Month: March 2018

You already have the agents with great attitudes, aptitude for learning, and passion for helping others. If you have these agents who are a great cultural fit with experience in the customer service field – you’ve hit the bonus round.

When it comes to messaging, you may be wondering which agents may be the best fit to staff your business messaging channel. In this article, we’ll discuss how Quiq’s clients have managed staffing for the messaging channel, and the surprises and lessons learned along the way.

Why Staffing For the Messaging Channel Is Different

The Skinny: The staff on your messaging channel will need to communicate a bit differently because customers have different expectations as compared to traditional channels.

• The point of having a multi-channel strategy isn’t to force everybody to one channel, but to provide each customer with their preferred method to have a conversation with a company. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about what your customer expectations are for each channel. Understanding where each customer is in terms of their product lifecycle, demographic, lifetime value or life event/status can help you determine where to focus the energy within your contact center.
• For instance, if you’re a customer service center that provides complex and lengthy explanations of 401K options to Baby Boomers, you’re probably not hopping on Facebook and updating your Instagram stories too often. However, you still may want to use messaging to attract new generations of investors or to help those who may need some guidance on their first account. On the other hand, if you’re selling concert tickets, you’re customers are probably jumping on Facebook or trying to text you to buy the best seats.
• Not only do your customers get to choose the channel they prefer, but multi-channel contact centers also allow you to align your personnel to their channel preference. This table will help you think through your customer’s preference for a particular channel and why it’s important that your agents are aligned appropriately:

  Channel	Customer Motivators	Agent Motivators
  Phone	Complex issue May need to ask a lot of follow up questions Wants someone to talk through the issue	Enjoys talking to people Easily able to verbally relay the appropriate empathy Finds the ebbs and flows of calls to be enjoyable
  Email	Has a non-urgent issue Needs some form of documentation Wants to share details	Likes to have more time to deal with issues Believes that an email trail gives the customer more confidence Likes to batch work and feels the influx of email is more predictable
  Chat	Doesn’t want or need to talk to anyone Engages online regularly Wants help right away In a location not suitable for a phone call (i.e. too noisy, at work, etc.)	Comfortable using automation to reduce handle time Able to communicate well with images and a few words Capable of multi-tasking to keep multiple conversations moving Enjoys a steady stream of work
  SMS	In a location not suitable for a phone call Doesn’t want to be tied up in a phone tree or talking to someone Busy, on-the-go

  While all of these channels may be available, once you implement messaging, you will see a decrease in phone and email volumes as customers shift to messaging. Most Quiq clients see 15-20% of calls deflected from the phone channel. Since the majority of your agents text message on a daily basis, it isn’t difficult to train them to handle messaging.

• Next, let’s discuss three simple characteristics that make a messaging agent effective.
  

  Characteristics of an Ace Messaging Channel Agent

  Messaging is fun, agents like to do it, in fact, many of them will request to do it. Some Quiq clients even use messaging as a way to reward agents. You can use the messaging channel as a promotion from handling phone calls and emails.

  While most people text on a daily basis, including your agents and your customers, that doesn’t mean that every agent will be able to handle multiple messages within the desired time.

  Here are a few things to look for in a messaging agent:

  1. Great multi-tasker

  • Messaging requires agents to work concurrently on multiple conversations, so you have to be sure that your agents are comfortable with this kind of workflow. Just because some employees are mobile and social geniuses, they might not be the best agents for handling simultaneous activities, so you need to have the right training in place to ensure a consistent service experience.

  2. Clear and concise writer

  • There are reasons why you should limit your SMS and text messages to less than 160 characters. The core idea is that these messages should be short and to the point given customers are using a mobile device. If your customers want to read or send something longer, they’ll likely use email.

  3. Not afraid of cross-sell and upsell opportunities

  • Customers that use messaging are engaged and most likely to be happy with this channel, unlike a customer who has been sitting on hold or waiting for an email response. Messaging-enabled agents should not be afraid to offer additional value to these customers who are more approachable and receptive.

  The Productivity Hacking Tool

  Agents want to use Quiq Messaging because of the ease of use and productivity gains. Some Quiq clients even look back at their initial hesitation to add messaging as a channel and wonder why they didn’t adopt messaging sooner #SMH.

  Staffing and workload improvements have made messaging a home run for a more productive contact center:

  • Quiq clients have seen work time reductions by as much as 25 – 40% with text messaging versus other channels.
  • Messaging agents can handle 6-8 conversations at a time, as compared to 1 phone call.
  • Messages come in at a more steady rate since consumers are able to shoot off a quick message at any time during the day.
  • With Quiq, messages are prioritized based on the customers level of activity or interaction with the agent, so the agent never has to worry about who they should engage with next.
  • Quiq clients are realizing a 5-7 ppt increase in customer satisfaction rates over the messaging channel, higher than any other channel.

  Messaging is an easy, convenient channel that’s a real time-saver – and everyone wants to keep it that way. An agent who can blend speed and issue resolution, for both simple and complex cases, is perfect for the messaging channel and will help you fully realize efficiencies.

  Let Quiq get you started on messaging. Request a demo today.

  Quiq makes it easy for customers to contact a business via Messaging, the preferred channel already in use with our friends and family.  With Quiq, customers can now engage with companies via SMS/text messaging, Facebook Messenger, Web Chat, In-App, and Kik for help with their pre-sales and post-sales questions. Learn more about Quiq today at quiq.com.

Are your customers antagonized by a complex IVR menu maze? Do they get frustrated and press zero to talk to a live person, shout “agent, agent, agent”, or hang up before they resolve their issue? You’re not alone. Although IVR has been viewed as a pillar of customer self-service for a long time, most people have a strong aversion to using them.

IVR systems have received a lot of scrutiny as consumers, especially Millennials, have become increasingly more self-reliant and mobile. Advocates and critics have predicted the rise and fall of IVR for decades. Maybe it’s time we start to think of a different outcome – one that isn’t a total win or lose game for IVR.

In this post, we’ll discuss how IVR must evolve in order to stay relevant in today’s mobile world. We’ve identified three things that must be brought into the IVR experience.

Omni-Channel

Consumers live across many devices. Laptops, smartphones, and tablets are the screens that manage our lives day in and day out. Whether it’s staying in touch with our family or friends or staying on top of current news, we are digitally connected and dependent. From tracking our diets to tracking packages, there is an expectation of immediacy and availability of information and support that spans channels.

These expectations don’t stop once a customer picks up the phone to call a company. In fact, this is where those expectations can turn into impatience and frustration.  In fact, 93% of customers using a call center channel want one call resolution (OCR).

However, many customers hang up before they even speak to anyone.  Call abandonment rates can average anywhere from 10% – 15% depending on the industry. For those calls that do engage an agent, OCR is at a 72% industry average, which means 28% of customers have to call back one or many times to reach a resolution.

These stats tell us that anywhere from 38% – 43% of customers picking up the phone for customer service are not getting the level of service they want and expect. We believe IVRs will have to present customers with channel options, other than just voice so customers can find more convenient paths to issue resolution.

This is exactly the reason a lot of Quiq clients have looked at messaging as a way to honor the needs of the digitally connected customer. These clients are enabling asynchronous messaging over SMS, social, and the web. Quiq Messaging integrates directly into an existing IVR and enables existing landlines to send and receive text messages.

Personal

IVR’s are notoriously robotic, confusing, and impersonal. Future IVR’s may find ways to change that with advances in voice recognition and by making menu options more visual. The use of visual communications is on a rise throughout all media consumed because it helps relay information faster and with a more clear and more consistent delivery.

For instance, Quiq clients have found that customers are engaging heavily through mobile devices. The majority feel right at home attaching documents, emojis, gifs, videos, and photos to bring more context to their specific situation. Agents who use Quiq Messaging are often encouraged to use visual content such as emojis to make conversations with customers feel more like the conversations they have with friends and family.

Quiq clients are also adopting messaging as a way to make conversations feel more human by adapting to the customer’s speed and pace of interaction. Quiq’s Adaptive Response Timer automatically prioritizes conversations for agents based on the customer’s engagement pace to give each customer a more tailored experience.

Mobile

Calls get missed or dropped. Customers get busy and have to abandon conversations. Future IVRs will have to be more accommodating to the lives of busy customers who don’t want to shout “representative” or “agent” repeatedly into the phone while in noisy environments or sit through confusing menus only to be put on hold.

Instead of having customers wait on hold, Quiq clients are able to provide customers the option, within the IVR, to have the next available agent text them. By deflecting calls to messaging, our clients are able to give customers a more preferred option to engage. By deflecting calls to messaging, our clients are able to give customers a more preferred option to engage, while reducing workload ~25 to ~40%.

Research shows that 71% of consumers find text messaging to be an extremely or very effective Consumer-to-Business (C2B) communication channel (Customer Preference for Messaging). Customers appreciate having the option to address their issues over the channel that is most convenient for them.

With asynchronous communications such as text messaging, conversations can take place over a time period that fits the customer’s pace, so even if your customer has to walk away from a conversation or gets disconnected, conversations pick up right where they left off.

IVR still remains one of the leading entry points for consumers to engage with companies. However, it’s also the costliest way for companies to interact with their customers and the most inconvenient way for customers to engage. Quiq Messaging allows you to deliver a personal, mobile, omnichannel experience – easily integrating within your current IVR. If you’re ready to bring your IVR into the future, request a demo today.

Quiq makes it easy for customers to contact a business via Messaging, the preferred channel already in use with our friends and family.  With Quiq, customers can now engage with companies via SMS/text messaging, Facebook Messenger, Web Chat, In-App, and Kik for help with their pre-sales and post-sales questions. Learn more about Quiq today at quiq.com.

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