Thanks to technology and globalisation, many of us are working in a “virtual world” – from virtual offices, with virtual project teams, and participating in virtual events. This virtual world gives us access to knowledge, international markets and diverse resources like never before. Let’s look at how. Virtual offices A good virtual office in Australia….
Offshoring contact centre and back office operations requires a lot of planning and understanding of cultural differences. A simplistic “let’s drop it into Manila” approach is geared for failure. Here are some tips for effective knowledge transfer into Asia. Why knowledge transfer is important Assuming that the offshore talent acquired is on target, knowledge transfer….
Popping up a web chat box on your website works best when it is targeted to users who are most likely to need help. Initiating a chat session with every user not only creates an atmosphere of intrusiveness, alienating some customers, but also is very costly and often a wasted effort. The key is to….
Looking to replace or review your contact or call centre technology or telephony platform? Here are some simple tips to set you on your way. Understand your business requirements Most companies look at the capabilities of their current technology and operational processes, and use this as the basis for their business requirements. This approach inevitably….
Online customer reviews and ratings are surging in importance for consumer businesses. It’s no wonder. Research shows that 92% of Internet users read product reviews when investigating a service or product, with 89% saying they influence their purchase decision. In the travel industry (where hotels, airlines, resorts and even the choice of food in the….
Since this interview, Carlo Leonessa has moved to a new role. Please consult LinkedIn for up-to-date information. In the third in a series of exclusive client interviews, Matchboard speaks with Carlo Leonessa, General Manager, Service Delivery at Healthdirect Australia. What role does Healthdirect Australia fulfil in delivering health information and advice to the Australian public? Healthdirect Australia designs….
Effective workforce management (WFM) is essential if you want your contact centre to fulfil both business and customer objectives and engage your staff. Yet too often, workforce management activities are passed from one person to another without being properly taught. On top of this, many leaders responsible for workforce management don’t know the fundamentals, preventing….
Every so often, a new three letter acronym appears in the world of sales and service, which is a game-changer. Web Voice Synchronization, or WVS, is a hot new technology which is catching the eye of call centre and digital marketing executives alike. Essentially, it allows call centre agents to view the caller’s online behaviour before….
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Since this interview, Bill Kanellis has moved to a new role. Please consult LinkedIn for up-to-date information. In the second in a series of exclusive client interviews, Matchboard speaks with Bill Kanellis, Head of Contact Centres at Australian Unity. Calls to health insurance providers can be very personal and emotional. How do you manage this human dimension of….
COVID-19 has put the spotlight firmly on IT and how it handles the mass shift from office to home working – and the Service Desk is the very visible face of IT. Service Desks need to manage demand quickly and efficiently and ensure employees get what they need to stay productive. Here are 6 tips….
Many people view Quality Assurance (QA) as a necessary evil within their call centre, “ticking the boxes” against relevant legislative and compliance requirements. But a good QA program also analyses the overall call flow and framework to design the recipe for a “perfect call”. In this article, we examine the ingredients of a successful outbound….
Are you drowning in a sea of CX (customer experience) jargon and feeling a little bamboozled by smart data, personalisation, the Internet of Things (IoT) and customer journey mapping? Our CX Jargon Buster provides some quick definitions of the latest terms used in the world of customer experience. Co-creation Co-creation is the process of a business….
An executive from Australia Post recently stated its contact centre was converting telephone customer service agents to digital agents at the rate of 12-15 people every two months. Such is the growth in consumer demand in using email, social media and web chat to communicate with companies. However, it’s unreasonable to expect telephone customer service….
Net Promoter ScoreSM (NPS®) is the most popular customer experience metric measured by companies around the world, however many NPS programs don’t translate through to the desired gains. Let’s look at several tips and traps in NPS deployments. An NPS survey ask customers to rate an organisation on a scale of 0 to 10. Customers are then….
Forbes, The New York Times, The Economist…they’ve all written feature stories about it. “It” is a new approach to finding customers online which is changing the way marketing departments and ad agencies operate. Yet most senior executives are blissfully unaware of what “Programmatic” is all about. Programmatic is a semi-automated method of honing in on a….
Resilience – our ability to bounce back not only from adversity but also to withstand stress and adapt more readily to constant changes in our environment – is one of the keys to success and blossoming in a world where we are often facing daily challenges and pressures, whether in our professional or personal life…..
Have you ever thought Procurement departments at large corporates are shrouded in mystery and strict protocol you don’t really understand? Matchboard (1 of Westpac’s 200 Businesses of Tomorrow) is very grateful to the team at Westpac Sourcing for sharing their top tips on how to navigate Procurement processes: To be on a preferred panel or….
Not too many business owners would say “no” to an ongoing free marketing opportunity, but LinkedIn is just that, and it continually surprises me how few people are taking full advantage. There are many ways to leverage LinkedIn for the benefit of your business and one of them is to use the tool as….
People said I was crazy and naïve – how could you base an entire business model on the assumption that your clients would be honest? The concept for my start-up business (Matchboard) was simple – jump online, answer a few questions about the product or service you’re looking for, and get connected with the best-fit suppliers for your needs. Suppliers pick….
Seeing is believing Here’s a vignette not to forget: on average people retain 70-80% of what they hear and see, 20% of what they read, and 10% of what they hear. In this sense, video beats all other channels of marketing and customer service for impact. In a marketing environment, website visitors convert at a….
Can the canned response! How often have you heard phrases such as, “That call centre agent sounds like a robot!”, “The person who invented IVR should be shot!”, “I just got a pro forma email from a company that didn’t address a single issue I raised!”, “Why does the speech recognition system not understand a….
Let’s face it, first impressions count. And when it comes to contact centres, often the first impression is created not by the contact centre agent, but by the message the caller hears while waiting patiently in queue. When you consider the statistics that most people hang up after periods of silence of 45 seconds, it’s….
The contact centre industry is in an era of “multiplicity” – multiple channels of contact, a rich array of technology solutions and deployment options, and multiple delivery location choices on, near and offshore. That’s not to mention inhouse, insourced, outsourced and DBOT models. But a revolution is underway adding yet another dimension to the industry,….
Most of us look after our health. Feel ill? See the Doctor. Need a check-up? See the Doctor. So when did your contact centre last have its blood pressure or cholesterol checked? One thing we all know is that the only constant in a contact centre is change. So if things are constantly changing we….
If the number of Unique Australian Visitors [UAVs] on YouTube (15,000,000) is any indication, Australians love video. Video is the new black of the customer service world – it’s cool, it’s fashionable, and it’s rapidly on the rise. While more and more companies are creating ‘how to’ videos as an extension of their self-service offering, the real innovation….
[Open letter to Matchboard Suppliers] On Sep.3, 2012, Matchboard launched its smart sourcing website to the market, and today, we celebrate our 1-year anniversary! Thanks to every one of our suppliers, Matchboard has been able to meet market demand for a huge variety of products and services across the sales, customer service and back office….
What is a customer journey map? A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s end-to-end experience with a product or service. Creating these maps is often a revelation for organisations not used to looking at things from the customer’s perspective: broken, unfriendly or duplicate processes become apparent; service accessibility gaps are suddenly….
Looking after our health and well-being should be our first priority in life. Yet we forget how important and vital it is to be well. We think we have no other choice but to keep going, or that we’ll be all right if we push through. There are so many external demands placed on ourselves,….
It was just a few years ago that “multi-channel” became the buzzword of customer service executives around the world. They proudly boasted of introducing a range of new channel options to customers, from social media service and web chat to two-way SMS, video and mobile self-service. Customers could now pick and choose their “preferred channel”…..
