In the past six months, the world—and work—has changed dramatically. Priorities have shifted, teams that once sat together everyday are distributed, and ways of operating are different. As an organization, how do you maintain alignment between people and teams in this new environment? How do you sustain clarity about what your goals are and how to achieve them? Objectives and key results (OKRs) are one way of creating clarity in an organization.

High performing customer experience teams are more than twice as likely as underperforming teams to be taking an omnichannel approach, according to Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends Report, 2020. Yet Zendesk findings also revealed that only 35 percent of Benchmark companies have an omnichannel strategy in place. This gap represents a sweet spot where businesses can rise above their competition and differentiate on the basis of customer experience.

The sheer volume of information being created on a daily basis by the average business is staggering. In fact, it’s been estimated that more data has been created in the last two years alone than in the entirety of human history leading up to that point.

A contact center and a call center are essentially the same thing, right? Well, yes and no. Call centers only field phone calls, whereas a contact center offers a variety of other ways for customers to reach out for support: email, chat, self-service, messaging apps, and social media. Why is it important to understand the difference? While a call center might work for your business, chances are your customers will be better served via a contact center.

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase customer value? You might think about money—giving customers a good price for a quality product. And 20 years ago, you’d have been right. But today, customer value encompasses much more. Today’s buyers don’t just care about a product’s price or even its quality. They also prioritize brand experiences.

The main focus of B2B companies is to offer unmatched support to their customers. Failing to do so will increase the likeliness of customer churn and also damage their reputation.That’s why an increasing number of businesses are leveraging AI every year to enhance their brand and provide a level of support required to stay competitive. In Part 1 of this series we introduced the first two of five ways AI is impacting the B2B customer support sector. Here are next three ways.

A Censuswide study found that only 24% of decision-makers at surveyed organizations were confident in their data literacy. That means over 3/4 of respondents might be making business decisions based on potentially inaccurate data interpretation. Data literacy is the ability to accurately read, analyze, and apply data. It’s a crucial skill for team members of all levels.

Internal support teams receive an average of 492 tickets per month (Zendesk). 69% of internal support tickets are resolved in one touch (Zendesk). It takes an average of 24.2 hours to provide a first response to an internal support ticket (Zendesk). Given that 69% of internal support tickets are solved in a single communication, a first response time of 24 hours seems high. It suggests that internal help desk teams may be too busy to respond to queries quickly.

Statistics show 88% of HR teams consider employee engagement a strategic priority for their organization. Employee engagement is a workplace method designed to improve an employee’s outlook on the company and invest emotional interest in the organizational goals. If the right employee engagement methods are used, employees will be ready to push their limits and work towards the organizational goals, driven by a sense of personal interest in their work.

Did you know that 50-60% of today’s organizations still rely on manual Identity Access Management (IAM)? While password management technologies like LastPass enable administrators to provision and monitor users across IAM applications, it requires admins to manually change these factors for each individual within the organization. This system can lead to lapses in access restriction and ultimately large losses in time, money, and security.