Senior management have often been accused of being ambivalent about customer service, committing in public to delivering an excellent experience to consumers, but then either cutting the customer service budget or failing to provide the board level support needed to excel.New research from the Economist Intelligence Unit seems to point to a change, with managers waking up to the bottom line impact...
Two things used to be true about the telecoms sector – prices were always falling and companies across the market had a reputation for poor customer service. The news that BT is increasing call charges by up to 5% - its second rise this year - shows that even in a competitive market such as the UK, prices are now escalating, driven by inflation.So, if phone bills are rising has there b...
When you think how many personal and business emails you receive every day, the number can be daunting.But multiply that by a factor of one hundred or more and you get an insight into how many emails the average contact centre receives. The sheer ease of writing and sending emails, whether via PCs or increasingly through smartphones or tablet computers means that, for many, they have replaced lett...
Businesses and individuals send and receive millions of emails every day. Yet when it comes to email customer service, companies seem to see it as a low priority in terms of speed and quality of service, either failing to answer queries or taking an age to respond.That’s what Eptica’s research into email customer service with 100 top UK companies found. The 2011 Eptica UK Multichannel ...
A large number of UK companies are still failing badly when it comes to online customer service. That’s the headline finding of a major new report – The 2011 Eptica UK Multichannel Customer Service Study, which found a chasm between the best and worst performers in delivering service to consumers.The study surveyed 100 leading UK organisations in multiple sectors, analysing their abili...
New research has found that more than three times as many Indians use social media for customer service compared to the UK and US. In the study, by analysts Ovum, nearly four in ten Indian consumers had embraced social media to raise customer service queries – in contrast, only 12 per cent of UK and US consumers have done so. Indian consumers both used it positively (to promote good se...
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...
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...
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...
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...