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Customer experience is perhaps the greatest source of competitive advantage available to your company. According to Forrester, companies with superior customer experience grow revenue more than three times faster than companies with inferior customer experience. Greater customer loyalty also abounds, as these satisfied customers will stay with you longer, spend more with you, and recommend you to others.

The new year is quickly approaching, so there is no better time than now to determine your top business priorities for 2019. Need some help determining what these priorities should be? When a previous year’s Computerworld Tech Forecast survey asked IT executives about their upcoming priorities, the respondents’ top priorities included “improving employee productivity/efficiency” (47%), “improving customer satisfaction/experience” (46%), and “containing costs” (44%). These are all important priorities that will greatly impact the success your business finds in the coming year. However, a difficult question emerges: What steps can your business take to fulfill all of these top priorities?

Has your business undergone the transformation it needs to thrive in an increasingly mobile-driven world? Enacting a bring your own device (BYOD) policy and making your employees accessible anywhere, with any device, is a good start. According to a KPMG survey, 74% of executives who work for highly profitable companies say they have a mobile-enabled workforce.

Technology and customer service go hand-in-hand. Without the right technology, you lack the ability to effectively connect with customers and track those interactions. When your employees are spending a significant amount of time on the phone dealing with customer complaints about your phones systems, you have an issue that demands quick resolution.

Conversations abound with talk of the BOT (a web robot that automates tasks) takeover in our customer care practices, but how will the human element evolve? If in just a few short years, 85% of interactions will be handled by BOTs, where does that leave the other 15%? In this post, I will focus on the 15%, its importance within our customer care ecosystem, and how you can ready yourself for the impact this will have on your organization.

Automation has been changing the customer experience (CX) for years with self-service and predictive routing. Artificial intelligence (AI), however, takes it to a whole new level. To understand this, we must first weed through some of the hype. For example, AI is not going to entirely replace your workforce.

As Leslie Willcocks, a professor at the McKinsey London School of Economics, stated, “AI will take the robot out of the human.” This means that AI will free workers from mundane, mind-numbing, repetitive tasks and allow them to concentrate on the more challenging and complex customer issues where they can take pride in adding value to the customer experience.

As a gamer, I'm always amazed by how realistic the modern gaming experience is. I'm currently playing the latest God of War on the PS4, in stunning 4k resolution. I can't help thinking about how far we've come since the video games of my childhood. I vividly remember playing Adventure on my Atari 2600, where your character was represented by a small square able to move from room to room, picking up things that kind of looked like a key or a sword. Pretty amazing transformation since then.

Scheduling can be a complicated and daunting task, especially for companies that manage many employees. Between family, illness, and absenteeism, employees may choose to take time off work, leaving Contact Center managers scrambling to find coverage.

Has this ever happened to you?  How often?  

In all these cases, employees not only want to work and get paid, but they also want flexibility in their jobs. In contact centers specifically, staffing needs are consistently inconsistent, making it hard to plan for these situations.

This is where shift bidding comes in. Shift bidding allows agents to self-select when they would like to work by going online or by using an app on their mobile devices. These applications then use algorithms to determine the type of work or skills that are required for coverage and identify the most qualified bidders to cover each shift.

Read on to learn how shift bidding has evolved to help companies better schedule employees, boost engagement, and improve the customer experience.

In order to ensure you are delivering an excellent customer experience, you need to capture data and insights that illuminate how customers perceive your services — and, even more importantly, you must ensure you’re capturing the right data.

When assessing an organization’s workforce management (WFM) program, there is one area where the benefits and ease of use seem to far outweigh current practice. That area is employee scheduling.

By 2020, customer experience (CX) is expected to surpass price and product as a key brand differentiator. With an increased focus on CX, companies must now work to optimize their workforce to provide the best service. While many enterprises still manually schedule their employees, automated processes and better WFM help to ensure that scheduling is fair and accommodating, which can ultimately boost employee satisfaction and customer service.

Read on to learn more about the current scheduling landscape and how you can streamline operations to deliver better customer experiences.