Channels, such as email and social media, have increased the pressure on organisations to deliver a fast, accurate response. Whereas consumers would have happily waited at least for a week for a reply to a letter, expectations for email are that queries will be answered with 48 hours (although our own Eptica Multichannel Customer Service Study found that many companies are much slower than this.)S...
Delivering the best customer experience has never been more critical to business success. And it has never been more complex. The growth in the number of channels involved, increasing customer impatience, greater competition and a need to be able to scale are amongst the factors that organisations have to take into account when designing the best experience for their customers.Much of the customer...
Customer service at banks is again in the spotlight. Firstly, an undercover reporter from The Times found shortcomings at one of Lloyds Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) complaints handling centres. Staff were allegedly being taught to reject potential complaints and ignore potential fraud by Lloyds salesmen. The bank has said that it identified shortcomings independently and has retrained staff ...
Mobile commerce is growing rapidly. Figures from performance marketing network Affiliate Window showed it made up 18.16% of its UK online sales in May 2013, increasing from 16.48% in April. That’s an enormous 572 sales per hour. Backing this up, the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index saw 2012 mobile sales triple (up 304%) from 2011. More importantly, conversion rates on mobile have doubled,...
Staff turnover has always been a problem in a lot of customer service teams. While the UK average employee turnover rate is approximately 15%, in contact centres it averages around 25%. That means one in four agents leaves every year - although for some contact centres turnover can be as much as 60%.One of the key impacts of staff turnover is increased training costs. On average, new agents receiv...
Navigating phone menus when you call a contact centre is a source of much frustration for consumers. Done well, the concept of phone menus should help improve the customer experience. You’ll be directed to the best agent to deal with your enquiry and they will be able to use the information you’ve typed in to give a head start on solving your problem, without needing to transfer you ar...
In an ever more competitive economic environment, businesses in every sector are looking for ways to increase sales and unlock additional revenues. There are many ways to do this, including raising the spend of existing customers, upselling, avoiding abandoned online shopping carts and delivering a superior experience to avoid customer defections.With its combination of real time response, and per...
Efficiently delivering the right customer experience is the number one priority for every organisation. But in today’s complex, fast-moving world this can be challenging. The number of contact channels is constantly increasing, competition has never been fiercer and the growth of mobile devices means customer service has to operate 24x7, providing the perfect experience quickly and efficient...
Businesses today operate globally, but need to provide a local service if they are to deliver the customer experience that consumers rightly demand. That means providing information, answers and support in local languages, at the time that customers want it, and of course through their channel of choice.Managing global customer service is therefore a challenge, particularly for web-based businesse...
How will consumers interact with brands in the near future? What channels will they use and what sort of experience are they looking for? A new report, ‘The coming era of on-demand marketing’, from consultants McKinsey aims to shed light on these questions and to help companies prepare themselves for this changing world.Essentially McKinsey believes that emerging technologies will mean...