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Nearly every startup wants to grow. At certain milestones of growth, however, the structure of customer support must change to successfully support the business. And while change is never easy, knowing what and when you’ll need to change as you scale can help smooth out the process. Over the past 13 years, Reagan Helms has grown from the solo support agent in a start-up organization with less than...

There’s a tendency to see mental health issues through a different lens than physical health issues. Whether it’s depression, anxiety, PTSD, or neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD, mental health challenges are often hidden from even close friends and family members. Because of the stigma around them and the fact that they often manifest with no outwardly visible signs, they are often not addres...

The chasm between the promises of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the reality of what AI can accomplish is closing faster than ever. Whether it’s creating uncanny images, writing poetry, providing better information in a chatbot, writing code, or creating original video from text prompts, the output of AI is increasingly disrupting long-established domains relegated to humans. This week, I’m talk...

Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, “The contact center is not a cost center.” The idea behind that is great contact centers drive customer loyalty and revenue by creating great experiences. But that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be efficient or that they should be immune to cost-cutting measures. Every company should be mindful of costs. But cutting costs for the sake of cutting costs can end up...

NPS® (Net Promoter System℠ / Net Promoter Score℠) was originally designed for B2C (Business to Consumer) as a predictor of loyalty. After working at Satmetrix Systems, the originator of the research behind NPS®, Steve Bernstein helped found Waypoint Group to tackle how to use NPS® in a B2B (Business to Business) environment.  B2B has a significantly different buying cycle (both in length and...

Remote work is not a COVID-era invention – it has been evolving for decades. But the COVID era forced many companies to adopt remote work with little preparation. Today, the debate rages inside companies – do we bring people back to the office? Do we continue with remote work? Is there a workable middle ground? Anne Bibb has spent the better part of the last decade advising companies on remote wor...

Customer Experience is impacted by the decisions companies make, the systems they build, and the people they hire. A fully formed CX strategy requires buy-in from the C-Suite because it affects every part of the business. To drive CX projects forward, practitioners need to be able communicate in “C-Suite Speak” to have an impact on the business. Diane Magers has worked with some of the most recogn...

Much like cooking, company culture is an art. It requires a lot of ingredients, time, and tools. But a culture with the wrong ingredients can leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. Growing up in a successful family business in the service industry, Jill Raff is very attuned to the importance of both Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) and has made her business to help companies w...

Chatbots are about as popular as cable companies, but every new technology needs time to mature. The continued evolution of Conversational AI (Artificial Intelligence) and NLP (Natural Language Processing) is making both “low-code” and “no-code” chatbot deployments successful, both from a customer standpoint and a business standpoint. But a successful deployment requires a solid strategy, appropri...

Employee Experience (EX) and how it relates to Customer Experience (CX) is a hot topic, but an often-overlooked aspect of EX is the workspace environment – layout, colors, scent, etc. As more and more people work from home, the environment these employees work in can become an afterthought. At the risk of sounding “woo-woo”, Claire Boscq set out to improve working environments (even if it’s also y...

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is deployed in a variety of ways in contact centers. But can AI improve hearing between customer and agent? Jacobi Anstruther, founder and CEO of IRIS Technologies, originally sought to improve F1 driver performance by inducing flow state through sound. This quickly shifted gears (!) to more low-hanging fruit: improving communication between driver and pit crew during...

Whether you believe in The Great Resignation or The Great Reshuffle, recruiting and hiring has become as important as ever. With an unmatched enthusiasm for the contact center business and over two decades of experience, Matt Beckwith shares insights on how to improve the recruiting and hiring process. We touch on: · Why recruiting and hiring is so important for contact centers · How Recruiting an...

We’ve all heard of Uber. Maybe we know multiple people participating in what’s been dubbed the “Gig Economy,” whether it’s for Uber or some other type of gig work. Megan Neale founded Limitless in 2016 to help create the brand support model of the future – GigCX. While gig work is a significant trend in the workforce, GigCX is more than just workforce flexibility – it’s a way to leverage loyal cus...

David Powers, host of Caffeinated CX and CXO for Rooter Hero Plumbing, and Drew Gorringe, Contact Center Technology Consultant at C-lect Consulting, join this bonus episode to discuss the future of the Contact Center, including emerging technologies. Connect with David on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjpowers2/ Connect with Drew on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewgorringeu...

While in high school, I was gifted a book titled 2000 Most Challenging and Obscure Words . I thought using some of those words made me sound smart. What they really did was get in the way of communication because the goal of communication is not to demonstrate knowledge. The goal is to be understood. An expert in effective business writing and advocate of the use of Plain Language, Leslie O’Flahav...

Mark Levy got into technology in the late 90’s – the early days of the internet. In the years that followed, he’s worked with some of the largest brands in the world on their Digital and CX strategies. It’s no surprise, then, that he’s an evangelist of improving the Digital Customer Experience (DCX). We touch on: · What Digital Transformation means · First Steps for Digital Transformation · How to...

Sandy Murphy started her own offshore BPO in 2021 after years cutting her teeth in the industry. But she found her true purpose after Typhoon Rai (Odette) hit the Philippines in December of 2021 and impacted her team members.  Her mission became to change the way customer engagement professionals are treated. We touch on: · How cloud-based systems have lowered the barrier to entry for startin...

Amy Smith, VP of Effortless Experience at Challenger, has been involved in best practices research and implementation her entire career and has been focused on Effortless Experience implementation since 2016. We touch on: · What is (and what isn’t) coaching in the Contact Center · The barriers preventing effective coaching and how to overcome them · Communication Styles · Building a Coaching Compe...

Dave Derington’s started his career as an analytical chemist, but it was teaching people how to use computer systems used in the lab that really excited him. This led to a role known as Customer Support Scientist. He honed his customer experience skills hosting LAN party events in the early days of online gaming and eventually got hooked by video game design and how games “help us define the exper...

Luke Jamieson got sick of the hours of being a pastry chef and ended up in the Contact Center world in Melbourne, Australia. He became an advocate employee engagement through gamification which led him to start his own consulting company. Today, as the Global Content Director at Centrical, he still advocates for great gamification in contact centers. He’s also a certified LEGO® Serious Play® facil...

Sean Ilenrey, VP of Support at Dutchie, got his start in fast food while dreaming of becoming a professional musician. While music didn’t pan out, his work ethic led to opportunities that eventually led him to the contact center world where he could finally “sit down” while he worked. He shares his journey into the world of workforce and operations, the differences between outsourced environments...

After cutting his teeth at Marriott, his idea for a hotel training manual eventually turned into a decades-long career traveling the world and training hotel and lodging professionals.  Doug Kennedy shares some of his experiences, beginning with his first job manning the register of his mother’s local craft supply store in Lexington, Kentucky.  Connect with him on LinkedIn - https://www....

When he’s not singing for The Lone Rangers, Brett Jones is leading Product at ItsaCheckmate. His path began in an outsourced contact center. But after being rendered homeless after the 2nd total loss from flooding inside a year, he decided to take a leap with a startup. We discuss the stresses of working in a tech startup, the pros and cons of working with family, and how product management is lik...

Contact Center Security is ever more important, but Matt Smallman says that the processes used by most contact centers are merely “Security Theatre.” During his time in the British Army, he was focused on Counter IED Search Operations. But when he left the military, he ended up in Financial Services and that’s when he began to see problems with security processes that technology could fix. He’s ma...

Bogdan Surdea-Blaga dispels the notion that there are vampires in Transylvania, shares his secret to career progression, and discusses how RebelDot acts as the “guardian” of new applications they support. Connect with him on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/bogdansb/ Music courtesy of Big Red Horse - https://bigredhorseband.com/ Brought to you by Happitu - https://happitu.com/