Crowdsourcing is one of today’s big buzz words with more and more companies turning to their customers or the general public for input on everything from new products to marketing campaigns. The latest blue chip company to embrace the crowd is food retailer Waitrose, which is about to launch Seriously Chocolatey Rose-Infused Chocolate Ganache, a new dessert based on a recipe submitted by one...
Following a slump in March, UK retail sales rebounded in April, helped by sunny weather and glut of bank holidays. According to figures from the British Retail Consortium not only did overall retail sales jump by 5.2 per cent, but internet sales increased by 14 per cent.Obviously this is good news for the sector, but as always there are winners and losers. Most companies selling Easter eggs did we...
Now is the time of year when everyone looks forward and makes their predictions for 2014. Rather than add my thoughts to this debate, I’ve taken a look at the views of the great and the good from this time last year – and seen how many have actually become a reality. I’ve tried to be as extensive as possible in my research, spanning analysts, publications, experts and other softw...
The next two weeks see an unprecedented number of bank holidays across the UK. Easter, the Royal Wedding and May Day mean that many physical shops will be shut, driving potential customers onto the internet.While this is good news for ecommerce sites, ensuring they have the right level of customer service support to match demand is tricky. Estimating how many contact centre agents are needed on pa...
Pretty much every business today operates in a multi-channel environment. Even purchases that are completed in the High Street have often been extensively researched on the websites of retailers, product manufacturers, competitors and review sites.To meet this need Google is piloting a new Analytics feature called Multi-Channel Funnels which maps all the marketing channels that impact the final sa...
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a technology that has been around for a considerable amount of time. Because of its complexity it has often proved difficult to get right – Gartner estimate that fewer than 10 per cent of organisations have optimised the management of their customer relationships.The bad news for companies struggling with CRMis that the rocketing adoption of social m...
The theft of personal data from up to 77 million users of Sony’s PlayStation Network is obviously headline news, particularly as it follows similar security breaches at the likes of Play.com and TripAdvisor.Moving beyond the incident itself, Sony now has the job of reassuring its customers by ensuring that they have the latest, most comprehensive information about the breach and its potentia...
Recent research from OFCOM has highlighted the number of complaints customers have with telecoms companies. The regulator itself receives an average of 450 complaints every day, covering everything from mis-selling to billing errors. And this figure obviously doesn’t cover complaints made to telecoms companies themselves that don’t get escalated to OFCOM.Given the fast moving and compl...
In the move to a digital world it is easy to overlook that a huge percentage of customer communication is still through traditional mail and fax – so called white mail. This is particularly true in industries such as banking and insurance where legal requirements mean documents need to be signed and returned. And in many cases customers feel more secure having signed and posted a document ra...
The reason that contact centres came into being was to provide a central place for delivering service to customers, initially via telephone and then expanding to include new channels such as email, the web and now social media.However forward looking companies now realise that customer service can’t be just left to a small part of the organisation – the contact centre – no matter...