There’s a lot of talk about the need to provide consumers with a superior customer experience. But how do organisations begin to implement a customer experience programme, who should be in charge and how does it differ from existing customer service activities?Eptica’s own research has highlighted a pressing need to improve the customer experience. The 2012 Eptica Multichannel Customer...
As we’re now well into January, commentators are releasing a growing number of predictions for the customer service market in 2013.The latest is from industry analysts Forrester. While its full trend report will be published later in the month, it has released a sneak preview of where it sees the customer service industry going this year.Essentially it revolves around three areas:The need to...
Anyone looking to convince their company of the importance of social customer service can point to a growing library of case studies. Whether it is how O2 has used social media to turn a customer service negative into a positive or on the flipside how Australian retailer Gasp failed to engage with a disgruntled customer, there are more and more stories that can be used to justify the necessary inv...
In an era where organisations are looking to reduce expenditures wherever they can, it is vital that they don’t make cuts that actually lead to increased costs – or cause valuable customers to take their business elsewhere.This is particularly true when it comes to customer service – after all it is easy to believe that cutting corners in the contact centre won’t affect how...
Companies have been talking about getting the customer experience right for many years, but 2012 could be the year that companies move from paying lip service to the customer experience to actually putting in place a strategy and action plan to improve it. That’s the view of analyst Forrester in its 2012 Customer Experience Predictions. Customer expectations of how they are treated are ...
The Christmas shopping season was bruising for some retailers, with high street names such as Hawkins’ Bazaar, La Senza and Black’s Leisure all plunging into bankruptcy. Overall sales were up by just 2.2% on December 2010 according to the British Retail Consortium, while e-commerce continued its rise, with online sales up by 30% compared to the previous year.One of the key trends highl...
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...
While it has been around for many years, live web chat is definitely an underused channel by companies. Despite the fact that more and more people are using chat channels such as instant messaging or Skype, companies have shied away from deploying it, particularly for customer service. Mainly this is down to the perceived cost of chat, as it requires a real agent to answer questions online. T...
As a discipline customer service has been around for a long time, with plenty of companies promising to deliver an outstanding experience, but few actually doing so. In many cases this was due to a fundamental imbalance in the customer/supplier relationship. The customer essentially had no choice but to put up with poor service, as either they couldn't buy what they wanted elsewhere or ev...
The 2011 edition of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Web Customer Service (WCS) is now out, and Eptica is one of just 13 companies worldwide that are positioned in it.Competition to get into the Magic Quadrant is always fierce, and Eptica’s inclusion follows impressive sales growth of 26% in 2010 and 22% in the first half of 2011. Eptica excels for its:Self-learning knowledgebas...