Despite the rising importance of customer service on both sides of the Atlantic, the UK is widely seen as lagging the United States when it comes to the experience that companies deliver. This is backed up by damning new consumer research commissioned by fixed-fee UK estate agent YOPA. It found that: 80% of Britons are frequently enraged by poor customer service...
Delivering a seamless, high quality customer experience is extremely complex. It has to cover multiple channels, involve the whole company and also key partners, for example logistics companies for retailers, in a way that is invisible to the consumer, minimizing the amount of effort that they need to put into their purchase or interaction.Over time it has become even harder as new chann...
Last month’s Gartner Customer Strategies & Technologies Summit provided a perfect opportunity to review where the customer experience market currently is – and to look forward at the next challenges and opportunities for companies. One of the key points raised is that while senior managers now understand the importance of customer experience, many are unsure...
Delivering the right customer experience isn’t just about systems and processes – it is also about how the consumer feels during, and at the end of, the journey. For example, it is quite possible that a company could solve a consumer’s issue, but that the customer needs to expend so much effort to achieve it, or that the process feels so complex, that they are...
In the fast-moving world of customer experience there is no shortage of new trends and technologies for companies to evaluate and adopt. How do they choose their priorities and ensure that they meet both customer needs and that they gain buy-in from the board?The Global State of Customer Experience 2016, a new research report from the CX Network, provides some interesting insight into what is...
At a time when consumers want a fast, seamless experience, knowledge is at the heart of delivering excellent customer service. For example, Forrester found that 55% of US adults say they are likely to abandon their online purchase if they can’t find a quick answer to their question. The same applies within the contact center – if they are to solve customer queries over the telephone...
According to UK industry regulator Ofcom, customer experience is improving across the sector. Its latest data found that the total volume of telecoms and pay TV complaints decreased between Q3 and Q4 2015. The only sector where issues grew was pay monthly mobile, where the average rose to 10 complaints per 100,000 customers, from 8 in the previous quarter. While there were spikes in issues...
The combination of growing competition and more demanding consumers means that customer experience is now recognized by businesses everywhere as crucial for success. Analyst reports back this up – research from Forrester found that companies with superior customer experience demonstrate improved revenue growth, while Gartner analysis predicted that by 2016 89% of...
Retail is one of the most competitive sectors in the economy. Transformed by the internet, new entrants and ever more demanding consumers, retailers cannot afford to rest on their laurels.Customers are pushing retailers to innovate and deliver new services, improved experiences at lower prices. Loyalty is a thing of the past, with consumers are now able to choose from an enormous range...
Over the past five years Eptica has regularly evaluated the multichannel customer experience offered by 100 of the UK’s biggest brands, across ten sectors. To do this we’ve posed as prospective customers, testing how easy it is to find information and answers to the routine questions that consumers might ask every day on the web and via email, chat and social media.Since we began,...