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Mar 12, 2019, 15:44 PM
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None
Some of the most successful brands across industries are outsourcing their customer care with great success. The negative image of customer service and support is the result of a variety of myths about outsourcing—read on to see how these myths are dispelled.
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Jun 14, 2018, 15:44 PM
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None
Enrollment continues to increase at this five-campus community college, and so has the need for student support services. With each new academic year comes predictable spikes in student information requests concerning enrollment, financial aid, and general information about student life. Student inquires of up to four times the typical need can easily stress student support staff to the limits.
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May 11, 2018, 15:44 PM
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None
What an exciting and yet challenging time to be in marketing. The demands placed on us as marketers are constantly expanding and are being driven from all areas that impact our customers’ and potential customers’ lives. Perhaps none is more top of mind at the moment than trust. People share their information with us in the two-fold belief that we first will respect it, and second, that we will use it in a way that is genuinely relevant to them.
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Apr 27, 2018, 11:25 AM
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Terry Arnold
There are a number of trends to adjust to as the role of contact center continually changes. However, a through-line is maintaining excellent customer experience.
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Apr 11, 2018, 10:23 AM
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Terry Arnold
Pharmaceutical field sales forces are among the best in any industry. Well-recruited, professionally managed, thoroughly trained, strategically deployed, accurately measured, and driven by carefully designed comp plans.
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Apr 3, 2018, 15:24 PM
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Terry Arnold
Often, for your customers, the first point of interactive contact with your business is via your contact center. Whether it's through asking a question of your brand on social media or through your online chat feature, emailing, or calling to speak with a representative, the caliber of this particular interaction can make or break whether a customer decides to continue to interact with your brand (and what they share with their networks about their experience).
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Mar 29, 2018, 15:44 PM
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None
Consuming today’s digital media is all about personal preferences and the individual user experience. When, where and how we watch our favorite shows or events is as personal as the clothing we buy. Our experience in engaging with a brand dictates whether it’s worthy of our precious time and attention.
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Mar 29, 2018, 13:45 PM
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Thea Crelin
Agility may be key to surviving an industry in flux, but when it comes to the insurance business, successfully keeping apace means understanding if fleet-footedness is necessary for fleeting change.
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Mar 9, 2018, 09:36 AM
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Terry Arnold
What happens when a brand overextends itself beyond its core business competencies? It fails. That's usually where outsourcing as a solution comes in. But some brands worry about how a strange new outsourcing partner could ever possibly know their business well enough to do take over vital functions like, say, inside sales.
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Mar 9, 2018, 09:24 AM
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Rusty Langford
It’s time to wrap up our series on strengthening the foundations of your customer support channels. Once you’ve mastered these basics, then and only then should you jump into the tempting waters of shiny and new technologies like artificial intelligence-driven chatbots and virtual reality.
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Mar 5, 2018, 14:44 PM
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This issue of Featured includes our top content from January 2018. Several of our most-read pieces this month illustrate the challenges marketers are still grappling with around getting their teams to design and execute on the experiences customers want.
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Mar 1, 2018, 13:15 PM
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Rusty Langford
Welcome to our second post about customer support channels to master this year. There’s a lot of talk about using new and impressive technologies—like artificial intelligence-driven chatbots and virtual reality—to improve support and the customer experience
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Feb 21, 2018, 12:40 PM
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Rusty Langford
Remember that old cliché, don’t put the cart before the horse? In other words, don’t get ahead of yourself. There’s a lot of talk about using new and impressive technologies—like artificial intelligence-driven chatbots and virtual reality—to improve support and the customer experience. But there are well-established communication channels that brands should (and in many cases, need to) focus on mastering first.
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Feb 15, 2018, 08:48 AM
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Rusty Langford
By using social media as a customer support channel, you give customers the option to solve their issues when and how they want. You can also use social to proactively mine insights about your trending support issues.
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Feb 12, 2018, 16:00 PM
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Rusty Langford
Need some strategic direction on how to improve your customer support experience? Thinking of testing out a new support channel small scale before committing? Not sure how to train your agents to support your new app?
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Feb 12, 2018, 13:10 PM
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Rusty Langford
Going with the biggest contact center doesn't always mean it's the best. Find out if your contact center has you stuck in a templated approach.
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Feb 12, 2018, 09:11 AM
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Terry Arnold
Welcome to the last of our myth-busting series on outsourcing customer care. Here’s a quick look back at what we learned from the previous entries: A strong customer care partner will keep you in the loop—not in the dark. A good outsourcing partner will encourage your team to be as involved as you want to be in every stage of the process.
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Jan 30, 2018, 08:46 AM
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Terry Arnold
We’re three for three so far in our busting of common misconceptions on outsourcing customer care and feeling pretty good about it! Looking back, some of the finer points we’ve noticed: it’s key to work with the right partner who has the relevant experience and the resources required.
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Jan 18, 2018, 14:11 PM
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Terry Arnold
This series examines a variety of myths and misconceptions that give outsourced customer care a bad rep (when, in reality, it's often a solid strategy that improves customer experience and frees up resources to focus on your core competencies). Each post also provides some suggestions on how to find a reliable contact center partner to meet your needs.
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Jan 18, 2018, 08:44 AM
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Terry Arnold
We’ve already debunked two prevalent myths regarding outsourcing customer care: I’ll lose touch with my process and my customers and I’ll lose both my control and my quality. We found that knowing what to look for in and ultimately working with the right partner with relevant experience is key.
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Jan 3, 2018, 13:06 PM
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Terry Arnold
The very phrase “outsourced customer service” can bring to mind poorly-lit phone banks filled with ashen-faced employees reading from call scripts in monotone voices. It probably feels impossible to trust this group of faceless strangers with your consumer interactions.
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Aug 23, 2017, 15:44 PM
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None
Panasonic Business was working with five different agencies in five different countries across Europe to generate leads for its 11 product lines. Each agency had different marketing systems, different levels of selling skills, and of course, different languages. Results in terms of quality and quantity of leads was uneven. Panasonic found it overly complicated to manage all five agency relationships.
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Aug 23, 2017, 09:21 AM
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Anubhav Mishra
You might have trained people at work. You’ve possibly trained, or know how to train, a pet. But do you know how to train a chatbot?
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Apr 5, 2017, 15:44 PM
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None
There are two unassailable truths about customer service. First, companies really don’t want their customers to have to use support channels. Second, and perhaps more importantly, customers do not want to call customer support.
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Mar 16, 2017, 15:44 PM
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None
In 2015, a leading health insurance provider began selling Medicare Advantage (MA) plans and quickly became the state’s top provider of these plans. Due to the dramatic increase in call volume for both MA and under-65, Affordable Care Act (ACA) plans, the insurance provider needed a contact center that could provide a better customer experience, while meeting all regulatory requirements.
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Mar 16, 2017, 15:44 PM
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None
A prominent quick service restaurant (QSR) had a legacy contact center vendor whose agents serviced many other QSR’s just like them. They needed to design and enable a better overall support experience for their customers consistent across locations.
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Mar 16, 2017, 15:44 PM
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None
A professional sports league streams its games to a variety of connected devices, which means a variety of customer support requests. Its contact center struggled to resolve customer issues with consistent responses because its agents had to work with several outdated, disparate technologies.
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Mar 16, 2017, 15:44 PM
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None
As a leading global provider of fleet cards, FLEETCOR serves over 500,000 commercial accounts with millions of cardholders across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Africa and Asia. The company has achieved significant growth by acquisition in international markets
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Jan 5, 2017, 14:44 PM
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None
You can’t get through the day as a marketer or customer experience professional without hearing about the importance of the customer journey. Yes, we all know that the customer should be at the center of all we do. Those of us in the contact center have been putting the customer first for decades.
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Oct 28, 2016, 12:10 PM
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Terry Arnold
Social media has become one of the BIG THREE customer service channels—especially in B2C—joining phone and email to form the triad of support modalities. But customers have high expectations, and there aren’t many companies meeting them.
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Aug 16, 2016, 15:44 PM
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None
With the evolving marketplace and increased customer empowerment, businesses find themselves in a quickly changing customer experience environment. Harte Hanks has been in the business of producing engaging and effective customer interactions to drive business results for our clients for many years.
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Aug 16, 2016, 15:44 PM
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None
In many industries, markets and businesses, contact center efficiency and—surprisingly—customer satisfaction don’t directly drive customer loyalty. Customer loyalty grows instead from the totality of interactions, including all forms of engagement, known as the customer experience. This is what moves the business forward.
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Aug 16, 2016, 15:44 PM
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None
A few weeks ago, I participated in a webinar with CRM magazine and discussed how to create smarter customer interactions and more effective contact centers. I have dedicated the last several years at Harte Hanks to specializing in Customer Experience Support solutions, leading a team of technology experts who specialize in Oracle Service
Cloud for Contact Centers.
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May 10, 2016, 15:44 PM
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None
A large consumer electronics manufacturer was caught off guard by a customer complaint that went viral on social media. While responding to this trending issue, the company realized it should have a more strategic presence in social communities.
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May 10, 2016, 15:44 PM
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None
A large entertainment provider was launching a subscription service to offer their live events online. A big portion of the millions of customers that had previously purchased each event on cable or satellite would now be purchasing a subscription to stream online. The organization needed a contact center partner that could quickly scale to handle all customer inquiries, including billing, product and technical support. The
partner also needed to provide customer support across multiple channels, including phone, email, chat and social, ensuring that each subscriber could properly stream the event on their device-of-choice and was satisfied with the service.
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Nov 24, 2015, 14:44 PM
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None
How do you enable customers to seamlessly shift from traditional to new entertainment services? How do you control the flood of consumer purchases and inquiries on a new online platform? In 2014, a major entertainment provider faced these challenges as they launched a new online subscription service.
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