B2B sales will never be the same

The sales world is forever altered, thanks to pandemic-fueled digital transformation across entire enterprises. In the B2B space, where relationships reign supreme, sales organizations found effective and efficient ways to conduct business with a digital-first approach that’s efficient, effective, and won’t go away any time soon.

In-person meetings have nearly disappeared, replaced by Zoom meetings, webinars, virtual trade shows, online wine tastings, and cooking demonstrations. Many sellers found success in these digital introduction, education, and nurture activities, thanks to the relaxed nature of connecting with people in their homes in an informal, authentic environment.

In its research, “The Forrester Tech Tide™: Sales Technologies, Q1 2021,” Forrester finds that digital “front doors” are now the primary way that sales prospects connect with brands—80% of B2B sales will take place in remote and digital settings, elevating the roles of data insight, digital content, and inside sales in the sales process.

The convergence of digital channels, buyer control, and deeper relationships means the old way of making sales won’t cut it anymore. Sales teams still relying on “old school” strategies and tactics will only go so far.

B2B sellers understand they need to change yet face challenges to creating successful digital-first sales experiences. As we emerge into a post-COVID sales environment, the buyer’s table adds more seats, decision-making takes longer, and sellers find it hard to stand out in a virtual environment. Today’s sellers need deeper, faster, more personalized data and insight, as well as the right tools to foster engagement and relationship building. They need to show their value to the buyer more quickly and digitally in order to build strong human connections. It’s a tough balance.

6 sales technologies to support digital-first sales
To succeed in today’s sales world, new technologies are needed. In the same Tech Tide report, Forrester recommends six technologies where sales organizations should invest to keep up with the changing sales landscape.

1. Conversational intelligence
According to Forrester, conversational intelligence tools, like speech & text analytics and other voice-of-customer technology, “use natural language processing to capture unstructured data from remote spoken conversations between sellers and buyers. Embedded AI analyzes the data and surfaces insights to support executive-level decision making, inform management coaching, and inspire reps to adopt best practices.”

There is tremendous insight to be gleaned from unstructured data. Keywords and trends, customer sentiment, and process analysis can help improve sales engagements and improve future interactions on the phone or through digital channels.

2. Customer success
Customer success (CS) solutions are used by brands to monitor the health of their customer relationships by keeping track of customer satisfaction and churn across their products and services. Forrester calls this a “high-potential category that is evolving quickly.” If used correctly, CS solutions enable proactive engagement with customers to ensure they realize the full value of their purchases and derive value from the brand.

As the space evolves, automation, AI, and advanced analytics tools are helping companies drive better engagement, higher revenues, and lower defection from their customer success activities.

3. Revenue intelligence
Revenue intelligence is a dynamic, developing category, using technology to “capture engagement activity between buyers and sellers and automatically upload that data to CRM systems,” Forrester writes. As automatic data capture and CRM uploads of buyer and seller activity data become commonplace, AI-generated insights from a range of revenue cycle activities offer significant potential to influence decision making. The AI engine analyzes data to deliver insights; provides dynamic guidance; and supplies inputs on deal management, forecasting, and other revenue generating activities, Forrester notes.

4. Sales engagement
According to Forrester, sales engagement (SE) platforms “help sales, marketing, and post-sales personnel manage their omnichannel touchpoints at all stages of the buy cycle.” Leaning on automation and orchestration of simple, repetitive tasks, SE platforms deliver efficiency and effectiveness gains. Embedded AI can help users understand preferred engagement channels and surface missing contacts.

5. Sales training and services
To win, you must train; that’s where sales training and services come in. Providers in this space help businesses increase sellers’ effectiveness and align sales execution to strategic business goals. With them, sales enablement leaders improve sellers’ skills, increase cross-functional collaboration, and embrace modern selling methods.

6. User-generated video
User-generated video allows sellers and other users to create, edit, and share dynamic and personalized video content over email or within social channels. They are prevalent in the B2C world, but with so much B2B buying and selling happening remotely now, Forrester predicts asynchronous video messages “will be an essential arrow in the seller’s quiver in 2021 and beyond.” There is also great potential for user-generated videos among sales teams and other internal groups.

Success story: Sales incubator boosts revenue and wins back customers
A leading bulk oil, fuel, and lubricants distributor wanted to enhance, expand, and evolve its inside sales approach while improving efficiencies and leveraging more insight. TTEC’s sales incubator program included growth services expertise, robust digital products, and experienced at-home inside sales experts. We deployed salesforce’s CRM platform for more visibility into the entire sales funnel. Now, it was clearer at which stage each account was, how many “touches” each account had received, and other reporting insights. This empowered the sales team to make more informed decisions from an account level as well as optimize their go-to-market strategy in a virtual setting.

Utilizing TTEC’s Inside Sales Playbook (a database of more than 400 different inside sales best practices) our sales experts conducted lead generation activities to prospect, cold-call, and qualify leads. We shared numerous industry best practices and sales exercises such as Win Back Wednesday to motivate and engage the sales teams. On one Wednesday of every month, we focused on winning back customers that no longer had an active status.

As a result, the company achieved a 12% increase in revenue in 3 months, reactivated 33 accounts in five weeks, and generated >$20k in win-back account revenue.

Move the ROI needle with human experts
While technology has its merits, it will not solve sales challenges on its own. Behind every great technology are people to realize the potential that’s specific to the needs of the business. Human experts can leverage the power of these technologies to achieve maximum ROI and deliver amazing experiences along the way. Some ways that humans can help make the most of sales technology include:

Focusing on a consistent customer experience and measuring longevity
Evaluating current tools and optimizing usage
Testing and measuring digital tools
Working with partners who can lend a helping hand

After all, a truly good sale is about relationships, not products. While that adage still holds true, cultivating and developing strong sales relationships now begin with digital. Where you go from there is up to you.

How to retain employees during the Great Resignation

Success is the result of hard work — Portrait of a young man standing in an office with colleagues in the background

A record 4 million people quit their jobs in the spring, reported the Department of Labor. There are lots of reasons so many workers are seeking new jobs—a trend that economists are calling the Great Resignation. For some people, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a shift in priorities, spurring them to pursue a “dream job,” or become stay-at-home parents. But for others, the decision to resign was in response to how their employer treated them during the pandemic.

Heather Younger, author, CEO, and founder of Employee Fanatix, an employee engagement, leadership development, and consulting firm, explains why employee retention is more critical than ever. We spoke with Younger to learn what employers should do—and not do—to retain talented and valuable employees. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Customer Strategist: Why are so many people quitting their jobs at this time, and what does it mean for employee retention?

Heather Younger: There are myriad reasons why people are leaving, but I think a major factor is that many people became comfortable working from home and their employers reassured them that it was fine. And so now, when employers are looking at the amount of real estate that they have and informing employees that it’s time to come back to the office, employees would rather resign and find another job that’s a better fit.

Customer Strategist: You wrote a book, The Art of Caring Leadership. Can you share the definition of caring leadership and how it benefits businesses?

HY: Caring leadership is taking daily actions to show concern and kindness to those you lead. It’s behaviors, it’s actions—it’s not just the words or what we think we are. The strategies that I talk about in the book aren’t new. They’re just restated and based upon evidence. A few of the strategies are based on this idea of leading the whole person. This is a big one and it’s even more important because of the pandemic. We learned so much about those that we lead that we didn’t know when we were physically together in the workplace.

Now, we go onto these Teams calls and these Zoom meetings, and we see each other’s home environments. Employees might even feel more comfortable telling us more about their mental health or about their aging parent. So, this idea of ‘leading the whole person’ is really critical. It was already important, but now it’s even more so because employees know that leaders know more about them and they expect them to show empathy, compassion, and connect with them at deeper levels. And if we can’t give that to them because we don’t have the desire or willingness to, we’re going to lose them.

Customer Strategist: What changes in the workplace do you think are temporary and which ones are more likely to remain for the long run?

HY: That one’s hard. Some of it is driven by what employee demand is but…I think it’s going to depend on how much companies are in it for the long haul. Also, is the board driving [changes in the workplace]? Is the market driving it? Are the changes financially justified? Organizations are driven by profits and the need to make money. Something I really want to highlight here is you can show care and make money at the same time. But I think in the end, it’s going to be driven by a lot of factors, including some that are outside of an employer’s control.

Customer Strategist: What common trends are you seeing in what employees are looking for in their new workplace? What do they want now?

HY: What I alluded to earlier was that there was actually quite a bit more connection that was going on during the pandemic. We almost had no choice but to learn about and get to know our employees. When I say we, I’m talking about the kind of organizational leaders who have the power to change the employee and the customer experience. These are both tied together. And in this case, we had no choice but to see and get to know our employees and customers, because we wouldn’t get anything done if we didn’t. So, we had to learn to show empathy and compassion. We had to ask good questions. We had to lean in to listen to stories and to listen to scenarios. And we had to learn to jump into action, to help, or again, we wouldn’t achieve any goals.

It was an environment that just required it. So, I think what our team members realize is that’s the kind of place they want. They want to have that connection [with an employer], and they want their leaders to ask them questions and lean in with empathy and compassion. And so that puts leaders in a position where now, there’s a lot of reinvention on their part and they have to figure out how to avoid compassion fatigue, how not to overdo themselves, and find that proper balance between [making demands] and showing compassion.

Customer Strategist: This reminds me of business leaders who believe surprising and delighting customers is the best way to increase loyalty when showing that you understand the customer is actually more important. Is the same true for employees?

HY: Yes, absolutely. I do think it’s about understanding and consistency. Surprise and delight are nice, but if it only happens once and there are a whole bunch of other things that aren’t delighting [employees], the interplay or the net result is not going to be as positive. It’s about understanding them. Leaning into what employees’ needs are and then being consistent. And when employers do mess up, it’s about admitting their mistake and asking, what can we do to make the experience better? It’s the exact same interplay, whether it’s the external customer or the internal customer.

Customer Strategist: Are there any pitfalls to companies doing more to retain their employees?

HY: I think the biggest thing is that not everybody’s built to lead with empathy and compassion. They’re just not naturally there. And so, the pitfalls would be, like I said, becoming fatigued. It’s starting to drag some [leaders] down because it’s not who they naturally are. Organizations are made up of people and everyone differs in how they communicate, how they behave, how they understand people, how they need to be understood.

And so, understanding that all of those things are going on… it’s not really a downfall as it is more of the complexity involved. How do we now manage this new kind of leadership realm where now I have to lean in further, do even more to consider the whole person more so than I did before and the impact it has on me emotionally, because I wasn’t prepared to do that before. So, I think that would be one of the things that we would see.

Customer Strategist: So, in order for businesses to thrive and retain their employees, they need to communicate with their employees to understand what their needs and expectations are, be consistent in their strategy and their interactions, and be flexible—is that correct?

HY: Yes, I would say those would be the three really big things they’ll have to do. And when I talk about listening strategy too, it’s a multi-focus thing; it involves making sure that you’re acting upon what you hear and that you communicate back to the people who lent their voices to you, to give you their feedback. You’re communicating back to them about what it is you plan to do, what you’ve done and how it relates to what they told you they wanted. Leaders should constantly be doing that.

I would say that this new way of leading in the next three to five years is probably going to take a lot more energy on the part of leaders. Passive leadership will no longer be allowed. It’s no longer going to produce results that we want. We’re going to have to be very actively engaged, super focused on the pulse, and lean in a lot more than we did before in order to get what we want.

5 retail strategies that are here to stay

At the 2020 National Retail Federation, on the eve of the pandemic, our writers noted that the future of retail was about removing barriers. Among so much change this much remains true, but how do we make retail experiences as easy and enjoyable as possible in our post-COVID world? How do we make interactions ‘effortless’ for customers?

The modern retail customer craves personalization, seamless conversations, and communication at every point in the journey. These roll up into what we call ‘effortless’ experiences, which will define the new age in retail.

Meeting these challenges while reducing cost to serve will require a digital-first, customer-centric approach. More often we are seeing digitally transforming legacy support systems as a key to meeting modern expectations.

To better understand this, let’s explore the 5 retail strategies that are defining the industry and unlocking success on all fronts.

1. Tap into the power of remote work

The unprecedented product and human demands that came out of the pandemic tested retailers’ resources. With post-pandemic online shopping increasing and deals running longer and earlier, consistent quality and service levels are essential to keep operations running smoothly and customers happy. Mishaps like delays, data breaches, product recalls, and inclement weather will continue to effect retail surge volumes. But as many retailers saw, the value of remote support can help ease the burden.

Innovations in knowledge, messaging, and security helped retailers achieve great results from a remote model that could maintain service levels, and ultimately drive customer loyalty by replicating the brick-and-mortar values customers love digitally.

Post-pandemic success rides on flexibility. At-home hiring lets retailers dip into a wide talent pool of a diverse and highly skilled workforce when needed to support customer service and sales inquiries. The scalability and efficiency of at-home employment allows retailers to easily to accommodate fluctuating interaction volumes during peak seasons, a perk not easily available through traditional means.

2. Optimize the cloud for omnichannel support

Shopping channels are no longer static—customers can switch from voice, to chat, and messaging in just one interaction. Retailers need to remain nimble. Unfortunately, legacy systems are often overwhelmed and there’s no integration among disparate channels. Retailers during the pandemic realized the value of holistically interacting with customers in the channels they prefer while optimizing technology, processes, and people.

Cloud contact centers provide many benefits, such as increased flexibility, cost savings, and the ability to support customers from virtually anywhere. By focusing on omnichannel routing, interactive voice response (IVR), and CRM integration you can direct customers volume to the best communication channel for them. Intelligent routing of calls can also improve customer experiences, average handle time, and call center agent performance.

3. Combine automation & empathy for a total shopping experience

Customers will always need information about store hours, return policies, and delays, among other topics. Answering these simple but time-consuming inquiries while also handling more complex conversations can slow agents down immensely.
Repetitive, simple tasks can be alleviated with automated customer self-service capabilities. Digital transformation powered by intelligent automation helps ease the effort needed by both your agents and customers during busy surge hours where the human touch is needed most.

Retailers who deployed Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Robotic Desktop Automation (RDA) offerings helped free employees up for more nuanced interactions that impact brand loyalty and customer happiness. Intelligent automation solutions such as these improve CX and drive bottom-line results, reduce average turnaround time, and resolve issues anytime.

Remember, if a retail journey starts slow, your customers will go elsewhere. Automation can provide customer self-service and alleviate processes that eat up time with virtual assistants. RPA and RDA software works in unison to minimize disruption and facilitate more efficient CX delivery from first-impressions to checkout.

4. Hit me up on text

Texting is quickly becoming the preferred customer communication channel. In retail, customers want to be updated about availability and delivery dates at every point of the journey. Retailers can quickly reassure customers with updates and delivery notifications that reduce customer effort to locate purchases and help them relax, thereby increasing brand loyalty.

Unlike web-based chat that occurs in a pop-up screen where both parties must be logged in, messaging is asynchronous, meaning you don’t need to stay in a dedicated session to send or receive messages. Messaging takes the idea of web chat, simplifies it, and moves it to where consumers already spend their time—on their phones.

Asynchronous messaging capabilities allow customer service to more than double the number of interactions they can handle concurrently on the channels customers prefer to keep them updated before a product even reaches their doorstep.

5. Seamlessly connect the entire retail customer journey

Retailers can’t create seamless experiences without first knowing the level of effort that goes into each retail interaction. Understanding where and why different customers interact with their brand allowed retailers to orchestrate better journeys that delivered personalized experiences and anticipated demands.

Converting data into insight by deploying technologies like voice of the customer and speech analytics to evaluate daily interactions and pain points for the customer is an incredibly powerful took. These insights help enhance customer journeys and further develop associates’ ability to create meaningful moments for customers.

Rather than trying to make blanket improvements, a narrow focus can illuminate which areas will drive the most CX improvement and ROI. Prioritize and act on the most common call types or frustration points for customers with data analytics. These tools will continuously spot business trends and react swiftly to reputation issues, assortment opportunities, and supply chain activities.

Usher in an age of ‘effortless’ customer (and employee) experiences

Retailers that persevered through the pandemic didn’t survive on deals alone, they stood out because they showed that they knew their customers. Organizations that utilize the best of people and technology from these five strategies can cultivate loyalty, revitalize sales, and maintain the agility to match customer expectations at every point of the journey.

Back office vs. front office: how to boost efficiency and productivity between both offices

An organization’s front and back office functions are fundamental to any great customer experience. That’s why it’s critical to keep both front and back office operations running smoothly and effectively. Yet, in many businesses, there is often some overlap and confusion over what defines the roles of a front office and back office, making it difficult to prioritize an area for greater efficiency and productivity. Have no fear, we’ll review the definitions of and use cases for the essential components of a business – the front office and the back office.

What is the front office?

The front office refers to the customer-facing section of a firm. For example, hotel receptionists, bank tellers, and other customer service and sales associates who directly interact with customers are considered part of an organization’s front office operations. Other front-office departments may include public relations, marketing, and the contact center. Front office employees play an important role in communicating with customers and ensuring they’re satisfied with the product or service provided. Since customer satisfaction is mostly tied to the front office, this area is a significant revenue-driver for organizations.

What is the back office?

The back office represents the part of a company that is non-client facing, such as administration and support departments. The back office is sometimes used to describe jobs that don’t directly generate revenue. Don’t be fooled by the name, however. Even though the back office isn’t visible to customers, it provides many critical functions including accounting, IT services, forms processing, claims adjudication, regulatory compliance, and more. Back-office employees enable and equip front-office employees to perform their client-facing duties and together, deliver an excellent customer experience.

How can the front and back office be automated intelligently?

Many front and back office functions are intertwined and directly impact each other. For instance, disorganized back office practices lead to slow responses and excessive rework that result in increased average handle time in the contact center and other errors that directly impact efficiency and customer satisfaction. This is where intelligent solutions that blend automated rules-based processing and human intervention can save time and deliver better outcomes.

For example, in the front office, many customer interactions are high-volume and repeatable, which can be handled in channels like chat, messaging, IVR and others that lend themselves to be easily automated. Reducing human dependency along these parts of the customer journey helps to drive down costs and errors while at the same time increase process compliance and interaction speed.

Unattended Robotic Process Automation (RPA) removes humans completely to speed up efficiencies and makes contact center agents available for more complex customer centric interactions. A one-time password (OTP) option—a component of RPA—for instance, enables customers to authenticate their account without human assistance.

The OTP option is received by the user on a registered email address or cell phone to authenticate the transaction initiated by the customer in order to reset a password, authorize a financial charge on the card, or make an online payment. Attended RPA, meanwhile, is used to assist contact center associates to help them make better, quicker decisions when dealing with customers or administrative tasks.

Artificial intelligence is also reinventing the back office by freeing up employees on the operations side to work on complex and meaningful tasks while automation caters to the easier work. For example, as part of a review and audit process, a bot could input the details related to a transaction and a human checker will validate the entry. This can help reduce manual efforts by up to 50 percent.

The front and back office both represent essential functions that make up a business. Understanding how these areas intersect and how they can be optimized is critical for a business’s future success. And increasingly, a seamless integration of various front-end and back-end systems with automation and human intervention is the key to enabling greater efficiency, accuracy, and productivity than ever before.

Learn more

Here are additional resources about the front office and back office.

4 best practices to redefine back office services – Here are four best practices around training, operations, quality assurance, and automation to create exceptional services.

Digital transformation powered by RPA/RDA – Learn how a leading telecom improved the efficiency of its customer-facing and enterprise back-office operations.

Breaking down backlogs with back-office accuracy and speed – Here’s how an agile team cleared a health insurer’s report backlog in record time.

How to maximize your back office in 4 steps – Organizations that value customer experience know their back-office services provide invaluable support.

4 CX changes to prepare for as the public sector embraces the cloud

Customer experiences have transformed seemingly overnight, with enhanced digital tools and technology, work-from-home operations, and empowered customers. These changes, while led by private industry, are now expected in government services as well.

Many government agencies are being asked to add more digital channels, flexibility and speed to public-facing operations while also maintaining strict levels of security and compliance. Every sailor, soldier, airman and their family members trust government agencies to protect and secure their information, whether it’s through a self-service channel or speaking with an agent. That’s why it’s critical for agencies to ensure that their constituent data is secure from top to bottom and everywhere in between.

As more government organizations move citizen services to mobile and cloud-based platforms, virtual systems and remote workforces open up security vulnerabilities. The responsibility of safeguarding citizen information requires superior omnichannel cloud contact center solutions with stringent security and reliability assurances.

In a recent 930gov webinar, TTEC Chief Information Security Officer Kip James and Vice President of Public Sector Steve Parowski highlighted CX trends that public sector agencies must prepare with a balance of ease and security.

Digital-first experiences: Digital transformation is no longer optional. Government agencies must utilize automated capabilities to streamline processes so that employees can focus on the human touch for empathetic interactions.
A distributed workforce: Agencies with only a few centralized brick-and-mortar locations or those with limited remote capabilities are prone to disrupted critical operations.
Channels for all citizens: From proactive outreach to urgent responses, agencies must leverage multiple traditional and digital channels that boost citizen engagement, including chat and SMS messaging.
Re-think security and fraud: As remote work becomes more common, security and policy factors need to be reviewed and adjusted to protect sensitive citizen information and comply with different work scenarios.

“The global pandemic taught us many things,” Parowski said. “One highlight was the speed at which mission-critical agency applications and technologies could be made available for consumption in an elastic secure cloud-based model. What once typically took three months to implement was condensed to weeks and days.” He added that cloud services provide agencies with the business continuity and security needed to meet the moment quickly and effectively.

“The goal of using cloud is to make an organization very agile so they can stay focused on their core mission,” added James. “We’re providing the phone, the chat and other channels, which allow agencies to reduce facilities costs while getting best-of-breed secure, authorized technology.”

How fast is your move toward cloud contact centers?

James discussed the “walk, run, sprint” maturity model being used across U.S. government agencies as they upgrade to cloud contact centers.

Walk: An agency hands over the technology, with federal implementation of security controls and validation.

Run: A hybrid cloud solution where services are provided by a cloud solution that has been an agency ATO, which is going through this FedRAMP process.

Sprint: A fully compliant system, a full stack service stack for the contact center, all contexts in our services, in a cloud-based environment.

The benefits of cloud are easy to see, based on evidence from government agencies that have implemented it. “Clearly what we’ve seen in the last five years as more agencies adopt cloud solutions is that their total costs of ownership is going down and they have a much higher return on investment than traditional government owned or contractor operated premise-based solutions,” Parowski said.

Watch the full webinar, “How to combine security and citizen centricity for cloud contact center success” to learn even more about the move to cloud in the public sector.

Here’s how Retailers are Shifting from Surviving to Thriving in a New Normal

Shop owner helping customer — Smiling shopkeeper helping client at counter in boutique

Retail has been altered in ways large and small since the COVID-19 pandemic began 16 months ago.
Businesses had to quickly adapt and find new ways to connect to their customers while maintaining operations. And it’s not over. At NRF Retail Converge, retailers weighed in on the consumer habits that they anticipate will outlast the pandemic, changing business models and the customer experience.

What customers want from the new physical store
The National Retail Federation announced in June that it expects retail sales to jump between 10.5% and 13.5% to more than $4.4 trillion this year compared with last year. “Americans are shopping—but HOW are they shopping?” asked Lee Petersen, EVP of thought leadership and marketing at WD Partners, a strategy and design firm.

Social distancing requirements, lockdowns, and store closures accelerated services that had been in the works prior to the pandemic—buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS), dark stores, and delivery posts, to name a few—that customers now expect, he continued.

The pandemic “changed the way that consumers shop and retailers will have to adjust to these changes for good,” he said. In a survey of 2,500 consumers conducted by WD Partners, 84% indicated that they used BOPIS in the last 3 months and 86% said it was a “top digital physical tool.”

At the same time, a majority (48%) of consumers said that an excellent in-store experience was still very important. So, what do customers want from an in-store experience? According to several consumer focus groups, the following store concepts resonated the most:

Experience: A store where consumers can socialize as well as shop, think a store with a coffee bar and lounging area next to merchandise.

Dark stores or micro-fulfillment centers: Stores that only offer delivery and pickup services for online orders.

Hybrid: A store that offers curbside pickup as well as the opportunity to browse.

Big box store brands such as Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods already offer some of these services, placing them at an advantage, Petersen noted. “I never thought I’d say this but big box stores are obviously emulators now. They are way ahead of the game and they’re studying the way consumers shop, so I would look to them going forward.”

Social commerce heats up
Newer subsets of ecommerce such as mobile commerce and social commerce went into overdrive in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. C&A Brasil, for example, the Brazilian arm of a European chain of fast-fashion clothing, saw purchases through its WhatsApp channel grow exponentially during the pandemic. In addition to making purchases through its website or at a store, customers can interact with a fashion consultant on C&A Brasil’s WhatsApp channel and have a delivery sent to their home or pick up the item in a store.

Prior to the pandemic, “we had about 500,000 monthly average users [on WhatsApp], said Paulo Correa Jr., CEO of C&A Brasil. “Now we have seven times that in less than one year.” Scaling the channel with adequate support and data in a short amount of time wasn’t easy, he added. “Leveraging data and CRM possibilities in order to really become more relevant and interesting for the customer was a stretch for us, as well as developing that type of ability among our sales associates.”

Social selling offers exciting opportunities to better connect with consumers, Correa said. The “combination of new channels and new data really bring the customer relationship to another level—that’s one of the key legacies for us.”

Conrado Leister, country managing director of Facebook Brasil, agreed. “I believe that the main opportunities for companies will come from two areas, which we call discovery commerce [finding a new brand or product via a social platform] and conversational business [when businesses connect with people via chat or messaging],” he said. “It’s a massive personalization opportunity.” The key takeaway is that consumer behavior and expectations have evolved—and will continue to do so. The pandemic made it clear how critical it is for businesses to have the infrastructure in place that allows them to not only meet current needs but be more flexible in their operations, customer support, merchandising, and marketing as new changes arise.

Cloud vs. On-premise Contact Centers: 3 Critical Differences

There’s no denying the vital role contact centers play in brands’ ability to meet customer needs quickly and efficiently. When done well, centers offer seamless experiences by connecting customers with the information they need – whether it’s via an agent or through automated technology – when and how they need it.

In the past, the term “contact center” has conjured up images of servers and staff sitting in a brick-and-mortar location. But, in 2021 and beyond, do brands still need to house their servers in a physical location like a warehouse? Increasingly companies are saying: no. More and more brands are turning to cloud-based contact centers, lured by the cost savings and increased flexibility.

For some, the on-premise approach may be appealing: brands know exactly where their servers are stored, which might bring a greater sense of comfort when it comes to security; and equipment is paid for upfront rather than in an ongoing subscription-based model.

But when it comes to cloud vs. on-premise contact centers, the cloud option offers many benefits that can not only streamline operations but also bring opportunities for customer experience (CX) innovation.

1. Flexibility

A big differentiator in the cloud vs. on-premise center debate is flexibility. The cloud option simply lets companies do more. Whereas on-premise centers can get bogged down by long deployment times, cloud centers can quickly scale up or down depending on customer traffic, eliminating this bottleneck and delivering a better customer experience.

Cloud centers also bring the capability to implement CX solutions, like workforce optimization tools. This means shorter ramp times and faster scaling. Cloud-based centers can grow quickly when companies need it, and cut back just as easily when they don’t.

2. Cost Savings

There are several cost-related impacts to consider when it comes to cloud vs. on-premise contact centers.

First, taking centers to the cloud lowers the overhead and maintenance costs associated with on-premise systems. Also, cloud centers typically are considered an operational expense, as opposed to on-premise options that are considered capital expenses – and ones that quickly depreciate, at that.

With cloud contact centers, users only pay for the services that are used. While the subscription payment model may take a little getting used to for some, the financial benefits are clear.

Finally, companies may benefit from software applications and tools that previously were cost-prohibitive but are now included in a cloud center.

3. More Resources

It’s not often that additional resources accompany cost savings but, with cloud centers, that’s likely. In the example mentioned above, for instance, previously out-of-reach tools become available as part of a cloud package.

In addition, with cloud-based CX solutions, a third-party provider can manage call center applications and infrastructure, which frees up an important resource – the brand’s IT team – to focus its efforts on more strategic projects.

When contemplating a cloud vs. on-premise center, another resource-related benefit to consider is the potential upside the cloud can bring regarding hiring. Brands will have many more hiring options. The ability to train, on-board, and deploy employees from any location gives companies a much wider recruitment pool across various countries and time zones.

The best cloud solutions also offer real-time knowledge management to give more relevant and consistent answers, automation of front- and back-office processes that can streamline operations, and valuable customer interaction analytics tools.

All of these benefits feed into the overall goal of any contact center, which is to provide great customer experiences. With cloud centers, brands can provide a seamless customer experience within and across all channels – voice, email, chat, messaging SMS, co-browse and social – which benefits customers and agents alike.

To learn more, check out these TTEC resources about cloud-based contact centers:

Contact Center of the Future: Digital Transformation Best Practices – Customer service is not the same as it once was. To keep up with customers’ growing expectations, it’s important for brands to re-imagine their service organizations – from their customers’ points of view.

Cloud Contact Centers: A Competitive Differentiator – Cloud contact centers provide many benefits, such as increased flexibility, cost savings, and the ability to support customers from virtually anywhere.

Five Questions to Find the Right Cloud Center Partner – There are a lot of factors to consider when migrating to the cloud, starting with finding the right partner to help your contact center implement, deploy, and manage the transition correctly.

5 Ways Cloud Unlocks Contact Center Potential – Cloud technology gives contact centers the ability to maneuver flexibly while saving costs, but moving to the cloud is only half the battle.

How’s My CX? Brands Get Rated on Their Pandemic Responses in 2021 Forrester CX Index

Shop owner putting up open sign — Photo credit: Getty Images

It has been more than a year since the COVID-19 pandemic forced business leaders to upend customer experiences and deploy digital initiatives that in many cases were slotted for a distant future. In a new report, the 2021 US Customer Experience Index, Forrester Research set out to determine how brands did in making abrupt CX changes with very little preparation.

The report scored 219 brands across 13 industries in areas such as how effective was the brand at meeting customer needs, how easy was it to work with the brand, and how likely is the customer to stay with the brand. In analyzing more than 85,000 consumers’ perceptions of brands between February and April 2021, the report found that:

Industries challenged by the pandemic had a mixed performance
Practically overnight, brands responded to the crisis with new fulfillment options, more digital channels, and services that emphasized social distancing and cleanliness. The effectiveness at which brands met customer needs and expectations, however, varied across industries.

Compared to 2020, health insurers performed best, with most providers improving their scores. Airlines and retailers saw no significant change in their industry averages. Credit card issuers and hotels both saw significant decreases in their industry averages, with most hotels seeing their individual brands’ scores decline.

Brands that performed best focused on understanding and meeting customer needs
The highest-scoring brands such as Chewy.com, Navy Federal Credit Union, and Trader Joe’s understood that common tasks, like shopping in person, were now difficult. “The top-performing brands in the CX Index eased this [in-person shopping] pain, as they outperformed all other brands in effectiveness — with a cumulative score 11 percentage points higher than the rest of the Index — and ease, where the elite brands had a 12-point advantage,” wrote Principal Analyst TJ Keitt.

Emotionally pleasing experiences mattered more than ever
At a time fraught with uncertainty and stress, customers were drawn to brands that provided reassurance and made them feel valued. A key differentiator among the top performing brands was that customers associated them with emotionally pleasing experiences, as indicated by the brands having a cumulative score 12 percentage points higher than the rest of the field. Organizations typically spend an enormous amount of time and research on identifying the best way to implement structured ways of change, and the pandemic has made it apparent that the traditional ways of approaching change must shift.

One of the major outcomes of the pandemic is that even in the absence of time, companies can evolve, experiment, and build new practices. At the same time, certain rules still apply: the most successful companies understand their customers’ needs, make it easy to do business with them, and build emotional connections. It’s within this framework—a focus on the customer—that forward-looking companies are best positioned to thrive.

3 Ways to Incorporate Wellness into Content Moderation for a Healthy Workforce

Social media enables people of various backgrounds, cultures, and communities to connect and share special life events. It has also become an uncertain ground for malicious content. Misinformation, violent content, and other harmful media are everyday occurrences for users. That’s why firms are increasing investment in content moderators to monitor and track potentially sensitive footage with varying levels of severity.

With content moderating solutions estimated to be worth nearly $11.8 billion by 2027, an increased focus on digital advertisements and data will mean more intense focus on what type of content is posted on social media websites. While AI is a vital part of discerning a degree of media before it reaches an agent, humans bear the brunt of confirming and blocking a majority of harmful content. Therefore, it is critical that mental health becomes a priority for the employees that act as a front line.

Here are 3 ways your organization can incorporate wellness initiatives, reactively and proactively, to better ensure a healthier and more supportive space for content moderator employees.

1. Embrace a culture of balance

The foundation of a wellness culture begins with ensuring a healthy environment for employees. Content moderating organizations need to consider a multitude of factors that impact an employee’s life in and out of the workplace such as: amount of severe content watched, healthy communication with co-workers, self-care, and a supportive community of friends and family.

To help encourage healthy habits and prevent harm, an impactful wellness program should consider its employees’ space, body, and mind:

Motivational posters aren’t enough. A healthy content moderation environment needs to contain outdoor spaces, easy access to medical professionals, on-site gyms, and counseling rooms.
Leave the desk. Movement programs (classes, on-site gym, fun runs), wellness boot camps, and nutritional items encourage healthy habits and activity inside and outside of work.
Encourage mindfulness. Wellness programs should include on-site meditation, sleep education and awareness, and on-site counselors and psychotherapists (individual & group sessions). These programs support and encourage awareness of oneself and mental well-being.

Backing well-balanced initiatives that impact the everyday life of your content moderation agents isn’t a perk, it’s a necessity. As the market continues to grow, the need to check, communicate, and grow with agents is key to a healthy foundation.

2. Build a responsive wellness model

Throughout the content moderator’s employee journey, the company must provide support and resources for well-being. From the first recruiting contact and employee onboarding to training and daily associate activity be sure everyone feels connected and supported.

A vital step to ensure the mental well-being of employees is creating responsive workflows, based on the intensity and quantity of work to be performed. This allows employees to work on multiple lines of business during any given day, with the necessary steps to deescalate when needed.

If an employee is typically dealing with low severity items, i.e. misinformation, they may only require weekly team meetings to discuss company initiatives, data/metrics, employee morale, team sharing for unity and group support and voluntary programs like counselor sessions and physical & mental wellness activities

On the other hand, if the content reaches a high severity, i.e. child violence, it will require a reduced daily production and increased coaching/mentoring. In addition to mandatory preemptive programs such as monthly counselor sessions and wellness assessments.

Be responsive, instead of waiting for harmful content to arrive then acting on it. As the severity increases, the amount of content reviewed within a day must decrease to achieve a healthy and productive balance.

3. Support healthy employees with AI and digital tools

When humans are not there to support employees, differentiated technology can be used to continue employee wellness that’s personalized and tailored to the unique needs of the individual. AI can be used to help preemptively and proactively support agents against stressful interactions.

At TTEC we envision real-time health and wellness bots with the potential to monitor and identify when an employee falls below acceptable mental well-being thresholds. These bots can potentially be a customizable high-tech AI platform that provides a Roadmap to long term Wellness.

If an agent is viewing highly severe work, it’s essential for bots to leverage data analytics to catch emotional cues and ensure the next workload is less intense. Our RealPlay bot enhances employee engagement through real-time feedback and coaching opportunities for successful mental health discussions.

Deliver the support content moderation agents deserve

The intent of content moderation is to foster a healthy digital landscape for customers. The same effort needs to be invested in employees. TTEC’s Workforce Management (WFM) best practices can help support content moderation agents achieve their career goals in a healthy and communicative environment. A world-class combination of people, processes, and technology makes this possible by deploying:

Employee-friendly schedules: Pre-defined schedule prior to hiring, consistent audits on agents shifts and support coverage
WFO On-The-Go: Empowering agents to access and manage their schedules online, anywhere
Text Connect Blast: SMS solution to provide real-time communication to employees OT / Time Off opportunities
Contingency management: Business continuity processes to ensure operations remain strong, even during uncertain times
Absence notification: IVR, web or text. Call in absent, sick, tardiness or leaving work early on the channels agents prefer

At TTEC, we’ve had over 40 years of perfecting agent lifecycle management. Our WFM practices can create, support, and manage agent productivity and well-being to deliver great experiences at scale.

What’s Next in the Retail Customer Experience

Internet of Things and Mobile Payment concept,close up hand holding smart phone with Communication icons.Paying through terminal.Connection and wireless network Technology

Propelled by the pandemic, retailers transformed their services, products, and customer experience at breakneck speed. More changes are ahead as consumers emerge, ready to spend with high CX expectations. Retailers, however, have a thin margin of error as they recover from 2020. Steve Rowen, managing partner at Retail Systems Research, discussed lessons to be learned from the pandemic and what forward-thinking retailers are doing to position themselves for success. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

As we slowly emerge from the pandemic and a new normal starting to take shape, what would you say the new normal looks like for retailers? What are they prioritizing?

What the pandemic has done is really accelerate that trend of consumers pushing, and retailers being hesitant, saying, “Well, this is going to cost a lot of money. There’s an awful lot of human resources that we need to throw at any one of these new, exciting ways of fulfilling consumer demand.” So this sort of pent up [demand for improvement]—think about a hose with a kink in it, all of a sudden along comes the pandemic and the hose is sort of burst open at the seams now, right?

And retailers are really scrambling to try to answer that very question: What will shopping look like in the coming months and years? And so this trend of consumers pushing and retailers holding back is no longer viable. And I think retailers are becoming, our research shows it, it’s not just my personal belief, right, our research bears out that retailers have been rapidly awoken to the fact that what they’ve been doing does not work. And we need to change at a fundamental level, right? They need to think about not only the products that they’re providing, and that becomes its own challenge when no one can really predict what the next big shortage will be or what the next great demand segment will be, but not just the products that they used to have to think about, but how they deliver those products and how consumers are going to take delivery of those products.

Do you think retailers will be able to maintain the agility that they demonstrated in 2020?

I think they have to. I mean, it’s the exact right way of looking at it. For years, the focus has always been on efficiency. Not agility. And what this worldwide event has done is completely flipped that on its ear, that those retailers who are able to be most agile are those who are able to maintain relevance in consumers’ lives. Those who were not, and again, this is assuming that the playing field is equal, right? This is assuming that all retailers are able to be open at this point. But those who are able to maintain agility for today’s standards will probably continue to survive. But who knows what’s around the corner.

To me, the most important lesson of all of this has been not just, how do we solve for, okay, people need to buy online and pickup in store because it’s unsafe to go in stores right now. That’s a very pragmatic solution to a very today problem. I think the more forward-thinking retailer is going to recognize that the future of this planet is as uncertain, if not more uncertain, than it was in the past 18 months. So how do we not just solve for the problems that we’re reacting to, but how do we build into the framework of our business the ability to be agile, so that if there is another series of political unrest, or if there is another outbreak of some really highly contagious and deadly disease that might be even more dangerous or more deadly or more contagious, how are they going to not have to undo everything they’ve done? And that’s not an easy task, right? That becomes much more of a business process than it is a technological response to a today issue.

Listen to the full interview at the CX Pod.

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