December 2019

Magazine Features

Customer Service Becomes a Marketing Tool

As businesses today compete on customer experience (CX), marketers have a tremendous opportunity to leverage effective customer problem resolution to increase loyalty and, potentially, sales. This approach integrates marketing and customer service in the ways that CRM always promised.

With Gamification, Contact Centers Can Be Fun

Contact centers are not blind to the issues that cause worker discontent, and many are now trying to inject a little fun into the drudgery by incorporating gamification. It's viewed as a natural progression as changing employee expectations increasingly alter the workforce.

Tips to Avoid Drowning in Data

Having tons of customer data means nothing unless companies can turn it into actionable intelligence that they can use to influence or alter the bottom line. That translation might not happen immediately, but it has to happen eventually if data projects are to sustain themselves.

Front Office

Why Are We Still Talking about Silo Busting (Among Other Things)?

While some of the predictions for 2020 involve revolutionary, cutting-edge technologies like blockchain, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence, many more of the predictions involve strategies and technologies that have been around for years but have yet to be adopted.

Reality Check

The Hybrid Contact Center Workforce of 2030

Make way for the ‘interaction center,' staffed with humans, IVAs, and robots

Connect

Customer Self-Service: Fast, Cheap, and in Control

Self-service has gone from an acceptable alternative to a desirable one

The Last Line

Analyzing CX Means Looking at the High Points, Wherever They Are

How customers feel at the end of interactions is only part of the story, not the climax

Customer Experience

How AI Is Impacting CRM (Already)

More customer data leads to smarter AI, and the sky's the limit

Small Biz Buzz

3 CRM Lessons From This Year’s Conferences

Some key themes kept coming up among the CRM intelligentsia

Insight

Brand Management a Challenge, Gartner Survey Shows

Even though global brand management is critical for company success, more than one-third (35 percent) of companies struggle with it, Gartner reports in its most recent brand survey.

Forrester Uncovers Customer-Marketing Disconnect

When marketers began to build customer profiles and personalize interactions, they had good intentions, but inadvertently, many of those efforts have led to creepy and even harmful experiences, Forrester Research contends in a new report.

Gartner 2019 Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service

In the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant report for CaaS, you'll learn how contact center solutions measure up. You will also discover why now might be the right time to update your contact center.

Gartner Hypes Blockchain as a Sales Tool

A handful of technologies are on the brink of making a splash in CRM sales technology but are still five to 10 years away from any significant adoption, according to Gartner, which recently released its "Hype Cycle for CRM Sales Technology" report.

Gartner Survey Finds Self-Service Insufficient

The self-service shortfall comes at a time when the cost differences between self-service channels, like company-run websites and mobile apps, and agent-assisted channels, like phone, email, and chat, are very substantial and continue to widen.

Marketing Budgets Hit an Eight-Year Low

Marketing budgets have shifted downwards, dropping from 11.2 percent of overall company revenue in 2018 to 10.5 percent in 2019, according to a survey of chief marketing officers (CMOs) by Gartner.

Required Reading: Journey Mapping Must Bring Customer-Focused Change

In their new book, How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer? Using Journey Mapping to Drive Customer-Focused Change, co-authors Jim Tincher and Nicole Newton of Heart of the Customer note that 65 percent of customer journey mapping projects fail to drive change.

REAL ROI

C3i Exceeds Expectations with Avaya

Phillip Britt // 26 Nov 2019

The contact center outsourcer is winning back business with new technologies, replacing a string of legacy systems in phases to maintain operations while easing the burden on its IT department

SharkNinja Operationalizes Customer Feedback

Leonard Klie // 26 Nov 2019

With Clarabridge Engage and Analytics, the housewares manufacturer is able to act on voice-of-the-customer data to create new products and evolve its customer experience.

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