Our latest blogs and case studies
The Influence Of Background Music On Consumer Behaviour
Background Music is all around us, in pubs, hotels, restaurants, shops, airports, shopping centres, leisure centre and many more places. Most of the time consumers don’t take much notice of it, more importantly they don’t notice how it is being used to influence their behaviour. Influencing Behaviour When used well, background music can be a […]
Mind The Gap
Having worked on a lot of projects with major brands in a wide variety of sectors, one thing often stands out, the gap between marketing and the customer contact operation. More often than not marketing and customer contact departments are disconnected and this is a real missed opportunity.
Customers Want To Self Serve – But It Has To Be Their Choice
A lot of customer contact operations are tasked with driving down cost and to do this are looking to generate channel shift to lower cost channels. In other words move from telephony to digital. We do a lot of work in this area and have achieved some very significant results.
Use IVR & Chat To Support Your New Starters & Make Training More Cost Effective
I was working in a large financial services contact centre recently. I picked up on the fact that their new starter training programme was suffering from a high churn rate within the first month of new agents taking calls. Being curious as we always are we started to ask a few questions.
Omnichannel Solution
Many companies say they offer omnichannel communications, through an internal omnichannel solution. What they really have is a multichannel approach. Delivering an omnichannel solution means a customer can contact you through their channel of choice and their history will travel with them seamlessly and instantly.
Customer Touchpoints
Why Do Customer Touch Points Matter So Much? We have designed hundreds of customer journeys focusing on the key customer touchpoints. Customer Touch Point have also worked as part of many different contact centre teams. Operating across a wide variety of sectors (Healthcare, Financial Services, Local Authority, Housing Association, Retail, Hospitality and Travel
Natural Language IVR
OK Google – play Absolute Radio. Alexa – add 15 avocados to my shopping basket.* Natural Language IVR (NL IVR aka Voice Recognition)
I’ll admit it - I have a smart speaker. At first, I was uncomfortable speaking to it and making it do simple tasks that I was more than capable of doing myself. But it only took a few days for me to feel that pressing a few buttons now felt like such an effort for my lazy hand.
Tone Of Voice – The Commercial Benefits
This blog is the 2nd in a series examining ‘Why Does Tone Of Voice Matter?’. This post looks at the commercial benefits of designing and implementing the right tone of voice for your and your customers. Connect on a higher level In a world inundated with choice, picking the right product can be a little
Why Does Tone Of Voice Matter?
I was talking to a friend about the tone of voice work I do. She looked at me with a puzzled look and asked, ‘but Why Does Tone Of Voice Matter’? The question really got me thinking so I thought I’d share it. First things first – what is ‘tone of voice’? Well, tone of voice is
Achieving Cost Reduction Through Channel Shift
Many businesses are looking for new ways to reduce the cost of customer contact without impacting negatively on their customer experience. One of the key areas we work in is channel shift – moving customers from agent answered phone calls to self serve telephony or to digital channels. We have a lot of experience
Corporate Podcasts (Part 2)
Corporate Podcasts – we’re still all over them. In our last blog post we talked about making corporate podcasts part of your internal communications. They’re the perfect way to share industry knowledge, to train and develop, promote company culture and encourage employee well-being. Plus, they’re easy to share with everyone – desk workers, those on different sites
Corporate Podcasts (Part 1)
Not that many years ago, the podcast was but a small seed in the eager ear of the audio world. But my, how it’s grown. From gripping investigative journalism series such as 'Serial', to comedies like 'Scummy Mummies' and witty educational series 'The Infinite Monkey Cage', we're plugging in and pressing play. We're listening on
Creativity On Hold
We’ve all been in a queue, waiting patiently whilst the agent is “busy helping other customers”. But, “your call is important”, remember. And “did you know, you can get answers to your queries on the website ”? Now I don’t know about you, but hearing these things makes me feel like just another number on
NPS Or Effort?
About a month ago I had a fantastic meal in a restaurant in central London for an anniversary. It was slightly expensive, but absolutely worth it – I would recommend that place to friends. Last week I went to the corner shop and bought milk. There was nothing wrong with the experience, but I wouldn’t
Sonic Branding – ‘logos for the ears’
What’s this then? We’re all ears… A Sonic logo is a short melodic tune that’s used to reinforce a brand’s identity. It’s like logo, but for your ears. You hear them on the radio whilst you’re stuck in traffic, when you load up Netflix in the evening after a long day at work, or when
When Creative Meets Corporate
How do you deliver messages to your customers? Chances are it hardly involves the postman these days. With the likes of social media, blogs, email and contact centres, you’re spoilt for choice with the ways you can talk to customers. And when you communicate clearly and consistently through all of these channels, you create opportunities
Reduce Cost and Improve Experience By Integrating SMS & Messaging With Telephony
My mobile broadband provider was hacked in November and I have not had a single piece of outbound communication from them explaining what happened or telling me if I was affected or not. I did however receive a text from my bank letting me know that they recognised I am a customer of the mobile
Are You Sleepwalking Towards A Fine? GDPR
I have been sorting out a few bills this week and was struck by the number of companies still asking me to give full card details over the phone. These weren’t small companies either, one major mobile provider was on the list. From May 2018, any organisation which processes or stores personal data, including payment
Time Is The New Currency
I heard this phrase yesterday in a discussion group on customer effort and its impact on customer experience design. I know it to be true but hadn’t heard it summed up in quite that that way before. Customer effort is now one of the biggest factors in delivering great experience, the hard part is to
Product Activation Using Visual IVR
A major software and technology company could not complete enough self serve product activation online or within the voice IVR. This was causing high customer effort, high inbound call volumes and increased costs. Approach Visual IVR was implemented to bridge the gap between digital and phone journeys and also utilise the capabilities of smartphones to