancing the Care Experience through Engagement

A healthcare consumer is a patient and a healthy member of a healthcare plan, possibly an employee, or a beneficiary of a government program. Each role is unique, with different expectations.

In reality, the current state of healthcare is sick care. The experience at the point of care happens when people are already ill and trying to get back to health. However, we could benefit significantly from increased engagement with our healthcare providers and professionals when we are healthy.

In a traditional customer journey model, a brand engages with consumers at different touchpoints throughout their purchasing journey. In healthcare, there is no current construct of engagement. Healthcare engagement is limited to transactions at the point of care.

The opportunity to improve is providing omnichannel engagement during the patient’s life journey before they are sick. This approach can increase the chance of the patient remaining healthy and/or recognizing circumstances that warrant healthcare treatment sooner to reduce the severity of illness and the cost of care.

Ownership-Based Engagement

An HFS Research study found that a healthy consumer with an income above the median wage is more satisfied with their experience at their point of care. By comparison, those dealing with illness and whose income is below the median wage are less satisfied with their healthcare experience. This data calls out the inequity in healthcare in the U.S.

Rohan points out that the potential remedy to address this inequity is to create an engagement process with shared ownership among the stakeholders, including the patient, the entities providing care delivery (e.g., hospitals, doctor groups, etc.), and employers who either self-insure or insure through traditional carriers.

Rohan points out the importance of educating consumers with vital information to enable them to improve their healthcare journey. Allowing the patients to manage their data and chart their choices in food and activities with accurate information in a shared ownership model would go a long way toward improving healthcare.

More than Just a Transactional Model

Setting up an engagement model would create a shared experience with incentives among all the stakeholders to maximize better health outcomes and reduce the cost of care delivery. Giving consumers a reason to stay healthy through information and resources would benefit all the stakeholders.

The health plan providers and employers should also be encouraged to engage patients during their healthy times, mainly since so many chronic conditions are often poorly managed for many reasons, including a lack of accurate information consumed by patients.

For effective engagement to happen, patients need to be educated about their health choices. And when they do need sick care, they need support and assistance with medication and other care details.

The Future of Triple Aim

Rohan hopes we will eventually reduce cost and improve patient outcomes and improve engagement, largely through evolving technology and the availability of innovative health plans.

Our population is constantly evolving. Lifestyles are changing. We’re likely to see more consumer engagement and literacy on healthcare topics. Healthcare distribution channels, including employers and the government, will play a different role, mainly as information concierges. As new distribution models emerge, they can disrupt the industry in favor of engagement and better patient outcomes.

Not surprisingly, Rohan enjoys a healthy lifestyle. He enjoys cooking healthy meals and hiking with his wife on the Appalachian trails near his home in northern Virginia.

Learn more about iQor digital customer experience capabilities.

Ep. 23 Three Strategies for Creating Stronger Employee Relationships

Posted on by Blake Graves

Companies That Thrive on Disruption Have Strong Employee Relationships

Charlene Li is renowned as a strategic thinker. She helps leaders and organizations thrive with disruption as an author, speaker, advisor, and board member. She has worked with dozens of companies such as IBM, Oracle, 3M, Adobe, Cisco, Dell, Intel, and Microsoft, to name a few. She has authored six books, the most recent titled: The Disruption Mindset – Why Some Organizations Transform, While Others Fail.  She is prolific at sharing content through her LinkedIn live streams and on Twitter and Clubhouse, sharing her thought leadership on the disruption mindset.

In this episode, Charlene discusses disruption in business, starting with what it is, why it is important for leaders to embrace it, and her recommendations to create stronger employee relationships within the disruption model. 

What is Disruption and Why it Matters

Charlene grew up in Detroit, where she was the only person of color in her early school years. Her presence alone was a disruption that prepared her mindset to look at mainstream principles through a different lens.

Now, she looks at the rapid evolution of technology as an opportunity for companies to thrive. In other words, she helps business leaders look at change and disruption as excellent opportunities for growth.

Charlene’s first book is the critically acclaimed Groundswell, which was published in 2008 when social media was in its early days. In this book, Charlene and her co-author Josh Bernoff encouraged business leaders to embrace the disruption of social media as an opportunity to engage and communicate with their audience. Leaders frequently asked her why do some companies thrive in disruption and others fail? So, she set out to research what’s different about those companies that thrive in disruption over and over again.

The Disruption Mindset

For a company to thrive in disruption, there must be a vision for what the future looks like. It begins with leadership, but the employees must catch the vision and trust leadership’s commitment and ability to embrace the disruption to thrive. Disruption will take people out of their comfort zone. Employees must trust their leaders to succeed in the midst of disruption. Leaders must have a plan to bring employees with them willingly on the disruption journey to a new future.

What it Takes to Create Stronger Employee Relationships

Charlene identifies three strategies for creating strong employee relationships to enable the disruption mindset to thrive across the organization. They are:

  • Integrity
  • Agency
  • Openness

Integrity

Leaders who do what they say they’re going to do with consistency between action and messaging operate with integrity. Employees know the difference between empty promises and actions that live out the company’s values. Leaders should communicate the reason for a different future, how the company needs to get there, how each employee is integral to getting there, and why it’s valuable to the employee. Beyond communication, leaders must live it every day to be recognized for integrity. Building long-term, sustained employee relationships start with integrity, which leads to long-term trust.

Agency

Agency means that employees believe in the mission and work hard to achieve the strategies defined by leadership. When agency is present, employees behave like owners in the business with accountability for their actions because they genuinely care. In other words, they are bought into the vision and they want to help achieve it.   

Openness

This is the simple concept that nothing is hidden. That everything not considered company confidential is out in the open and available for discussion. No question is off the table.

Charlene points out that these three strategies are intermixed to define the relationship between leaders and employees in the disruption mindset.

How to Implement Integrity, Agency, Openness

Charlene points out that leaders must be committed to building relationships with employees by defining what the relationship looks like. Leaders should document the attributes of their desired relationship with their teams as the starting point in this process.

At iQor, we deploy a weekly Mood-o-Meter survey to our contact center agents to measure their current mood. Anyone who scores low for more than one week in a row gets contacted by a skip-level manager to set up a meeting. These meetings allow the employee to discuss what’s on their mind. The relationship and trust built in these skip-level meetings exemplify our attempt at integrity, agency, and openness.   

Borrow Best Practices from the Marketing Department

Your marketing team is adept at listening and communicating with customers. Employers should adopt some of these marketing practices to listen and engage with employees in relationship building, treating them with the same care as customers are treated.

A Long-Term View of the Employee Relationship

The lines are blurred between an employee’s life outside of work and at work in the digital age. Employers should embrace the employee’s whole self, including their passion and dreams. By providing a supportive work environment that allows employees to thrive as an individual working toward their long-term dreams the relationship between employer and employee is strengthened. 

Infusing Integrity, Agency, and Openness into Employee Relationships

Imagine speaking with an employee about their last day at your company on their first day. Strong relationships are built if we talk openly with employees about their aspirations and offer support to help them achieve their dreams. In return, the employee is more likely to have a strong relationship with their employer while they work there. Additionally, we can ask cooperation to receive more than two weeks’ notice of resignation and the employee’s commitment to help hire and train a replacement. This level of relationship lives beyond current employment and breeds agency among employees.

What Charlene Does for Fun

Charlene is a serious business leader who enjoys playing with her cat named Cosmo. She has trained him to do tricks, which he is motivated to do for treats. She says he performs about a dozen tricks, such as jumping through hoops and playing with cups and balls. Charlene loves dogs, but with her busy travel schedule, a cat is purrfect for her lifestyle. 

Learn more about Charlene’s books and other valuable resources at her website.

Learn more about iQor digital customer experience capabilities.