Intro

Quit snacking or you’ll ruin your appetite!

If you’re like me, you’ve probably heard this more than once in your lifetime (and I would try to imitate my mom’s voice, but she listens to these so I’ll let it be).

But as we wrap up our first season of Snackable CX, I’ve been reminiscing about the 30 snacks we’ve munched on and I’m blown away by just how much we’ve covered. From playbooks on reducing agent burnout and repeat callers, deep dives on concepts like total experience and customer experience transformation, and conversations with pros on AI and the future of the contact center space, we’ve served up a smorgasbord of goodies.

So, for the final episode of Season 1, I wanted to take a quick trip down memory lane, sample four of some of our tastiest snacks, and leave you with some punchy tasting notes to stoke the fire as you continue taking your contact center and customer experience to the next level.

Roll the intro.

Welcome to Snackable CX, where we break down our best resources into bite-sized guidance on how to stand out and be known for your customer experience. I’m Sam Salerno, here from Mindful, the best-in-class, total-experience solution that aims to add kindness to your tech stack.

First tasting: long hold times

We kicked off Season 1 with still one of our most listened to snacks: The Scary Science Behind Long Hold Times. And honestly, I think it’s still so high up on the charts because brands are desperate to get hold times right.

…and when I say “get hold times right,” I really mean eliminate them altogether.

The proof is in the pudding. Sixty percent of callers won’t wait on hold for more than a minute. And by the time the five minute mark rolls around, you’re looking at a 90% drop off rate. And callers don’t just hang up and go about their day like nothing happened. Frustration spikes, satisfaction nosedives, and when they become repeat callers (which is almost inevitable) they muddy hold queues and kick your Average Handle Time up by at least a minute per call as they take their frustration out on your agents.

It’s a lose-lose for customers, agents, and your bottom line.

So how can you solve long hold times? If you’ve listened to any of our episodes this season, you’ve likely guessed it: implement a callback solution. Whether it’s through your IVR or a digital scheduling solution on your website or mobile app, callback puts the customer in the driver seat of their experience, allowing them to get back to their day while reducing the pressure on your agents and staffing managers to handle peak call times. Trust us: CSAT goes way up, agent burnout goes way down, and all those pesky telephony fees and overhead costs disappear when callers spend less time listening to your hold music.

Final tasting note: Don’t leave your callers waiting with the phone up to their ear. Callback is a game changer, but be aware: not all callback software is the same (you may have even listened to the Snacks that say as much). Look for solutions that prioritize features like customer-first dialing, real-time analytics, and the ability to pop the hood and make full customizations to meet your brand’s specific needs.

Second tasting: connected experiences

For our second tasting, let’s revisit our Snack on the importance of a connected customer experience from Episode 5.

If you’ve ever wondered, “Sam, how do you decide what to write for these things?” I’ll always point you to this timely episode. Visiting my parents one week, I overheard my dad arguing with the service rep as he tried to get warranty info from a big box retailer. He had called, waited on hold, hung up in frustration, tried their SMS chatbot, filled out all the information…

and then was told he’d need to speak with an agent. And by the time he finally connected on the phone, they asked him again who he was.

Now, working for a company that wants to improve the lives of agents everywhere, I felt terrible sitting there silently laughing as my dad flew off the handle. He even told me he’ll never do business with that company again. But deep down, we all know this kind of disconnected experience happens all the time. And customers (and frankly, agents) are tired of it.

Fortunately, your agents don’t need to be mind-readers to fix the disconnect. You just need to have the right omnichannel tech in place. If a customer starts on your website, moves to your chatbot, then calls into your contact center, all of their context — who they are, what they’re looking for, and where they’ve already been — has to follow them.

It’s not just a nice touch for your customers. This kind of experience pads your bottom line as well. Your agents get to jump into conversations where they can spend less time asking questions and more time providing solutions. And as handle times drop and customer satisfaction and retention climbs, you’ll quickly wonder how you managed to get by before setting up an omnichannel experience.

Final tasting note: Silky-smooth, omnichannel experiences only happen with the right tech working in the background. Should you make the extra effort to meet customers on their preferred channels? Absolutely. But more importantly, make sure those channels can pass along a customer’s context to your contact center. I don’t want to brag, but with a world-class omnichannel solution like Mindful Handoff, you’ll crush data silos and see greater efficiency across the board.

Third tasting: Total Experience

One of the best parts of working at Mindful is we’ve got some wicked smart and amazingly friendly people on our team. So I was over the moon when Meghan Hussey — our wonderful Senior Client Success Manager — came on to guest-host episode 16 and totally blew our minds with a pretty fresh concept: Total Experience.

Straightup, that Snackable is pure gold.

In it, Meghan walks us through each discipline that makes up a brand’s total experience: multi-experience, employee experience, customer experience, and user experience.

But the secret sauce to unlocking Total Experience for your brand is understanding that each of these are connected to one another. If your brand skips on equipping your agents with the tech they need to serve their customers, your customer experience is gonna fall apart pretty quick. If your UX team over-indexes on incomplete CX data, they risk pouring time and energy into the wrong marketing and support channels. As customer expectations evolve and brands add more and more tech to their tech stacks to accommodate, it’s easier to lose the forest for the trees — leaving departments siloed and operating on what they think customers and agents want or need.

That’s a recipe for disaster if I’ve ever heard one. And while Meghan does a phenomenal job of breaking down exactly how you can avoid the mess in your own kitchen, getting total experience right really boils down to a simple truth: brands need to do the hard work of evaluating their current experiences, then actively break down and guard against the barriers between their experience management, teams, and solutions. That takes a whole lot of guts and an even greater commitment to transparency and collaboration between departments. But the rewards — an integrated total experience that drives revenue, retention, and satisfaction — is well worth it.

Final tasting notes: Like a fine wine, Total Experience is only going to get better (and definitely more important) as brands race to differentiate themselves from their competitors. That is a race you really can’t afford to miss. Meghan’s episode is chock-full of practical steps you can take at nearly every level of your brand to make sure you’re laying the foundation for a strong total experience. Take the extra ten minutes and give it a listen.

Fourth tasting: repeat callers

And last on our season wrap up, we’ve got Episode 6, all about reducing repeat callers in the contact center. And true story: this one was pretty easy to serve up because if there’s one person who’s a notorious repeat caller, it’s this guy.

We all know that repeat callers are just bad news for contact centers all around. From clogging up hold queues to inflating call metrics, they’re a drain on your contact center’s time, energy, and resources.

So what can you do? Here’s a quick recap of the three step process we laid out:

First you need to implement a virtual queue and callback option in your IVR and hold queues. Cut out long hold times, and you’ll eliminate a majority of pesky repeat callers.

And that’s not wishful thinking. We saw it first hand when one of our clients, The Connecticut Department of Labor, started using Mindful Callback and cut their daily call volume from 26,000 to 11,000 overnight — all because callers could opt in to get a callback rather than having to try to game the system and jump ahead in the call queue.

Second, you gotta level up your first contact resolution. There are a few factors at play here. First, you need to surface customer details to agents before the call (you can use an intelligent click-to-call solution for that). Then, make sure your IVR routing is in tip-top shape and gets callers where they need to go. And, it means giving your agents the training and resources they need to solve the problem the first time around.

And last, your self-service tools need to be on point. From your website FAQ pages and IVR deflection tools, to your app and chatbot functionality — consumers want to troubleshoot their own problem before picking up their phone to call in to your contact center. Give them the right tools they need — again, make sure those tools are connected to make any transitions feel seamless — and regularly monitor those options to make sure they’re catering to your customers’ unique needs.

Final tasting note: Repeat callers are inevitable, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to keep them from clogging up call queues. I’m still amazed when I hear how new Mindful clients are able to remove repeat callers in one fell swoop just by implementing callback… that’s news that always tastes good going down.

Nutritional Facts

Well, that’s a wrap for Season 1 of Snackable CX! If you’ve been following along with us since the beginning, thanks for hanging out. We hope you’ve walked away from each episode feeling more equipped and excited to take your brand’s total experience to the next level.

That’s what we’re all about here at Mindful. And if there’s any way we can help, remember, you can always hit us up.

This has been Snackable CX, a bite-sized podcast by Mindful. Huge shout out to our producer, Jared Evers, our editor and mixer, Adam Griffith, and Rob Beckham for creating the cover art. This team makes this Snack taste as good as it does.

Thanks for joining us this season, and we’re excited to snack with you again in the next one.

Written and hosted by Sam Salerno.

Produced and engineered by Jared Evers.

Edited, mixed, and mastered by Adam Griffith.

Artwork designed by Rob Beckham.