While chat-bots, self-service, and community answers are key tools in your customer care playbook, the collective experiences of your agent team aren’t something to overlook. On the surface, improved agent experience may include one or two things listed above. However, pairing some out-of-the-box thinking and the wide range of capabilities found within Khoros can make the difference in your digital contact center.  In the past, it was commonplace to have your care center on the second floor of your main office building. In those days, it was easy to get your finger on the pulse of your agents’ experiences and performance. All that was required was to walk into your call center and ask your managers. Today, your agent’s office has turned into bedrooms, kitchen tables, different floors of your headquarters, and for the larger brands out there, different nations.  Working Remotely has changed everything and we as brands have to change with it. This isn’t to say that WFH is detrimental to customer satisfaction or agent performance. The rise of WFH environments has been a broadly positive shift in the workforce according to a study done in the Department of Psychiatry at Tokyo Medical University. To quote the study directly,    “The multivariate logistic regression analysis demonstrated that remote work was associated with the reduction of psychological and physical stress responses independently of changes of job stressors, social support, sleep disturbance, and total sleep time on workdays.”   While this is a key indicator of a more positive experience for those who work remotely, it has presented an interesting challenge for brands. With our teams now spread out across the country or the globe, we need to understand how our teams are performing and what we can do to improve their in-app experience.  While your specific KPIs may differ widely depending on your brand, your agent experience should always be included in your list. The simple truth is that happy agents make for satisfied customers, which in turn, creates an overall more positive customer experience. Regardless of your team’s size, a primary factor in improving your customer’s experience is understanding not only how your agents are performing but also ensuring that they have the right tools to serve their customers in the best way possible for your brand and customer care goals.  Like any tool, Khoros’ Care Platform can best serve your brand when it is implemented to its full potential. Let’s take a look at the seemingly unconventional methods that Khoros can help your agents across the board.   Analytics A foundational step to modernizing, the ability to recognize and understand what your team needs to perform at peak levels is wholly dependent on your analytics. Without clear data, you may find yourself struggling to make meaningful changes or better design your care strategy.  Alongside your monthly key reports, a best practice would be to run an Agent performance report. What exactly this means for your customer care team will, of course, differ on your KPIs, care strategy, and chosen industry. However, you should consider the following metrics and how they fit into your care system.  Average Response Handle Time  Total Inactive Time In-Focus Inactive Time  Out-of-Focus Inactive Time For more information about how to fit these concepts into your care strategy, take a look at this step-by-step series exploring Modernizing Digital through Care Analysis, Optimization and Growth.   Automation Improving both Customer and Agent experience is simplest with the addition of Automation.  Skip headaches on both parties by providing customers with an easy way to get answers prior to routing to your agents. For agents, it can be integrated with your KB to provide instructions to internal-only information that can help customers resolve their issues. Our Agent Assist feature reduces the time to handle customer inquiries, deliver accurate resolutions, and even the time needed to train new agents. Powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP), Agent Assist delivers agents real-time recommendations for troubleshooting Guides and Community Knowledge articles. Combining Agent Assist, our current automation systems, Welcome Responses, and even the simple act of listing Business hours can equal up to a significantly improved CST/NPS.   Community In the case that you have an active and flourishing Community, directing your customers' support requests to your Community is the best solution for both your agents and your customers.  It’s a way to connect with your customers while providing practical ways to find their answers. Give your customers the accurate responses they want while opening up more opportunities for customer satisfaction, loyalty, and positive “voice of the customer” feedback. Best Practices Utilize your Community’s super users with self service and off-loading Q&A’s to decrease the workload for your Community managers and agents.  Allow peer to peer responses and enable super users to provide answers.  Meet your top KPIs by increasing engagement & resolution rates, improve your CSAT/NPS, reduce cost per contact, and improve agent performance(link to Atlas Agent Performance).   Suggested Responses Time is money and the less time your agents spend getting your customers the answers they need improves your NPS for more than just your quarterly metrics. Suggested responses cut down on the repeated questions bottlenecking your agents' contact channels. Best Practices Provide agents with repeatable answers that they can easily access and provide to customers, easily cutting down their handle time and TAR. (TAR is a customer experience metric link to TAR in Atlas)  Meet these following KPIs: % of SLAs, Deflection/Containment, AHT, TAR, Cost per contact & Agent performance. Resolution Rate   Welcome Responses Welcome responses built into your initial contact system can provide a big relief to your agent to increase the amount of call deflection in one fell swoop.  Best Practices Setting expectations on time to respond Ask preliminary questions and even refer to Self Serve  Main KPIs: Improve TAR , CSAT/NPS, Handle time, % of SLA and initial incoming engagement.   While at first this can seem like a complex puzzle of various systems, by putting all of this together you will rapidly see a happier, more efficient team emerge that are more equipped to meet your brand’s SLAs and improve your CX overall.  As always, if you have questions or would like to chat live, shoot me a PM @A11ey. I would love to discuss your ideas on how you are modernizing your Digital Care! If you are interested in best practices for your Care or Community programs, check out the other blogs in the Modernizing Digital Care Series. ... View more

Self-service goes beyond relieving your support team’s workload. It’s a way to connect with your customers while providing practical ways to find their answers. Give your customers the accurate responses they want while opening up more opportunities for customer satisfaction, loyalty, and positive “voice of the customer” feedback. Building brand awareness, increasing CSAT, and deflecting calls all sound great, but the thought of building or managing a community might sound strenuous. Many brands have legal concerns, fear overly negative responses, sometimes even bullying, or dread managing volumes. It is our mission to help alleviate those concerns, and turn them into opportunities with the Khoros Platform. Previously, I’ve touched on self-service options in previous blogs, specifically community & automation. Today I’ll be expanding on these topics, starting with the advantages a community provides and the benefits of Community Moderation in Manage View. Effective self-service is the key to success. No matter what industry you are in, self-service always should be a factor in your customer support plan. But the key to success here is doing it right. Too often do we see companies stop at a basic FAQ page to get important information out to their customers. Now don’t get me wrong, FAQs are great. But this only serves a select group of customers, which often leads to a call, chat, or search to answer their questions. Thanks to search engines like Google, people expect to find answers when they search. But if your site doesn't offer the correct answer, your customer could find their answer on a competitor's site. With a branded community, your customers can find answers anytime and have a place to interact with each other.   Combine the power of Khoros Communities with Care to gain efficiencies. Once you have your community up and running, you may quickly identify that many of the questions will be the same ones that come from your other channels, including Social, Chat, and Voice. Khoros has a great Accelerated Community Management Solution that connects your community to your Care instance. This gives you powerful tools to manage community responses and moderation.  If you already have a Khoros Care team answering similar questions for other channels, routing community responses could improve your response time. Routing through Care helps alleviate manual routing and switching between your community & Care instance to manage responses. Plus, Care provides analytics for your community responses, helping you better manage cross-channel conversations, agent capacity, and response times.   Here is some advice to keep in mind on encouraging your community to be accessible and positive. Let your community content be a universal guide. In any community, it is paramount to provide both users and agents with clear self-service direction to find answers in the Knowledge Base (TKBs), Announcements, Discussions, or even Ideas. Official brand documentation such as FAQs or instructions should be easily found and identified in your community’s TKBs. It's best practice to ensure your agents provide customers with the same answers/instructions provided in your TKBs. A community public knowledge base provides quick and accurate resources for agents to distribute across active channels. Additionally, sending customer links to TKBs will inherently create your community SEO value when customers search for answers on Google.   Accepted Solutions are a great way to encourage community members to provide answers. Healthy “peer2peer” collaboration reduces the demand for agent/community manager interaction.  Be sure that Accepted Solutions have been verified for accuracy when needed. This practice varies by community type. Not all Accepted Solutions require verification by the brand but should remain actively reviewed.   Here's the bottom line. Having a branded community doesn't only increase agent and content efficiency. It goes beyond static FAQ capabilities by allowing customer feedback and providing more opportunities to optimize and utilize resources.  I mean, how often have you gone to an FAQ page only to find outdated, incomplete answers with no way to tell the company that you still need help? As always, if you have questions or would like to chat live, shoot me a PM @A11ey. I would love to discuss your ideas on how you are modernizing your Digital Care! If you are interested in best practices for your Care or Community programs, check out these other resources  Modernize your Digital Care Series   Product Overview: Accelerated community management Interactive Product tour: Accelerated Community Management ... View more

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous conversation priorities In this blog, I am going to answer some questions we get from many of our customers. What is asynchronous vs. synchronous?  How do I forecast staff for each type of channel? What does success look like for a best class customer service in each of these channels? Let’s start with the differences between asynchronous vs. synchronous.   Synchronous Channels Synchronous channels are session or time-based, which means, as a customer, I start and end conversations in the same session; this is how traditional web chat works.  Typically you find this when you are on a brand’s website, and the chat bubble opens in a separate box with some expectation setting of “your chat session beginning.” This requires customers to finish their conversation in a single discussion and expect an immediate response. Many consider this a more old-fashioned way of engaging with customers because it puts the chat owner, or brand, in control of when the conversation starts and ends.  Other examples of Synchronous conversations are phone calls, in-person conversations, and video conferencing.  Perspective for Staffing  Customer Experience: If their session unexpectedly ends or times out due to external factors, it can leave them without resolving their issues. The customer then must rely on the agent to have made notes on the account or chat history (if available) to search for confirmation. Agent Experience: A conversation doesn’t close until it is complete, resulting in fewer conversations since they are waiting for the customer to respond or for the session to timeout to close the conversation.  Brand Staffing Needs: You may need to hire more agents to handle Synchronous channels because they cannot handle more conversations at a time. Asynchronous Channels Asynchronous channels are continuous and can happen over time, which means, as a customer, I can start and end conversations at my convenience. This type of conversation is in your everyday life, text messaging, email, Facebook, Google Business Messages, WhatsApp, and other Messenger apps.  “Messengers” are often called chats, which causes even more confusion for anyone trying to understand the difference between asynchronous and synchronous chats.   Perspective for Staffing Customer Experience: Asynchronous channels put the customer in control of “when” they want to engage with or respond to your brand. They don’t always expect an immediate answer if they ask a question, depending on their urgency.  It's the intrinsic nature of the technology and how our brains have been trained based on personal experience. I mean, how often do you expect your friend to respond immediately if your question is not urgent? “What up, girl?” vs. “OMG, you won’t believe this!”   Agent Experience:  This often allows agents to start and end multiple conversations simultaneously or even answered by other agents. In this scenario, where the customer response time informs their urgency or situation, the Agent can multitask on other conversations. (You can multitask on Synchronous channels, it's just not as easy).   Brand Staffing Needs: Your agents can handle more asynchronous conversations simultaneously, leading to a much more efficient staffing model and easy-to-measure results. In addition, it also focuses more on a customer-first experience, in turn increasing CSAT.  Now then, how to be successful in either conversation type Always remember that a technology change may require reevaluation of your processes.  Here are some scenarios to consider and how they can impact your handling of conversations in terms of Customer Experience: When chatting with a customer in a Synchronous channel, it is almost customary to ask, “is there anything else I can assist with?” But for the agent to move on to the next chat, the customer must respond with a yes or no, close the video chat, or let it time out, leaving the agent with limited options.  If the customer responds with “no,” the agent can close out the conversation. It is a low percentage rate that the customer will respond, and there is no way to close that conversation. If they respond with a yes, the agent continues the chat and resolves the next question, then asks again, “Is there anything else I can assist with?”  Rinse and repeat, becoming an ongoing conversation with no anticipated time to end until all customer’s questions are answered.  Once the conversation is ready to close out, let’s say the customer asked four questions, and the agent resolved three. What is your close disposition?  Resolved? Not Resolved? Won’t respond? (a very synchronous conversation in an Asynchronous chat)   In an Asynchronous chat, there is no chat window to close and end the session. Now, after asking, “is there anything else I can assist with” agents can move to a new conversation, leaving the customer with the ability to respond at another time. Now, an Asynchronous chat in the same scenario, giving the agent more flexibility to help your customers. The agent's final response instead can be a statement, for example. “If there is anything else we can help with, just let us know!”  Or even just close it out with a positive end statement like, “Happy we were able to assist! Have a great day!”  Now you can close the conversation as Resolved.  If the customer responds now, it's a new conversation.  The chat may come back to the same agent or a different one. And if it happens to be the same question, the agent can see the history and use that to assist. (if you are tracking bounce, you can even add a tag here to track it)  Routing prioritization for any channels should still be based on conversation type and urgency of need, whether it is Asynchronous or Synchronous.  For example, if it is the “I need help now!” type of conversation, this is usually an indication that the customer will be frustrated, while “where do I find the FAQs?” is more of an I just need some direction. Of course, there are always the “I love your brand” posts, which we want to see more. So consider the Customer and the brand in each of these scenarios. Quick use case comparison Take into consideration the types of conversation for each of these.  You may have a straightforward question like “where do I find the FAQ”, which could be answered by a simple link, one and done. The convo can take the same amount of time, whether in an Asynchronous or Synchronous channel.  A more personalized question, like “why is my bill wrong,” the time to resolve may be the same for the Agent regardless of it being Synchronous or Async. The difference is how long it takes the customer to respond.  In a Synchronous channel, the agent is waiting on the customer to respond before the session timeout hopefully. Whereas with asynchronous, the agent doesn’t need to wait. They can move on to the next conversation. When the customer responds, the Agent can pick up where they left off. Ultimately your Brand’s success should be defined by the goals you set and your customer’s expectations.  There is no set number on how quickly you should respond, and you cannot base your response times on what other brands are doing. If you are doing things the same as your competitor, you may just be setting yourself up for failure. The best way to think about this is how quickly your customer expects you to respond to specific questions/posts.   For example: If you are meeting your SLA’s at 98% with a one-hour average response time, you are already meeting a great goal. Now consider your sentiment and CSAT.  Are there specific types of conversations that you could be responding to faster? A question about billing may require a fifteen-minute target in SLA. Then 1 hour SLA for an FAQ question; or even better, use a bot, so the agent never has to respond.  Having a 15 minute or less response time on a high-priority conversation will improve your customer experience and raise CSAT. This is how brands start to target negative situations and turn them into positive ones. A customer is less likely to be frustrated if your brand responds within fifteen minutes, improving the Customer Experience and the Agent Experience. If you set customer expectations on wait times with bots or Welcome messages, the customer waiting on the FAQ answer probably doesn't mind the wait nearly as much.   ⇒ Did You Know: The Khoros Platform supports both Synchronous and Asynchronous conversations. If you have questions or ideas, please feel free to PM me @A11ey, or comment below!  I know technology and customer experience are continuously evolving, so I encourage you to share your experiences with our other Khoros customers   Don’t miss my upcoming webinar, Sync vs Async: How customers choose their experience, with @MatthewHe.  We will deep dive into Khoros Care to discuss different customer and agent experiences with asynchronous and synchronous conversation, as well as how to use automation to set customer expectations. If you are looking for more on Best Practices in all Khoros Care channels, check out the Modernizing Digital Care Series. I discuss in-depth best practices for response times, staffing, optimization, and managing change.  ... View more