Delivering Improved CX for the Gamer Community

From the Zendesk Blog:

In 1972, a simple video game mesmerized players around the world: Pong. Despite its rudimentary black-and-white graphics and limited gameplay, the table tennis game kick-started the video game industry, launching one of its first giants, Atari. Now, as the industry approaches the half-century mark, it’s projected to surpass a global value of $90 billion USD.

But for every World of Warcraft or Assassin’s Creed, hundreds of other titles flounder in the marketplace. With so much at stake in the industry, forward-thinking companies have begun focusing on the player experience after a release: in other words, on customer service.

No matter what platform a game surfaces on — mobile phones, PCs, or consoles such as the Playstation 4 or Xbox One — customers demand quick, friendly customer service that’s both in-game and utterly seamless. They want to reach game publishers to address bugs, player bans, billing issues (for subscription services), questions about in-game transactions, and more without leaving the immersive environment they’ve come to love.

Increasingly, those publishers turn to omnichannel customer-service software to keep their customers returning to their carefully crafted worlds—and those that do are reaping the benefits.

Headlines (Read on for more content from the original source material)
In-game support with Mobile SDK
Custom-built tools powered by Zendesk’s API
Faster Chat, Happier Players
Serving up self-service in-game

#CX
#CX for gamers
#Improved CX

10 Contact Center Tips to Help with Customer Satisfaction

Companies have long relied on location, product innovation and pricing to gain a competitive advantage. However, customers can now find nearly any product or service at the lowest possible price, right at their fingertips. In other words, the key differentiator between companies is the customer experience.

With increased competition and ongoing pressure to continuously meet rapidly evolving expectations, it has become vital to focus on customer satisfaction. This means having the right strategies in place. The following are 10 rules to get customer satisfaction right, regardless of the industry you’re in:

1. Every Interaction Matters

In the digital age, when one complaint can be shared widely across social media channels, there’s no margin for error when it comes to customer satisfaction. To add to this challenge, customer journeys also are increasingly complex, across both self-service and assisted-service channels. This requires increased effort to provide a great experience across every channel, every time. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but it’s essential to keeping customers from shifting to the competition.

2. Upset Customers Can Become Your Most Loyal Customers

Even when service levels are high, problems can still happen. While it is easy to just let an angry customer walk away and consider them a loss, successful companies see the opportunity in customer service recovery. This means an upset customer can actually become loyal and happy if a mistake is handled correctly. Many customer service experts consider the Disney Institute’s HEARD method as the gold standard in customer service recovery:

Hear – Enable the customer to tell their complete story without interruption.

Empathize – Communicate an understanding of how the customer feels.

Apologize – A genuine “sorry” can go a long way to defuse anger.

Resolve – Solve the problem as quickly as possible. This requires employees being enabled to do so.

Diagnose – Learn from the mistake without placing blame on anyone. Fix the process, so it is not repeated.

3. Every Customer Is Unique

Increasingly, customers expect personalized interactions that meet their specific needs. Fortunately, contact center technology has evolved to the point that both inbound and outbound interactions can be made personal. Even self-service can be fine-tuned to each customer.

4. Speed Isn’t Everything

It’s easy to get hung up on providing fast service, but good people skills are equally as important. In fact, increased customer engagement and satisfaction is closely linked to empathetic, friendly and competent support.

5. Make Things Simple

Do you have 14 options on your IVR system? Are customers frequently transferred multiple times to reach the right agent? If you’re adding extra steps for your customers to obtain service, you’re risking losing them in droves. Today’s customers expect user-friendly experiences that they can understand and navigate. Solutions such as skills-based routing, callback and more self-service options can enable customers to get the hassle-free experiences they appreciate.

Continue reading the list which was originally written By Roman Kowalski: http://www.brandquarterly.com/contact-center-tips-10-rules-customer-satisfaction#

#CustomerSatisfaction

8 ways your Contact Center Can Reduce Customer Effort

- FAQs:
Add a frequently asked questions page on your website as part of a self-service initiative. Customers can reduce effort by quickly searching and finding the answers to their questions. Often better than IVR hell.

- Direct Dial #s:
Giving customers access to contact their agents directly can save a few steps.

- Be active on multiple channels:
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Email, Webchat, SMS. It's more than just audio and your customers will appreciate the availability and a quick acknowledgement and response.

-- Team Building:
One important aspect to express in your company is teamwork. The agents should be encouraged to share ideas and experiences, good or bad, on different ways they were able to reduce customer effort.

- Trends:
Develop an ongoing cycle of agent and customer feedback and use your business intelligence tools to analyze trends.

- Training:
Explain how you define customer effort and what is expected from your agents.

- Proofing:
It is important to maintain a low rate of call backs from the customer you are contacting. Make sure quality, spelling, grammar and dates are correct.

- Metrics:
Measure and improve customer effort. A workforce optimization solution such as Virtual Observer provides tools and reports to track customer effort and allow for continuous improvement.

5 ways Cloud Contact Center technologies have transformed your contact center

The cloud contact center layout presents a standard foundation to provide a stable and ever scalable platform, allowing customers an affordable way to offer sophisticated omnichannel customer support in a managed environment, extending a number of tremendous benefits to today's contact centers.

One underlying technology for cloud computing is virtualization.

In computing, virtualization refers to the act of creating a virtual version of something, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources. A virtual contact center is a contact center that is cloud-based and managed completely by the cloud provider. 

Cloud Contact Centers will often:

1) Provide big cost savings:

Cloud Contact Centers carry inherent lower costs due to increased efficiency and the economies of scale. Financially, virtualization has significant advantages over traditional deployment methods. One-for-one physical servers are often underutilized, likely using only a small fraction of their resources to deliver a particular application or need. Despite this, companies are still willing to pay a premium by using a single-server-per-application methodology. Cloud contact centers consolidate multiple applications into a fewer number of servers, each running more efficiently. Using less physical servers, as well as less specific and often-times limited vendor-specific appliances, allows businesses to maximize physical resource utilization and minimize capital spending.

2) Provides a greater level of security and business continuity: 

With the cloud, improved business continuity is possible, along with security compliance advantages and disaster recovery planning benefits. There are also planning advantages gained from a newfound ability to manage massive teams (potentially thousands of agents) using centralized reporting tools available in the cloud.

Disaster recovery initiatives are mission-critical and downtime can lead to lost revenue. With legacy solutions, creating a highly redundant environment was complex and extremely costly. Companies that could not afford for downtime in their communications platforms needed to purchase expensive redundant servers and additional licenses. Cloud platforms instead include features such as high-availability or redundancy and storage migration to keep applications running even in the event of a hardware failure. 

Utilizing multiple virtual servers, it is now possible to create an environment where multiple servers act as one, allowing applications to remain online automatically and seamlessly during hardware outages. Cloud service providers also provide companies with a method to create a private infrastructure for disaster recovery. Redundant virtual servers can be placed off-site, allowing systems to be accessed even in the event of a weather-related outage, power outage, or any other unforeseen event that occurs at the main office. 

3) Offers more scalability and flexibility:

Solving scalability requirements is one check off which can't be met with a legacy contact center system. No longer do companies need to worry that they’ll outgrow their phone system equipment. Deploying and maintaining separate hardware for every application is time consuming and creates a constant challenge for your internal teams to keep up to date. Systems that are virtualized can be deployed faster and maintained more easily, while reducing technology management headaches. 

4) Enhances hiring flexibility: 

With cloud contact centers, it becomes far easier for companies to hire remote workers, since the contact center solution is available everywhere. Employees can work from anywhere – their homes, a hotel room, or even a coffee shop – though noisier public areas might mean the agent can only answer texts, emails or support tickets, rather than phone calls. A reduction in commute time can also help boost agent morale. 

In addition, it means that the company does not have to invest in extra office space, desks or computers, since the vast majority of home workers provide their own devices. The recruiter gains access to a wider talent pool of agents for more specialized jobs; for example, a London-based contact center could recruit highly skilled agents in Scotland if necessary. Additional capacity is easily obtained by adding resources to the virtual servers.

5) Creates an Eco-friendly environment: 

In a world with rising utility costs, and scary levels of global warming concerns, demonstrating concern for the environment has become an essential and humane corporate concern. Eliminating the need to manage a server room’s power, cooling, and capacity is directly related to the managed cloud choice.