Cape Town, August 8, 2018:  Africa’s customer experience leaders gathered in Cape Town last week for the 2 day Customer experience Management Africa Summit. The delegation of over 600 customer experience professionals discussed pressing issues such as generating a return on investment in cx, practical application of data and driving emotion to create exceptional experiences.  

South Africa’s customer experience professionals are slowly emerging as some of the best in the world, and the data is there to back this up.  

Sarina de Beer, Managing Director of Ask Afrika stated in her keynote “As mentioned right up-front it is a celebration year. Service levels are at its best ever…with satisfaction ratings of 91%, delight ratings of 54% and very low dissatisfaction scores of 5%. This is largely driven by technological advances and progress, with systems, and technological solutions, self help channels and chat bots in place to deliver bigger, better, faster.”  

Looking into how these results have been achieved, much of it can be contributed to the work customer experience professionals are doing in designing deliberate customer journeys. Diane Magers, CEO of the world’s largest and foremost association for CX professionals, the CXPA, elaborated; “Designing these deliberate customer experience is like building a bridge. Just like any team sport, it takes coordination and a clear understanding of the goals and it requires collaboration and contribution by all team members to ensure the bridge across the support structures is solid and consistent.  Building in silos or vacuums creates an inconsistent experience for our customers. Inconsistent experiences are one of the key factors commonly identified as a factor of dissatisfaction by many other organizations, particularly B2B, as a key opportunity to improve CX.” 

“The results presented by Ask Afrika were for me a great reward and justification for what we do, but great customer experience is a double-edged sword. The better you get, the higher the customers’ expectation and that baseline sets a new bar. You have to keep improving, keep evolving and stay moving when it comes to delivering exceptional customer experience. Finding and nurturing talent in the CX profession will be the next great challenge businesses face within in this industry” Juan Mouton, Portfolio Director for the Customer Experience Management Africa Summit.  

Grace Sikapokoo, the Chief Customer Office for AIG, South Africa spoke on this topic in both her keynote and as part of a panel discussion on customer centricity. The AIG CCO shared five steps to remain relevant and continually skilled; understand your organisation, understand you customers, understand customer experience management, understand technology and most importantly understand your purpose.  

The future for Customer Experience in South Africa is bright and there is much to be positive about, but the challenge will continue to grow harder, and the search for CX talent will be a driving competitive advantage for businesses serious about customer experience through 2018 and beyond.  

Follow @CEMAfricaSummit on Twitter and join the conversation using the #CEMSummit18 hash tag.

ABOUT CEM AFRICA CEM Africa is a meeting place for CX professionals and innovative CX solution providers. The show took place on the 1-2 August 2018 at the CTICC in Cape Town, where like-minded customer experience experts and the top CX solution providers gathered for an informative and educational summit with the common goal of improving customer experience across Africa. The event provides a platform for like-minded CX professionals to showcase their industry knowledge as well as solutions to better the customer’s perception of the brand.

ABOUT KINETIC Kinetic is an international business-to-business conference and exhibitions producer based in Cape Town. Our mission is to equip senior management executives with knowledge, market intelligence and viable commercial opportunities. Kinetic are leaders in providing business facilitation platforms throughout Africa.

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Released by:  KINETIC SA
Juan Mouton:  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

The term customer experience is ubiquitous in business these days. In fact, focusing on the customer experience has become the single most important way for and organisation to achieve success. Customer experience can include a lot of elements, but it really boils down to the perception the customer has of your brand. Even if you think your brand and customer experience is one ting, if the customer perceives it as something different, that is what the actual customer experience is. 

CX Defined

It is how customers perceive their interactions with your company. It was defined as being made up of three things from the customer's perceptive: 

1.  Useful - they deliver value 
2.  Usable - the value is easy to find and engage with 
3.  Enjoyable - they're emotionally engaging and people want to use them 

Every company provides a customer experience, regardless of whether you create it consciously. That experience may be good, bad or indifferent, but the fact that you have customers, you interact with them and provide them with products or a service means that they have an experience with you and your business. 

Customer experience is an integral part of customer relationship management and the reason why it's important is because a customer who has a positive experience with a business is more likely to become a repeat and loyal customer. 

It seems like common sense, happy customers stay longer with a brand. And if you treat your customers poorly and ignore their needs, then they are more likely to leave. Yet some companies don't place any importance on customer experience. 

CX moves us beyond the traditional definition of customer service - those individual moments when employees are providing direct service to customers. It is also about the bigger picture of what happens before and after these service interactions.

To truly understand customer experience, you must know that it encompasses every aspect of a company's offering - from the quality of its customer care to its reputation management, marketing, branding, product and service features, and reliability. 

Customer experience is about much more than just customer service. It is about fostering employee engagement. It is about truly understanding your customers, creating a strategy for delivering exceptional customer service, and then empowering employees to deliver it. It is about the culture you create in the work environment that empowers and inspires your employees to reinforce the right behaviors that support exceptional customer experience. 

Create a Customer Experience Strategy 

Understanding Your Target Audience/Customers: 

Who they are and what they need, this is crucial in building a positive customer experience. If you are really going to understand customer needs and wants, then your employees need to be able to connect and empathize with the situation that your customer faces.

One way to do this is creating a customer persona. By creating personas, your customer support team can recognize who they are and understand them better. It is also an important step in becoming truly  customer-centric. 

SMS 

Mobile phones are the fastest adopted technology of modern times, with more than 91% of adults having access to a mobile phone, and the number of text messages sent daily ranging between 5-6 billion. That's a lot of people communicating over SMS. 

SMS Marketing is a fantastic channel for your business to receive messages from your customers. By allowing your customers to text you, you can enhance your customer service. The majority of people prefer using SMS messages for customer service inquiries and comments, It's quick, hassle-free, and extremely cost effective. By offering an SMS feature you make your business accessible and allow customers to contact you with any questions or problems (this is also a great way to add to your opt-in marketing list!!). Immediately reducing the amount of time for a customer to resolve an issue they have and leads to a satisfied customer base, a win-win really!

Customer expectations are higher than ever, and as customers become more empowered, it increases the importance of the customer experience. 

Saoirse

Sendmode Bulk SMS and Mobile Marketing

Available in South Africa through local authorized distributors, Plantronics Manager Pro provides enterprises total control and flexibility over their Plantronics audio headsets and devices. Plantronics Manager Pro is a web-based service that gives IT Managers easy-to-use tools to configure settings and update audio device software and firmware for end-users across the enterprise. Last month, Wendy Dawson, Senior Development Marketing Manager for Plantronics, blogged about a professional partnership which represents a collaborative viewpoint of the value of adopting Software-as-a Service (SaaS) solutions such as Manager Pro.

"Today, I’m happy to let you know that Plantronics and Nectar are introducing the industry’s first ear-to-ear (e2e) unified communications (UC) diagnostics solution, extending call visibility past the desktop. Nectar UC Diagnostics troubleshoots network issues contributing to poor UC experiences and along with the actionable insights from Plantronics Manager Pro software-as-a-service (SaaS), can be used to improve your customers’ UC experience.

Nectar and Plantronics are bringing two stellar communications solutions together to provide diagnostics showing call-specific health statistics for wireless headsets. Until now, the last three feet of the UC network has been out of reach to the enterprise IT team. This new solution goes beyond traditional UC diagnostic solutions that end at the desktop and now gives IT the ability to see network health all the way to the end user’s Bluetooth headset.

Using this solution, enterprises and UC service providers can diagnose issues faster than in the past and they can track and make decisions from these actionable insights over time. This means call quality issues—no matter what is causing them—won’t ever get in the way of the ability to deliver superior customer service and user experience before an issue is ever detected.

Many factors can impact the quality of a UC session. The “data-your-way” philosophy built into the Plantronics Manager Pro offering extends Nectar’s capability with e2e diagnostics for Plantronics touch points providing this entirely new level of visibility into the last few feet of connectivity.

Last September, Nectar announced their agreement to develop this e2e diagnostics solution with us. Now, link quality is collected for the Plantronics Voyager UC family of headsets (excluding Voyager Legend, Voyager Edge and Voyager 104). And, it’s officially available for purchase through authorized Nectar and Plantronics authorized partners.

Nectar’s initial release of this solution will support Skype for Business on-premise deployments, with additional UC platform and cloud service support to be added over time."

If you are interested in finding out more about Plantronics Manager Pro for your South African business, please visit www.plantronics.com/za/en/services To read the original blog referenced, visit this page.

About Plantronics
Plantronics is an audio pioneer and a global leader in the communications industry. We create intelligent and adaptive solutions that support our customers’ most important needs: experiencing and facilitating simple and clear communications while enjoying distraction-free environments. Our solutions are used worldwide by consumers and businesses alike and are an optimal choice for open office environments. From Unified Communications and customer service ecosystems, to data analytics and Bluetooth headsets, Plantronics delivers high-quality communications solutions that our customers count on today, while relentlessly innovating on behalf of their future. For more information visit www.plantronics.com/za.

Plantronics is a trademark of Plantronics, Inc. registered in the U.S. and other countries, Plantronics Hub, Plantronics Manager and Plantronics Manager Pro are trademarks of Plantronics, Inc. The Bluetooth trademark is owned by Bluetooth SIG, Inc. and any use of the mark by Plantronics, Inc. is under license. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 

South African consumers love the ease of comparing insurance and financial services quotes online, which has been shown in the latest South African Customer Satisfaction Index (SAcsi) results based on the survey conducted in 2017. According to the survey, conducted by research organisation Consulta, Hippo.co.za has been ranked as a global leader in customer satisfaction.  

The 2017 survey results for the Short Term Insurance industry were released 29 May 2018. 

The SAcsi is an independent national benchmark of customer satisfaction on the quality of products and services available to household consumers in South Africa. The survey looks at perceived overall quality, complaints, value, loyalty, and expectations while calculating a brand’s overall scoring for customer satisfaction. The survey is conducted by contacting and interviewing customers of companies and users of government services randomly via telephone and email. 

“We are blown away by the positive feedback we have received from customers who have used our online quote platform, especially if you consider how detailed the SAcsi methodology is and how deep it dives into overall customer experience and satisfaction,” says Vera Nagtegaal, executive head of Hippo.co.za. 

“Consulta measured the customer satisfaction of Hippo.co.za customers, parallel to the Short Term Insurance SAcsi,” says Prof. Adré Schreuder, CEO of Consulta. “As a unique value offering in South Africa there is not really direct competitors to compare Hippo.co.za with, but the SAcsi methodology has proven itself to allow comparisons across different industries. Hippo.co.za achieved one of the highest SAcsi scores of all South African companies measured and the results show that the online platform consistently exceeds customer expectations.”

 In the insurance and financial services industry, customer experience and satisfaction is becoming a top consideration for businesses, both globally and locally. In South Africa, regulatory measures such as Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) and Twin Peaks will place further emphasis on the importance of customer satisfaction. TCF is an outcomes-based approached designed to ensure fairness to customers of financial services providers whilst Twin Peaks focuses on consumer protection and market conduct in the financial services industry. The insurance industry is also hugely impacted by digital technologies as more companies are employing online devices such as chatbots and driving behaviour apps in order to personalise the user experience. These digital technologies improve customer experience in terms of easy online quoting and purchasing, and personalised pricing methods based on individual driving behaviour. 

“We have taken both the regulatory measures and technological factors into account and have further strengthened our business through digital innovations and changes that will ensure the customer continues to come first. It is positive to see our efforts being manifested through the SAcsi results. Hippo.co.za was ranked as one of the strongest industry performers, achieving an overall score of 84.3. We also ranked higher than international brands McDonalds and Apple - reaching the 4th spot overall.” “We are proud of this achievement and will make sure we do everything we can to continuously improve our customers’ experience,” says Nagtegaal.

Discerning, informed, and connected.

With a multitude of choices in the marketplace, multiple buying channels, and instant access to information, today’s customers have never been more empowered, or more demanding. They’ve come to expect the ability to deal with a company on their own terms, very often opting for the convenience of self-service. So, when they do take the time to call a company, it’s usually because they have an immediate need—an issue they want resolved right away, and to their complete satisfaction.

An effective customer service representative (CSR) plays a critical role in meeting those expectations. No detail—from the CSR’s speaking voice to the quality of the sound on the line—is too small. And, the CSR must possess a certain kind of temperament, professionalism, and skill—but these alone are not enough. Answering the phone is just the start. Today’s customer service representative (CSR) listens, understands, and acts upon a customer’s needs with skill, rigor and thoughtfulness. Every minute, every day, the CSR needs to demonstrate that they have the customer’s best interests in mind, while presenting the company in the best possible light.

In fact, for the customer, the CSR doesn’t just represent the company, they are the company. Their job is to completely engage with the customer to provide the most informed advice, support, and guidance.

Problem-solver, diplomat, expert, empathizer: a CSR needs to be all these, and more. How can you help equip them for success?

A headset is a vital tool to the CSR. When it’s performing as expected, it’s barely noticeable. But if a setting needs to be adjusted or updated, it’s immediately noticed—and IT needs to handle it, right away. For companies with hundreds or even thousands of CSRs, it has meant a lot of effort for IT to manage their needs efficiently—until now.

Plantronics has a solution that helps IT monitor, manage, and maintain headsets. Plantronics Manager Pro is a cloud-based management tool that results in effortless management for IT, helping ensure users always have well-maintained headsets that enable them to confidently engage with customers, and ultimately improve the customer experience.

Now available in South Africa, find out how Plantronics Manager Pro can help make headset management effortless. Learn more here.

About Plantronics Plantronics is an audio pioneer and a global leader in the communications industry. We create intelligent and adaptive solutions that support our customers’ most important needs: experiencing and facilitating simple and clear communications while enjoying distraction-free environments. Our solutions are used worldwide by consumers and businesses alike and are an optimal choice for open office environments. From Unified Communications and customer service ecosystems, to data analytics and Bluetooth headsets, Plantronics delivers high-quality communications solutions that our customers count on today, while relentlessly innovating on behalf of their future. For more information visit www.plantronics.com.za 

ContactCentreWorld.com, the Global Association for Contact Centre and Customer Engagement Best Practices and Equilibrium Business Lab, a South African BPO & Contact Centre Consultancy recently announced a strategic partnership to help bring the South African and Global Contact Centre World closer together. 

The partnership gives the South African BPO and Contact Centre Industry access to a global network of close to 200,000 industry professionals, unrivaled tools and resources to develop the skills, industry knowledge, experience and recognition programs. The partnership recently launched ContactCentresSA.com and its Top Ranking Performers National Awards. This exclusive award program. gives local industry professional an opportunity to compete against the best in South Africa and the globally through ContactCentreWorld.com.

Raj Wadhwani, President of ContactCentreWorld.com: "We have seen the industry in South Africa grow substantially in skills and sophistication. The passion of the people is infectious and we are delighted to partner with Equilibrium Business Lab to help grow and develop the industry further. We have worked with Naz Salie, founder of Equilibrium Business Lab over the past year and are excited by the plans she and her team bring to the South African industry". 

Naz Salie, Managing Director of Equilibrium Business Lab and previous South Africa Industry Head for BPESA: "We are honored to be part of an alliance that will enable Equilibrium Business Lab to deliver world class solutions to our industry and complement the existing support structures in South Africa. 

About ContactCentreWorld.com
ContactCentreWorld.com is the world's premier on-line resource for the call and contact Centre industry. This article is one of hundreds available on-line to registered members. Our resource is updated every working day and includes content from every corner of the world. If you are not a registered member go to www.ContactCentreWorld.com and register today. 

Raj Wadhwani  President, ContactCentreWorld.com www.contactcenterworld.com  

About Equilibrium Business Lab
Equilibrium Business Lab provides businesses operating in the BPO & Contact Centre Industry with business development, marketing and branding solutions. Working hand in hand with business teams, develop cutting-edge, actionable and sustainable strategies. Equilibrium brings together a complimentary mix of business skills, creative talent and a passion to for developing sustainable relationships. 

Naz SalieDirector – Equilibrium Business Lab
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Online insurance and financial services website, Hippo.co.za, has won the 2017 Feefo Trusted Service award, an independent seal of excellence that recognises businesses for delivering exceptional experiences, rated by real customers.  

Trusted Service is awarded to businesses that use Feefo to collect genuine ratings and reviews. A badge of honour, this accreditation remains unique as all the awards are based purely on the interactions with verified customers. This feedback has been collated by the Feefo review platform, with the accolades being awarded based upon performance.  

In order to win the 2017 award, a company had to maintain a rating of between 4 – 4.5 stars with a minimum of 100 reviews or more between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2016. Hippo.co.za maintained a score of 4.4 and received more than 3 000 reviews in the above-mentioned period.  

“Feefo ensures that all feedback is authentic, by matching it to a legitimate transaction; we believe this is the best way to combat the rising issue of fake reviews,” says Andrew Mabbutt, CEO at Feefo.  

Derek Wilson, head of Hippo.co.za commented: “It’s a real honour to receive this award from Feefo. To be recognised for delivering exceptional experiences to our customers is a great achievement.”