Smart organisations realise that the customer experience is the responsibility of everyone within the company that comes into contact with consumers. From frontline staff within branches or stores, through product experts and marketing teams adding content to websites, to senior management, all have a role to play in winning and retaining customers through superior service. But how do you ens...
At a time when consumers are getting ever more demanding, it is good to see that complaints have fallen over the last year in one sector. According to the Consumer Council for Water, an industry watchdog, written complaints made by customers to their water providers have fallen by 18% in 2013/14 compared with the previous year in England and Wales. While four water companies did record a rise in c...
Today, businesses understand that they need to engage with customers, whatever the channel, if they want to be successful. Customers are demanding more, across every sector, and, with social media, they have a megaphone to publicise their experiences (good or bad), instantly, around the globe. The number of interactions is increasing dramatically and consumers want faster answers than ever before....
Every business understands that today’s customers are demanding more – and are happy to move to the competition if they don’t receive what they are looking for. However, breaking these demands down into specific areas can be difficult, so those involved with customer experience should take a look at a recent Forbes blog post by customer service expert Micah Solomon as it gives mo...
In increasingly competitive markets, customers look for experiences that match their expectations and needs. Essentially this means that as consumers continue to become more savvy at researching and comparing brands, companies need to realise that when it comes to customer experience, they need to create a brand promise and deliver on it. After all we live in a world filled with technology-empower...
When interacting with organisations, customers value convenience, speed and consistency above all. Self-service systems deliver in all three of these areas, which is leading to their widespread adoption on the web. But self-service isn’t stopping there. Advances in speech recognition and voice to text technology mean that companies are beginning to look beyond websites to applying self-servi...
Customer satisfaction with UK companies is worsening. That’s the stark headline finding from the latest Institute of Customer Service (ICS) UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI).Researched every six months, the Index fell in July 2014 for the third consecutive time, with over half of organisations seeing a drop of at least one point in their ratings. Satisfaction levels fell in 12 out of th...
In most sectors, the customer journey is growing in complexity, spanning interactions across multiple channels with customers interweaving digital interactions with physical (in-store or branch) experiences. Customer service and the customer experience needs to evolve in order to stay on top of these changes.Previously a lot of information people might have needed before a purchase was delivered f...
Contact centre agents are at the front line of providing customer service, acting as the public face of an organisation. It is therefore critical to give them the training, tools and information they need to deliver a superior and joined-up customer experience.However, as they have often grown in a channel-based, ad hoc manner, many contact centres struggle to integrate information from different ...
In recent years, the consumer insurance market has changed out of all recognition. New channels such as the internet have transformed the landscape. Indeed, according to the Financial Conduct Authority, almost half of all internet users have researched motor insurance on price comparison websites, with 4 out of 5 of them going on to buy policies through them.Customer loyalty is a thing of the past...