Blog

The 3 capabilities needed to empower customer service employees

Published on: July 08, 2015
Author: Anne-Merete Jensen - Senior Business Consultant

Employees are at the frontline of delivering the right experience to customers. No matter how strong your processes are, customer service comes down to the people who provide it. Staff who fail to show empathy or, even worse, are rude or sound bored risk damaging your brand and hitting customer loyalty. In comparison, agents who go the extra mile, being helpful...

International customer experience: comparing the UK and France

Published on: July 03, 2015
Author: Olivier Njamfa - CEO & Co-Founder

Earlier this year Eptica released the 2015 UK Multichannel Customer Experience Study. Covering 10 sectors, it researched the strength of the customer experience delivered by 100 leading brands across the web, email, Twitter and chat channels. Some of the key findings were that:On average UK companies could answer less than half (48%) of all questions as...

Customer service and the public sector – how can it be improved?

Published on: July 01, 2015
Author: Derek Lewis

Last week UK government body HMRC said that it would spend an additional £45m to improve customer service for taxpayers. The money will be used to employ 3,000 more customer-facing staff, with a further 2,000 existing employees moved temporarily to help with the forthcoming tax credits deadline. The investment follows figures which showed that over a quarter (27.5%) ...

Do you need a Chief Customer Officer?

Published on: June 26, 2015
Author: Pauline Ashenden - Demand Generation Manager

Customers are becoming ever-more demanding, across every channel, while competition has never been fiercer. All of these factors mean that the customer experience is now central to winning and retaining business for organizations of all sizes. Customer service is now everyone’s job, from the CEO downwards. But who should be in overall charge of ensuring that the organization...

Understanding your customer – why it is key to delivering the right service in APAC

Published on: June 25, 2015
Author: Vincent Giraud - Business Development Manager

The move online has transformed how consumers interact with businesses, and opens up completely new markets to companies. However, as you cannot physically see your customer it can make it more difficult to understand them and their motivations, and consequently provide a personalized customer experience. For example, the degree of formality customers expect in written and verbal communications...

The Sharing Economy and customer service

Published on: June 24, 2015
Author: Dharmesh Ghedia

The internet and ecommerce have transformed how we research, buy and communicate across a wide range of activities from shopping and choosing holidays, purchasing insurance to applying for a mortgage. Characterized by disruptive internet giants such as Google and Amazon, this shift has fundamentally changed customer service, but also brought its own challenges around confidentiality, protecti...

The widening online customer experience gap

Published on: June 19, 2015
Author: Anne-Merete Jensen - Senior Business Consultant

The amount of time – and range of activities – that consumers carry out online continues to grow. It is now the first port of call for everything from shopping and banking, to researching and buying insurance policies, switching telecoms supplier or booking a holiday. No wonder that in 2014 UK ecommerce sales broke the £100 billion barrier for the first time, making up ...

The importance of customer experience to building a Digital Business

Published on: June 17, 2015
Author: Robin Tandon - Senior Product Marketing Director

Last week’s Gartner Customer Strategies & Technologies Summit in London provided a perfect opportunity to take the pulse of customer service and customer experience, and to look at future trends that companies need to start preparing for now. The two day event was certainly packed with presentations, and well attended by both vendors and end users, demonstrating the vital ...

The importance of empathy in customer service interactions

Published on: June 11, 2015
Author: Pauline Ashenden - Marketing Manager

One of the biggest complaints consumers have when they raise an issue with a company is that customer service agents don’t show sufficient understanding or sympathy for their plight. In contrast, when agents apologize and demonstrate that they realize that there is a problem that is causing inconvenience, customer satisfaction rises. This is even the case if the issue can’t be solved...

How can APAC retailers cope with customer complaints?

Published on: June 10, 2015
Author: Vincent Giraud - Business Development Manager

A research in 2014 from the Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore (CSISG) has found that retail is the most complained-about sector in the country. According to the Index, consumer satisfaction with the overall retail sector declined significantly, dropping by 3.5%

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