Exceptional Customer Service with Co-Browsing

Exceptional customer service drives customer satisfaction. True, and in order to provide the best customer service, you should have better relationship with your prospects and customers and at the same time use different technologies that can balance their happiness.

 

Co-browsing, being deployed across many serious industries at present plays a major role in many savvy business’ routines. It’s used for customer/sales support, online shopping, trainings, collaboration, transactions and more.

Co-browsing “why”s

If you are still unaware of co-browsing “why”s, let’s start with the simplest one - with co-browsing you can see exactly what your prospect/customer sees. You, in your turn, can use the pointer to guide throughout the website, show the products/services, help to choose the best one for the case and help complete the purchase. And the most important fact is that co-browsing guaranties security while sharing your web. What else is needed for a successful business?

Co-browsing “how”s

How co-browsing works? There are many solutions in the market, but I’ll mention the way, the  best one can perform.

• works with any browser on any computer
• works across all firewalls and pop-up blockers
• works on mobile devices
• works with complex pages and technologies
• limits view to any combination of web domains, web pages, desktop applications, documents, etc.
• hides/blocks sensitive data like credit card numbers or account numbers
• does not store any customer information, ensures regulatory compliance

 Co-browsing “pros”

What values will co-browsing add to the business? Really worth ones:

• real time assistance
• customer service improvement
• customer satisfaction and loyalty increase
• first call resolution rates increase
• call handling time decrease
• self-service tools adoption
• agents empowerment
• confidence increase
• revenues increase
• new visibility into the customer experience

Many financial and governmental services, retail, telecom, insurance and travel companies already use co-browsing and they saw significant increases in customer satisfaction scores. If you’re not in the list yet, hurry up; use co-browsing for your business success!

Twitter Usage Best Practices

Excited to speak about my favorite social platform – actually Twitter became the source of my social success. It’s so great when your followers’ number grows and they are really your targeted audience waiting for some valuable content from your side every day. Love Twitter! Are you in the same boat with me? If yes, let’s go to some interesting facts on Twitter usage.

Hashtag Usage 

We all know that tweets without hashtags are almost useless. But bear in mind to keep the hashtags to a minimum - 1 or 2 will get you 21 percent more engagement than if you add 3 or more. Hashtags can occur anywhere in the tweet without limitations – at the beginning, middle, or end, the only important thing is to use hashtags relevant to the topic.  

Image Usage 

Along with hashtag usage, keep in mind to compose tweets with images. This gets twice more engagement than those without. Images catch attention as if making the reader anxious to see the content.    

URL Usage

Tweets can be composed with or without a URL. But the ones that include links are 86 percent more likely to be retweeted.

Topic Usage In general Twitter has no limitation of topic usage – you can speak of whatever you desire. In my opinion, it’s more useful to choose a few topics and make them your favorite ones. In this way you become a fan of the topic and you have a proper audience.

Character Usage
140 character usage is the only limitation on Twitter. But this doesn’t meant that we should use it all. The optimal tweet size is 120 characters, which makes it easy for everyone to RT, share, comment. Shorter tweets get more engagement that long ones. Tweets with less than 100 characters get 17 percent more engagement.

Mobile Usage
It’s not a secret that mobile engagement changed the online presence. Twitter says that 60 percent of its active user base accesses the service via mobile devices. Compete found that 18 to 34 year olds are 21 percent more likely to be logging into Twitter primarily via a mobile device.

Date Usage
Many of us use social platforms (mostly for brand engagement) throughout the week. Only 19 percent of brands tweet on the weekends, Twitter engagement is 17 percent higher on those days for brands. So it’s wise to use some services, which allow you to schedule tweets. It makes your life easier, you can schedule for weekends, whole week, why not for a month?

80 percent of world leaders use Twitter. What about you?

Generations Living in the Present High -Tech World

We live in an age when one can meet seven different generations - radically different ones. Each generation has its characteristics, interests, attitude, likes and dislikes, and each approaches technology and life quite differently.

Incredible technological changes made it difficult to live in the same society with many of them. For such a broad topic, I went in search of generations existed in the 20^th century. According to which there have been five generations living in 20^th century and the division of every “generation category” differs, depending on the age range of 18 to 25.

20^th Century Generations:

GI Generation/Greatest Generation - born 1901-1926

Mature/Silents - born 1927- 1945

Baby Boomers - born between 1946 and 1964

Generation X - born between 1965 and 1980

Generation Y/ Millennial - born between 1981 and 2000

Prior to these generations, Lost Generation (1883-1900) also existed. But one can hardly find people living at present or who knows, maybe there are some.

While speaking about technology we come across Baby Boomers most of all, who have lots of difficulties with this innovative world. Generations before Baby Boomers have nothing to do with technology; they are so far from it and live their calm life without even realizing what they miss. On the contrary Baby Boomers try to keep pace with the innovations and the most complains come from their side. That’s why many modern technologies like co-browsing, live chat, screen sharing and many others come to help them.

Generations coming after Baby Boomers very much differ not only from Baby Boomers, but from each other. The Generation X is not very much interested in traditional perks and needs to make clear what they are looking for (having patience to wait), the Generation Y loves challenge, they are flexible, multi- tasking, true team players, but want everything right now.

As for the 21^st century, here we already have two generations, and I guess that if before the category range was big enough (18-25 years), now it will change faster, as everything in this world changes at such an enormous speed.

21^st Century Generation:

Generation Z/Boomlets – 2001- 2009

Generation A/Alpha, 2010-2025 

I’m almost sure that at the end of the 21^st century today’s new generations may appear in the same situation as Baby Boomers. Life is like a marathon, and you should run fast to keep up with all the new things.

2015 – Starting a New Year with the Best Tech Deals

The internet of things? Can we learn about the future peering into the past? If so, this year will also be a promising one, as 2014 has been marked as the most active year in technology. Before that, 2000 was the most active one.

Numerous acquisitions happen each month, but to make my posts shorter, I select the most important deals only. Surely they are important from my personal point of view; anyway hope that my readers will share the same opinion.

The same “giants” all the time – as if conquering the heights. Do they need the products or the talents, or maybe both? Never remember any company announcing about that.

Year started with social deals – two Facebook acquisitions with two-day interval – not bad. Then Twitter joint the list with its ZipDial acquisition. Ok, let’s switch to the list, not to miss anyone. 

06 January - Facebook Acquires Wit.ai to Help Its Developers With Speech Recognition and Voice Interfaces
Facebook acquired Wit.ai, a Y Combinator startup founded 18 months ago to create an API for building voice-activated interfaces. Wit.ai already has 6,000 developers on its platform who have built hundreds of apps. The Wit.ai product lets developers add a few lines of its code to instantly build in voice control and speech recognition. The platform will remain open and free.  

08 January - Facebook Acquires Video Compression Startup QuickFire
Facebook acquired video-compression company QuickFire Networks, further underscoring the social networking giant’s increasing focus on video. Based in San Diego, QuickFire says, it can quickly convert video formats and allow them to be downloaded with less bandwidth and without a loss in video quality. 

20 January – Twitter Acquires India-Based 'Missed Call' Startup ZipDial

Twitter announced that it has acquired Bangalore-based ‘missed call’ marketing platform, ZipDial, which assigns companies a special phone number which their brands can use in print ads or TV commercials. Customers can call the number and hang up before they are charged for the call. In turn, brands can phone or send text messages about their business to the ‘missed callers’. ZipDial’s clients include Unilever, Disney, Gillette, Amazon, Facebook and, of course, Twitter, whose customers have used the platform for placing orders, receiving coupons or entering contests. 

20 January – Microsoft Acquires Text Analysis Startup Equivio, Plans to Integrate Machine Learning Tech into Office 365

Microsoft announced it has acquired text analysis software startup Equivio, which uses machine learning to let users explore large, unstructured sets of data. The startup’s technology leverages advanced text analytics to perform multi-dimensional analyses of data collections, intelligently sort documents into themes, group near-duplicates, and isolate unique data. 

21 January – Apple Buys UK Startup Semetric to Power up Its Media Analytics
Apple has acquired Semetric, the London-based startup behind music analytics service Musicmetric.  While Musicmetric seems an obvious fit with iTunes and Beats Music, Semetric has also been working on analysing data for games, TV, movies and books so will enhance Apple’s understanding of data around all the digital products it sells. 

23 January – Microsoft to Acquire Revolution Analytics to Help Customers Find Big Data Value with Advanced Statistical Analysis

Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire Revolution Analytics - the leading commercial provider of software and services for R, the world’s most widely used programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics. This acquisition will help more companies use the power of R and data science to unlock big data insights with advanced analytics. 

23 January – Mobile Network Three to Buy O2 in £10bn Deal 

Asia’s richest man is poised to take control of the UK’s biggest mobile phone network, after Three announced it had started exclusive takeover talks with its larger rival 02. The deal would create the UK’s largest mobile phone firm with 31.5 million customers, cutting the number of network owners in the UK from four to three.

Customer Age

“This is the age of the customer”, was the opening remark and I decided to call my post accordingly.

Now my own introduction – when I received the invitation to participate at The Future Contact Center Summit in Florida as an industry influencer with a free press pass, I was really happy. But I had no idea what to expect from the conference, it was the first summit I was going to participate.

I read the brochure which was very impressive - all about customer service - the topic I like so much. “Customer service is the new marketing. Marketing is the new customer service”- so cool!

Thanks to my management and the company I work, I appeared in Orlando. And the summit started. It was really a place where leaders unite, a place where you become aware of the latest technology innovations from the industry experts.

“Future success depends on what you do right now”, said one of the summit speakers.

Lack of “Excellent” Customer Service

Although we speak so much about better customer service and try to make it really a good one, statistics shows that we lack excellent customer service. Hold times during last year were 30-45 minutes long and callers were transferred multiple times. Is it the service we are willing for? Why we still have a poor service?

Some more “sad” statistics from the event:

•  38% - give the same information or repeat themselves multiple times
•  37% - getting transferred multiple times
•  33% - not being able to get through the system to talk to a real person
• 29% - unable to resolve the problem

Why can’t we give our customers an effortless experience? Is it really difficult or our call centers need some more trainings to produce better results?

The customer is changing so fast in the internet age, their expectations change every day. And many companies don’t even listen to their customers. Why? If you listen to them, you’ll know so many new things that will surely help your business. While listening to your customers, you’ll start generating new ideas that will face their needs. What else is needed for making our customers happy and loyal?

"Customer Experience is the sum of all interactions a person has with your company throughout their life"

I’d like to mention some great ideas from industry experts:

• Listen to all you hear
• If something matters to your customers, it must matter to your business
• If your competition is doing something, find out “why” they are doing it
• Put the power to your customers’ hands!”

While delivering customer service, we should keep in mind that the word of mouth is increasing the influence on the customer trust 3-5 times more that TV or radio ads. Instead of spending money on such things, try to delight your customers and they will help you sell your products.

“Start with good people.

Lay out the rules.

Communicate with your employees and reward them.

If you do all those things effectively, you cannot lose”

~Lee Lacocca

Generation – Does it Matter?

Another important topic of the event was the generation which comprises the largest demographic- 80 Million people.  Yes, those are Millennials – the most tech-dependent, achievement-oriented and collaborative generation.  A generation, which is the most educated one ever – 63% of Millennials have a Bachelor degree. Millennials love blogging too - 50% of bloggers today are Millennials. They are the working power of most technology companies, so it’s of great importance to understand this generation’s needs and preferences.

Social Media and Mobile

In social media Millennials are leaders too, they love it so much. They are in many social platforms and like to be informed through both desktops and mobile devices.

71% of Millennials check social media sites at least once per day which is more than they watch TV-60%

Millennials are inseparable from their smartphones and they listen to each other on the social channels.

• 75% of users access Twitter through mobile
• 68% of all clicked Facebook “Like”s come from mobile
• 62% of all emails are first opened on mobile
• 40% of YouTube views are on mobile 

Create Magic for Your Customers

And to sum up my everlasting impressions, I cannot but mention the most inspiring session of the Former Executive Vice President of Operations for Walt Disney Resort, Lee Cockerell, who shared his ideas on how each of us can create magic for our customers, our families, friends, how to spend our time productively, as it directly relates to how happy, healthy and successful we are in all parts of our life. I do believe that he inspired the entire audience. 

•  Focus on the right things - hire right people!
• Training is of great importance – test people!
• Make better habits, show appreciation!
• Keep your life under control
• Doing hard work makes your life easier
• Get organized, become a better manager
•  Make sure what competition is doing
• Give people authority – people have no authority, that’s the reason of a poor service
• Try to do business with yourself, although it’s scary
• Do the right things to be trusted
• Communicate with people in the right way, not an easy way
• Management is about doing, leadership is about being
• Treat people as individuals and they will surprise you
• Set higher expectations of yourself, ask for more and you’ll get more

If you do all those, you can create Disney Magic too!