Congratulations. You’ve decided to prioritize agent experience as a key driver of customer success. This move positions your business to unlock the one true secret to a better customer experience: equipped, empowered, and engaged agents. Now, where do you begin? The genesis of this proactive change program is in prioritizing improved collaboration.

Research is clear: customer service is one of the biggest drivers of customer loyalty. In fact, 78 percent of U.S. consumers say customer service is important to loyalty, according to Netomi’s State of Customer Service 2020 report. Increasingly, customers expect support that is fast, personal, and effective. To deliver the experience that customers expect, companies are adopting AI to provide immediate resolutions that bring customer delight and business value.

Customer expectations are higher than ever before, and your customers are scrutinizing your business more intensely than ever. They’re comparing their experience with your brand to the easy, fast, and personalized experiences they’re having with the best of the best. And it’s these customer-focused businesses that get to reap the benefits of renewed loyalty and competitive advantage.

Not long ago, handle time was the chief measure of customer support agent productivity. Managers optimized everything they could to lower costs (that is, time spent) by speeding up their teams’ calls. This, according to management consultants at Bain & Company, is what leaders do to make teams more efficient. Efficiency is producing the same with less. Productivity, by contrast, is producing more with the same.

In most organizations, the highest-performing sales reps are eventually promoted to management. But being a manager is a much different job than being a rep. You can be at the very top of your trade, but that doesn’t necessarily make you a good leader. I experienced this firsthand when I moved into management. I was good at sales, but I wasn’t really good at leading. You’re not taught that it’s a completely different job that operates in a gray area every single day.

A business can’t thrive without lead generation, however, the more leads you generate, the more selective you have to be in your pursuits. Sales rep don’t want to waste time chasing a large list of dead-end leads. That time could be spent nurturing more promising leads. Yet, when it comes to valuing leads, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? Experience and gut instinct goes a long way, but they aren’t enough.

Messaging has changed the way we communicate. Relationships big and small — from the personal to the political to the commercial – can be mapped out across conversations in the messaging apps almost everybody uses every day. In our annual conversational business report, State of Messaging 2020, we look at the biggest messaging stories from the past year, along with research, reporting, and predictions on how the future of messaging between brands and customers will play out.

The emergence of bots, AI, and interactivity in messaging has transformed channels like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and iMessage from places we chat to platforms where we do business. Conversational business is only going in one direction—Gartner estimates that “by 2022, 70% of all customer interactions will involve emerging tools like chatbots, machine learning, and mobile messaging, up from 15% in 2018.”

In the past 3 years, the AI space has become so noisy that even seasoned executives struggle to cut through the jargon, making it challenging to deliver against an AI strategy. Support leaders face a series of roadblocks. The AI space overall isn’t accessible to the business stakeholders who want to leverage it for improved customer experience.

Customers may not be interested in your customer experience software – but your company absolutely should be. When done right, a simple and sophisticated customer experience platform is a key tool for creating loyalty. For companies, it means being able to seamlessly communicate with customers across the channels they want – including email, chat, text, phone and social media. For customers, it fosters a sense of trust that they can reach you the way they want.

Identifying the attributes that constitute a qualified lead can be a complicated process, especially if your product caters to a wide variety of customers. Your sales reps need a clear and structured strategy to ensure their lead qualification process is both consistent and reliable. A lead qualification checklist establishes the criteria and step-by-step framework your team needs to ensure the leads they work have the highest probability of becoming future customers.

Lots of companies say they’re customer focused. But are they really? The fact is, most companies think more about profits than how they treat their customers. That makes sense on the surface–after all, any business needs to be profitable to stay afloat. But in the long run, it’s much healthier for the bottom line to put customer needs in focus. A single angry customer can create a social media firestorm with a complaint.

For SaaS businesses, no metric matters more than monthly recurring revenue (MRR). That’s because they rely on recurring revenue to run their business. MRR is how they track whether that revenue is growing, plateauing, or declining. And following that trend, they can predict future sales revenue and adjust their budget as needed. Read on to learn how MRR is calculated and how SaaS companies can leverage it to create more accurate sales forecasts and better budgets for their business.

In order to grow your business, revenue needs to exceed the costs of running your company. This may seem like a “Thank you Captain Obvious” concept. But the truth is, accurately calculating revenue to plan for future expenses and growth is not as cut and dried as you may think.That’s because there are different types of revenue, each one requiring a unique revenue formula to calculate.

Hitting your sales quota every month means knowing how to work smarter, not harder. Oftentimes, this means knowing which leads to chase first. Sales reps who have mastered this skill typically use lead scoring to guide their actions. Usually calculated on a numeric scale, lead scoring helps reps identify people who are most likely to buy their product or service and weed out those who are least likely. It makes you wonder why everyone isn’t scoring their leads, right?