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...
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...
Figures just released by the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) show that the number of complaints made by consumers increased by 24% in the third quarter. 31,386 complaints were made to the FOS, which deals with issues escalated by consumers beyond their financial services provider, between July and September 2011.Commentators have highlighted factors such as the worsening economic situation for t...
Eptica’s International Customer Service Summit highlighted customer service excellence through the second annual Eptica Customer Service Innovation awards. Dixons, AirAsia and Ageas were amongst the companies to receive awards for service transformation based around Eptica’s multichannel customer interaction management software. Winners achieved outstanding results in the ca...
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...
Last Friday’s Eptica International Customer Service Summit in Paris provided a perfect opportunity for 200+ Eptica customers, partners and staff to review current and future developments in the customer service market. As part of his presentation, Paul Barnes, managing director of Eptica UK Ltd, outlined ten key trends that the company sees driving the market in the near future. Th...
National Customer Service Week (3-9th October) is now an established fixture in the UK business calendar, providing a real focus to demonstrate the importance of customer service and its impact on the UK economy. This year is no exception, with a whole range of activities planned by both the Institute of Customer Service and individual companies, both in the UK and around the world Eptic...
News that Rochdale Council is proposing to cut £10 million of the services it provides, including a £3.1 million reduction in what it spends on customer service demonstrate the pressures that public sector are under. The council is looking to save £64 million by 2015, forcing it to make tough and often unpopular choices. Rochdale is not alone, as councils up and down the UK look ...
Customer service at the UK’s water companies is improving dramatically, according to new figures released by the Consumer Council for Water. Consumer complaints in 2010-11 fell by 4.5%, part of a trend which has seen a reduction of a third over the last three years. Overall there were 185,140 complaints to companies in England and Wales, compared to 193,824 in the previous 12 months.While th...
This week the Independent Commission on Banking (ICB) released its long-awaited report on reforming the banking system. It has two main aims - firstly to protect us all from potential future financial crises by splitting bank’s retail and investment arms but importantly to increase competition within the UK banking sector.In fact the report states that it wants a market where “ba...