Engaging with customers is one of the key challenges facing businesses today. Building and maintaining strong relationships across multiple devices and channels requires a combination of reactive and proactive processes in order to meet the needs of demanding customers.Gartner has talked extensively about the Customer Engagement Center (CEC), the replacement for the Contact Centre that it believes...
Last week marked a significant anniversary for Eptica - our Customer Experience Blog has now been running for three years. Created in April 2011, it has grown significantly since then, receiving thousands of visits from 160 countries across the world. This is the 290th blog post, with subjects ranging from the impact of wearables on customer service to how our software has helped safeguard elephan...
Despite the rise of new channels, most organisations understand that the telephone is still vital for customer service. Whether it is to discuss details of an order or to get to the bottom of a query, it is still the number one channel of choice for many consumers.However, telephone service is expensive – and it could be about to get even more costly in the UK. From 13 June 2014, companies w...
Poor service costs UK brands £116 billion every year. That’s the headline figure from new research from Accenture, which found that over half (53%) of British consumers had switched provider in at least one industry in the last twelve months. To put this in context, the equivalent of 12 per cent of UK consumers’ annual disposable income is being switched due to bad service.Accord...
Eptica customer L’Occitane has been recognised for the strength of its customer service, ranking first in the prominent 2014 Qualiweb/Stratégies index for email and fourth in the category for social media. It is the only brand to feature in both categories, demonstrating the strength of its multichannel service and consistency of its approach. Running since 1998 and organised by independent...
Analyst group Forrester has just released its 2014 predictions for customer service. It lists 12 trends that companies should be paying attention to, if they want to engage with customers and deliver the right experience for them in the year ahead.These trends are organised into four topics:1. Deliver pain free customer service Covering areas such as omnichannel, mobile and stand...
1st January 2014 saw a major change in the utility sector, as new Ofgem regulations came into force. Designed to create a clearer market, suppliers are now limited to offering eight tariffs to customers (four each for electricity and gas), which will be structured more simply. The aim is to make it easier to compare prices from different suppliers and therefore encourage switching to ensure consum...
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...
We’re now well into the Christmas shopping season, with Cyber Monday behind us and both retailers and analysts releasing their first figures for sales. This seems to show a strong start for many retailers, helped by promotions around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. John Lewis said online sales for the week ending 30 November were 35.7% higher than last year, while ChannelAdvisor reported that...
As companies expand, delivering the same, personal, high quality service is vital to their continued growth. Customer service teams can be spread across multiple locations and have to cover multiple brands and a greater range of products. This means that traditional methods of collecting and sharing knowledge (such as physical folders or handbooks) no longer provide fast answers to staff, leading ...