If you needed a reminder of the importance of customer service to the bottom line, this week’s £2 million fine for utility npower for mishandling customer complaints demonstrates the financial cost of poor customer service processes. The punishment, levied by energy regulator Ofgem, follows a £2.5 million fine for British Gas in July 2011 for similar issues. In its judgement...
Most organisations today have a multi-channel strategy, allowing customers to contact them by email, phone, the web, branch and increasingly social media. Ensuring that you can respond to them via the channel of their choice is a key part of delivering high levels of customer service. After all, if you begin a conversation on email you don’t want to be forced to call the contact centre ...
Delivering excellent customer service is a central part of business today, whatever industry you are in. While sectors such as retail may be very visible when it comes to customer service initiatives, improving service can deliver huge benefits in other, more traditional, sectors such as insurance.The perfect example of this is Ageas Insurance Solutions (AIS), one of the UK’s leading persona...
With the UK in the grips of recession, this will be a make or break Christmas for many struggling retailers. There’s just a month to go until Christmas and while predictions are that consumers will still be spending, they are going to leave it much later and shop around searching for bargains. Customer service as well as price will be a key factor in where they decide to spend their hard-ear...
The Virgin brand is known for doing things differently and for putting the customer first, whichever market it is operating in. So last week’s news that the UK government has sold Northern Rock to Virgin Money could potentially have a big impact on the banking market.Northern Rock will be rebranded as Virgin Money, with the company pledging to increase the number of branches it has and to ad...
Next year’s London Olympics will put the UK in the spotlight. Millions of visitors are expected to come to the country, providing a much needed boost to the economy. And provided they enjoy the experience many of these tourists could turn into regular visitors, coming back year after year for holidays across the country. Outside the spectacle of the games themselves, what will make the ...
It has just been announced that the former owners of Britain's last circus elephant are to be prosecuted for animal cruelty – and customer service software has played its part in helping secure a better future for Anne the elephant.When footage of Anne being beaten and kicked emerged on YouTube in March 2011, The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) received hun...
Telecoms companies have historically had a poor reputation for customer service, something that our own research unfortunately verifies. Previously with little difference between service levels amongst telcos, customers didn’t have much choice, so there was little incentive to invest.However this is changing as new entrants and technologies disrupt the traditional telecoms market. On the bac...
Last week’s IT problems at HSBC demonstrate how quickly a customer service issue can develop in the age of social media. On Friday afternoon the bank suffered an IT outage on its mainframe which affected online banking, ATM and some customers using debit cards in stores. While the problems lasted just over 2 hours, Friday afternoons are amongst the busiest time for banks, with HSBC’s 1...
New research demonstrates wide variations between online buying behaviour across the globe. The survey, from Pitney Bowes, asked 10,000 consumers from 10 countries about their online shopping habits and preferences and uncovered some interesting differences.Overall 93% of consumers had shopped online, 49% in the last 30 days, showing the mass market appeal of ecommerce around the world. In the UK,...