Contact Center

Why responsive customer service is key to retail success

Published on: May 12, 2011
Author: Epticablog

Following a slump in March, UK retail sales rebounded in April, helped by sunny weather and glut of bank holidays. According to figures from the British Retail Consortium not only did overall retail sales jump by 5.2 per cent, but internet sales increased by 14 per cent.Obviously this is good news for the sector, but as always there are winners and losers. Most companies selling Easter eggs did we...

Customer service isn’t just the contact centre

Published on: May 10, 2011
Author: Epticablog

The reason that contact centres came into being was to provide a central place for delivering service to customers, initially via telephone and then expanding to include new channels such as email, the web and now social media.However forward looking companies now realise that customer service can’t be just left to a small part of the organisation – the contact centre – no matter...

Coping with snail mail

Published on: May 06, 2011
Author: Epticablog

In the move to a digital world it is easy to overlook that a huge percentage of customer communication is still through traditional mail and fax – so called white mail. This is particularly true in industries such as banking and insurance where legal requirements mean documents need to be signed and returned. And in many cases customers feel more secure having signed and posted a document ra...

Hanging on the telephone

Published on: May 04, 2011
Author: Epticablog

Recent research from OFCOM has highlighted the number of complaints customers have with telecoms companies. The regulator itself receives an average of 450 complaints every day, covering everything from mis-selling to billing errors. And this figure obviously doesn’t cover complaints made to telecoms companies themselves that don’t get escalated to OFCOM.Given the fast moving and compl...

Coping with online company crises

Published on: April 28, 2011
Author: Epticablog

The theft of personal data from up to 77 million users of Sony’s PlayStation Network is obviously headline news, particularly as it follows similar security breaches at the likes of Play.com and TripAdvisor.Moving beyond the incident itself, Sony now has the job of reassuring its customers by ensuring that they have the latest, most comprehensive information about the breach and its potentia...

Taming the Customer Relationship Monster

Published on: April 26, 2011
Author: Epticablog

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a technology that has been around for a considerable amount of time. Because of its complexity it has often proved difficult to get right – Gartner estimate that fewer than 10 per cent of organisations have optimised the management of their customer relationships.The bad news for companies struggling with CRMis that the rocketing adoption of social m...

What Google Analytics teaches us about customer service

Published on: April 21, 2011
Author: Epticablog

Pretty much every business today operates in a multi-channel environment. Even purchases that are completed in the High Street have often been extensively researched on the websites of retailers, product manufacturers, competitors and review sites.To meet this need Google is piloting a new Analytics feature called Multi-Channel Funnels which maps all the marketing channels that impact the final sa...

The Royal Wedding and Customer Service

Published on: April 19, 2011
Author: Epticablog

The next two weeks see an unprecedented number of bank holidays across the UK. Easter, the Royal Wedding and May Day mean that many physical shops will be shut, driving potential customers onto the internet.While this is good news for ecommerce sites, ensuring they have the right level of customer service support to match demand is tricky. Estimating how many contact centre agents are needed on pa...

Don’t make Facebook customer service a silo

Published on: April 15, 2011
Author: Eptica

Pretty much all customer facing companies have woken up to the power of social media and the new channels it provides for customer service. Lots of organisations are monitoring conversations on the likes of Twitter and Facebook, but a high proportion are not integrating it with their overall customer service strategy.In many cases the customer service side of managing Facebook pages or responding ...

Ageas scoops two FST industry awards for multichannel customer service

Published on: April 14, 2011
Author: Epticablog

Ageas Insurance Solutions (AIS) has won not one, but two, prestigious Financial Sector Technology (FST) Awards for its successful Ageas eStream service transformation project, powered by Eptica technology. Best Use of IT in Insurance and Best Use of CRM technology were both awarded to AIS in recognition of the way it has transformed its multichannel cus...

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