To maximize the impact of your customer service department, there are a number of training programs available which focus on a variety of different areas. There’s emotional intelligence training, team-building, and conflict management training, just to name a few. There are also multiple options available for the delivery of these programs: online, lecture, workshop, full day, half day, etc.

There’s no question that customer service training is a worthwhile investment for your organization, but how do you know if you have chosen the right kind of customer service training? Here are a few tips to help you make your decision.

  1. Define your goal. It’s difficult to choose the right type of training if you’re unclear on what you want your training to achieve. Asking yourself what challenge you hope to address by providing the training can really help you get clear on the goal you are working towards. Do you want to orient new staff? Help staff deal with difficult calls? Or reduce the length of your call center calls?
  2. Evaluate the route to achieving your goal. Sometimes training isn’t always the answer depending on what your goal is. If you feel like staff have all the information they need to do their jobs well, then look to your business processes. Maybe there is something happening in the back office that needs fine-tuning.
  3. List your training objectives. Once you know your goal and have decided that training is the way to achieve it, you need to determine what objectives the training will meet. What outcomes will you see as a result of the training?
  4. Research training programs. Now that you have your goal and objectives set out, you can start researching training programs to see which ones will accomplish what you’re trying to do. You may even find that designing your own in-house training is the best solution if nothing out there matches your needs.
  5. Determine how you will measure whether your goal was achieved. Here is where you need to start thinking about some quantitative data. Hopefully you are already using metrics to improve your contact center performance and you can use those numbers as a starting point. It’s important to determine what improvements you want to see as well as how you will measure those.
  6. Post-training check-in. After your employees have gone through the training, you need to review the results. Check the key metrics you identified in step 5 and notice what they looked like before and after the training.

Regardless of the type and format of customer service training you want to provide, you can use these six steps to ensure you’re investing in the right kind of training to meet your goals. KOVA  provides Enterprise Feedback Management software to help you keep track of all the important customer service metrics in your business. With Enterprise Feedback Management software you can share and customize data, analyze customer responses, evaluate employee performance, and protect customer data. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you start tracking the key metrics you need to improve customer service in your business.

Customer service will always be a priority regardless of what industry or business you’re in. It’s even more important now in 2018, when customers can easily share their views for the whole world to see on social media. A bad customer review will spread like wildfire. Many experts believe customer service is more important than products and pricing when it comes to setting up your business strategy. Here are a few customer service trends to keep your eye on in 2018.

More Ways to Communicate With Customers

The integration of social media with customer service is not new. In 2017 we saw the introduction of the Messenger bot through Facebook. You can now order your Starbucks coffee through the Facebook Messenger bot and be notified when it is ready for you to pick up. In 2018, the bot will become even more prevalent as a way for customers to communicate with their favorite companies.

With so many methods available to communicate with customers, organizations will need to make sure they are providing the same level of service across all channels in order to remain competitive. This may mean hiring more customer service agents or assigning agents to be responsible for certain channels.

Service Continues to Matter

You can probably remember a few times when the customer service you received caused you to stop patronizing certain businesses. Regardless of advances in technology, the customer experience is still key. Customers want to be treated like humans, and this is an important consideration when deciding what technology to incorporate into your customer experience. Customers still want human interactions, therefore, a good balance between personal service provided by a real person and automation through technology is key.

Comprehensive Customer Data

With information coming from so many sources in 2018, it’s important to consolidate it to create a comprehensive view of your customer. Having a centralized data dashboard will allow you to serve your customers more completely and efficiently. This will help you determine the necessary steps to provide your customers with the best experience.

Regardless of the type of business you run, optimizing your company’s customer experience must be a priority if you’re going to achieve your goals. Continue to focus on your customer experience by taking advantage of the comprehensive customer data available to you and maintaining a genuine customer service approach that uses people and technology in cooperation. Make sure you have a clear and consistent plan for managing all the communication channels your customers use.

If you’re not sure how your customers feel about your business, KOVA has the solution. Our Customer Experience Survey software can help you gather valuable customer feedback at the end of your calls through IVR or email. The software is browser-based and allows you to collect data on everything from products and processes to staff performance and customer loyalty. To learn more about how you can use our Customer Experience Survey software in your business, contact us today.

Job-related health issues are a concern for many people in our country and around the world. Public safety officers have one of the most stressful jobs around. They need to remain calm in some of the most terrifying situations and they often work long shifts or shifts that last overnight. It’s not surprising that almost fifty percent of public safety officers report having mental health symptoms. Here are some of the health issues affecting public safety officers.

Stress

Public safety officers risk their lives everyday to protect our citizens. They are exposed to extremely high levels of stress. Stress can cause a number of symptoms including headaches, stomach aches, low energy, chest pain, sore muscles, insomnia, and frequent colds and infections.

Some of the ways that 9-1-1 dispatchers deal with stress are also effective for public safety officers. These include spending quality time with loved ones, talking to a counsellor, and using exercise as a stress reliever.

Anxiety and Depression

Anxiety and depression are often the result of repeated stress. The symptoms of anxiety and depression are similar to those of stress. Sometimes people with depression can end up turning to drugs or alcohol for relief.

There are a few things that can help with anxiety and depression as well as improve the mental health of public safety officers. Instituting an employee wellness plan is key in the process and can include things like counselling services, gym passes, and social activities.

Lack of Sleep

Given the amount of shift work required by public safety officers, it’s not surprising that they suffer from a lack of sleep. Lack of sleep can cause dizziness, mood changes, memory problems, and difficulty concentrating.

Exposure

Public safety officers experience physical health issues as well. They risk being exposed to any number of things depending on what they are dealing with. This can range from toxic chemicals to flying objects and gunfire. Public safety officers have a very real risk of physical injury.

Dangerous people are a big threat to the physical health of public safety officers as well. Sometimes, no matter what the officer does, the other person intends to harm them. But the greatest dangers to the physical health of public safety officers are two things you’d least expect: traffic and training accidents. Traffic accidents have been the leading cause of death for public safety officers over the past several years.

While public safety is a career with high risks to the mental and physical health of those who choose it, Silent Partner can help manage some of these issues for public safety officers by giving them less to worry about on the job. This smartphone recording app provides premium quality recording of audio and video and can capture text messages and photos. It provides added benefits of case management features and speech analytics. Lighten the load of your public safety officers by contacting us today to learn more about Silent Partner.

Social proof is a big thing these days. It allows potential customers to see how you interact with your current customers, and what your customers think of you based on what they say about your products or services. In the information age it’s become extremely easy to obtain social proof, and online communities are one place people can go to see social proof in action. Integrating social media into your contact center’s customer service offerings is one way to easily start your own online community.

Not only do online communities increase social proof for your business, but they also help strengthen your customer experience by acting like an extension of your call center, allowing customers to connect in other ways with your business, providing employees with a place to share ideas, and creating customer-to-customer connections. Let’s examine each of these in a little more detail.

Call Center Extension

Picking up the phone is no longer the only way to reach a contact center. Some might argue that social media and other digital tools will make traditional contact centers obsolete if they choose not to incorporate those tools into their business. By creating an online community through the use of social media, you now have another way for customers to reach you. The online community acts like an extension of your call center, where customers can start or continue conversations with your contact center agents. Many people nowadays prefer communicating online to having a conversation on the phone where they may potentially spend some time waiting on hold.

Another Place to Connect

An online community can provide a place for customers to connect with you and your business. Maybe they don’t have a specific issue that they would normally call the contact center for, but they just have a quick question about your product or service they can post online. In this way, you can provide more value to your customers by sharing helpful information about your products and services, like sharing a link to an article, that might not be shared as easily over the phone.

Customer Connections

Online communities allow customers to connect with each other as well. Here’s where you get into the meat and potatoes of social proof. As your community grows, you will see customers start to answer other customers’ questions and provide honest feedback about your products and services. You can jump into the conversation or simply monitor what customers are saying about you - then use the information to improve your customer experience.

Employee Think Tank

Online communities aren’t just for interacting with customers. Creating an exclusive online community for your employees will help them provide a better experience for your customers by allowing them to share ideas for dealing with certain customer complaints or even quickly ask questions while they are on a call with a customer. Providing a place where employees can share ideas is a valuable way to reduce employee turnover too.

KOVA provides a number of workforce enterprise optimization solutions that can help you improve the customer experience in your contact center. Contact us today to learn more.

As 2017 comes to a close, it’s time to start thinking about what you can do to start the new year off right. Take note of how your contact center’s performance could be improved going forward and record your goals for 2018. Once you’ve got an idea about your goals, it’s time to figure out how you’re going to reach them.

One way to reach your goals in the new year is to make sure you have all the tools you need. One important tool is workforce optimization software. Workforce optimization software can help you manage your call center’s workload, meet quality standards, find more time for training and coaching, and gain insights from numerous helpful reports.

There are two important factors of workforce optimization that should be considered as you start the new year: employees and technology. By investing in technology like workforce optimization software, you are actually investing in your employees as well, because workforce optimization software allows you to create better employee schedules, train your employees better, and streamline processes which will help your employees do their jobs better.

Understand What Your Workforce Optimization Software Can Do

To get the most out of your workforce optimization software, you’ll want to make sure you’re using the software where you need it most. If staffing is a big concern for you, then use it to create optimal schedules. If your contact center employees’ level of customer service isn’t where you’d like it to be, then use the quality monitoring and recording functions to listen to and analyze customer interactions. You can also use the software to train employees so they are better prepared to serve customers at the level you expect.

Analytics are another feature of workforce optimization software that can help you improve your processes and start the new year off right. Analytics can help boost your call center’s success by improving customer retention rates, predicting whether follow-up calls will be successful, and increasing the quality and efficiency of calls.

Improve Back Office Efficiency

Workforce optimization software isn't just for your call center. The back office is generally tasked with things like remaining compliant and staying on budget. Workforce optimization software can improve back office efficiency by centralizing staffing and workload management, and helping the call center and the back office to communicate more efficiently which also improves customer service.

Start the new year off right with the workforce optimization solution that’s right for you. At KOVA Corp, we provide a number of enterprise workforce optimization solutions to help your contact center be successful. Our workforce optimization solutions are designed to work seamlessly across all areas of your business whether it’s the call center or the back office. Workforce Optimization with Verint Media Recorder offers a number of solutions to help you capture critical data about customers and processes so you can learn where there are opportunities to improve performance. Contact us today, to learn more about how we can help you start the new year off right.

The 9-1-1 emergency services network has been in place for over forty years. Communication takes place by voice using telephone and analog lines. One of the major drawbacks of this technology is the limited ability to handle overflow, which means callers can receive a busy signal - which is, of course, highly undesirable during an emergency situation. There may be times when reporting an emergency using your voice is also not desirable. Enter Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG911).

The NG911 initiative was started in 2006 when a need for 9-1-1 service infrastructure updating was identified. The goal of NG911 is to upgrade telephone-based 9-1-1 systems to fully digital IP networks capable of receiving information by text, video, and voice. NG911 will allow public safety answering points (PSAPs) to control congestion by automatically rerouting calls to other PSAPs based on the location of the call.

Converting the 9-1-1 emergency services network to NG911 is no easy undertaking, because the emergency response system cannot allow for downtime. Preparing your PSAP for NG911 compliance is also a daunting task which must be done in incremental steps. A 2014 study conducted by Dr. Walt Magnussen at Texas A&M University for the Industry Council for Emergency Response Technologies evaluated the progress of the NG911 initiative and found that many states hadn’t started converting their 9-1-1 systems due to a lack of funding for the required capital.

In 2016 the National 911 Progress Report was issued. The National 911 Program was created to help coordinate and promote optimal 911 services, as well as provide federal leadership. Forty-six states provided data for the report which confirms the necessity of NG911. The report indicated PSAPs are receiving an increase of calls from cell phones. About 80% of all incoming calls are from cell phones. Of the states that participated in the survey, 17 have installed and are testing the NG911 infrastructure. This is almost double the number of states that had implemented NG911 in 2013.

Upgrading to NG911 is a large undertaking that must be done over time in order to ensure there are no downtimes in the 9-1-1 system. Information learned from the collection of the data can be used to foster collaboration between individual states and the Federal government, as well as provide information that can be helpful in applying for the resources needed to fully implement NG911.

While the task of converting to NG911 is an extremely large undertaking, both financially and in terms of time commitment, funding is available to help individual PSAPs with the costs associated with optimizing their 911 services. A total of $115 million was set aside for the 911 Grant Program in 2014, and it is anticipated that the grants will be awarded in 2018.

To learn more about how you can prepare your PSAP for NG911, check out our Emergency Communications Training white paper. At KOVA, we specialize in public safety solutions. To learn more about how KOVA can help you with the transition to NG911, contact us today.

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