Key New Features This Month

Areas of Excellence

What Is It?

Areas of Excellence enable customers who leave positive feedback to highlight the specific areas where the agent went above and beyond.

Why Does It Matter?

Understand in more detail why customers leave positive ratings. By accessing this granular additional detail, you can create coaching opportunities from positive as well as negative feedback.

 You may find, for example, that one of your agents who is a consistent top performer never receives an Area of Excellence for a specific key element of your service experience. Before this feature was introduced, you would have had no visibility into this gap in performance. With Areas of Excellence, you can spotlight this issue and have the opportunity to coach the agent and further improve their performance.

This feature is particularly important for service teams that typically receive a high percentage of positive feedback and struggle to unlock the full coaching benefits of Stella Connect.

How Do You Use It?

Areas of Excellence will replace Rewards within your existing feedback requests. We made this decision to ensure that your feedback requests remain quick and easy for customers to complete.

Within your Settings page you will now see a new page for ‘Rewards / Areas of Excellence’. From this page you will be able to select whether you want Rewards or Areas of Excellence included as part of your feedback request.

When you enable Areas of Excellence you will be able to select six Areas of Excellence. As well as choosing from standard Areas of Excellence, you can also create custom options specific to your service team. Your client services manager will be able to help you with this process.

Tip: If you like the sound of Areas of Excellence, but you’re not sure about stopping your rewards program, consider converting Areas of Excellence submissions into reward votes. Your client services manager will be able to help you understand how Areas of Excellence can be used to drive reward and incentive programs.

Monthly Leaderboards

What Is It?

Ability to switch the default view for your Leaderboards from weekly to monthly.

Why Does It Matter?

If you run incentive programs on a monthly basis then switching Leaderboards to a monthly view will enable you to more closely align Stella Connect with your internal program.

Monthly Leaderboard views are also a great option for companies with lower volumes of customer inquiries, so you can ensure you’re maximizing the value of this important feature.

How Do You Use It?

As an admin, you will now see a dropdown on Leaderboards which will enable the view to be switched between weekly and monthly. Updates to this setting will reflect for all users across your company. This will ensure everyone in your service team is seeing the same view.

Survey Expiration

What Is It?

Your feedback requests will ‘expire’ after seven days. If consumers choose to complete their feedback request after more than seven days, they will select their star rating and immediately be directed to a thank you page rather than seeing the complete feedback request. Their rating will not be captured within your platform.

Why Does It Matter?

Expiring surveys allow you to properly use Stella Connect data for performance management and incentive programs. Statistics that you use to coach and reward agents can’t change after seven days, so once a team member has reached a goal, there won’t be any change to that goal. Analysis of our data reveals that typically well under 1% of feedback requests are responded to after seven days, so using this feature will have little to no impact on your response rates.

How Do You Use It?

Contact your client services manager who will activate this feature within your account.

Salesforce Data Return API 

What Is It?

Stella Connect’s Salesforce integration has been enhanced to enable data to flow from Stella Connect into Salesforce.

Why Does It Matter?

By leveraging our data return API, Salesforce customers can not only enrich records within Salesforce with Stella Connect data, but can also enable end-to-end service recovery programs. Creating a service recovery workflow will enable you to identify customers that need to be contacted after negative experiences to make things right. Follow up Stella feedback requests can then be triggered after the service recovery process to measure changes in customer sentiment.

How Do You Use It?

Contact your clients services manager who will arrange a meeting with our integrations team. Our integration specialists will be able to guide you through the setup process and work with you to create the workflows needed to maximize the potential of the service recovery feature.

Custom Channels

What Is It?

Custom Channels enable you to more accurately separate feedback if you’re delivering service across more than just phone, email and chat. With custom channels, you can create separate copy for feedback requests across channels and then report on each channel individually.

Why Does It Matter?

This new feature is all about accuracy of reporting and giving you the ability to deliver more customized coaching. Some Stella Connect customers, for example, offer support over social. These companies currently deliver feedback requests via email, but mark their social channel as ‘chat’ which doesn’t paint an accurate picture of performance. With this new release these companies (and companies with similar use cases) will be able to create separate feedback requests and measure feedback across their social channel.

Notes:

• While this new feature provides more granular reporting, feedback requests are still sent out via email. To discuss sending feedback requests via other channels, such as SMS, contact your client services manager.
• With this update, channel icons will now be removed and replaced with text. This won’t impact functionality, but it’s worth giving team members a heads up, particularly if you are sending out Stella Connect feedback requests in manual mode.

How Do You Use It?

Contact your client services manager to discuss the list of channels you would like added. Once channels are added, you’ll be able to enable and disable them and customize your feedback requests via your Company Info page, just like you do with your existing channels today.  

Once new channels are in place, you’ll be able to report on performance via your Stream, Trends and any data exports.

Tip: It’s important to remember that Custom Channels should be used only to measure different support channels that you offer and not different types of interactions. Our Tags feature should continue to be used to measure different interaction types.

Profanity Filters

What Is It?

Mute inflammatory or derogatory language from your team’s Feedback Streams.

Why Does It Matter?

Stella Connect should provide an environment for positive reinforcement, motivation and coaching opportunities. Profanity has no place in the product. With this new release you can specify terms that you want to block from your team’s Feedback Streams.

Note: Team members can still see the specific feedback if they choose to, and the star rating from feedback including blocked terms will continue to count towards the team member’s overall rating.

How Do You Use It?

Simply provide the list of keywords you would like to set up filters for and your client services manager will implement them for you.

UPDATES TO TRENDS DASHBOARDS 

Team Filters:

What Is It?

View team performance for any level in your existing hierarchy.

Why Does It Matter?

If you have several layers of hierarchy within your existing team structure it’s currently not possible to view aggregate reporting for any layers higher than the team member > team leader level. This update changes that and gives you more flexibility.

How Do You Use It?

No action is required from you - by selecting the ‘Team’ dropdown on your Company Trends dashboard you will now be able to select the leader you want to review data against, regardless of their position in the hierarchy.

Tags Trends

What Is It?

Get a more holistic view of your performance by individual tags.

Why Does It Matter?

With this update you can more easily identify gaps in service performance against specific tags that you’re passing into Stella Connect. 

How Do You Use It?

On your Company Trends Dashboard, you can now select ‘See All Tags’. This functionality works in exactly the same way as the existing ‘See All Teams’ and ‘See All Team Members’ features you are currently utilizing.

Historical additional question reporting

What Is It?

Easily toggle between reporting for your current and previous additional questions.

Why Does It Matter?

If you have changed your additional question in the past, it is currently difficult to quickly access the data from previous questions. This update addresses this issue. You can now select either your current or previous additional question to quickly get at the data and insights you need.

How Do You Use It?

On the Additional Question widget on your Company Trends Dashboard, you will now see a dropdown. Using this dropdown will enable you to access historical performance data for that question.  

Note: When you select a different additional question, the ‘See All Teams’, ‘See All Team Members’ and ‘See All Tags’ links will show data reflecting the additional question you’ve chosen. The ‘Star Rating’ and ‘% Negative’ tabs will not be updated and will still show overall data.

Measure Star Ratings Over Time

What Is It?

Get an aggregate view of star rating performance over time on your Company Trends Dashboard. 

Why Does It Matter?

Enables you to more easily see your overall star rating performance over time. You’ll already be familiar with this aggregate view from the ‘% Negative’ and ‘Additional Question’ tabs.

How Do You Use It?

This new widget will be automatically displayed on your Company Trends dashboard.

OTHER UPDATES IN THIS RELEASE

Smaller updates included in this release are detailed below. You client services manager will be able to share further details on these, and all of the other updates being released today.

• Offer different additional questions across teams
• Create flexible reward thresholds across teams
• Leverage enhanced SAML support for streamlined sign on
• Ensure comprehensive compliance with GDPR and WCAG 2.0 AA