Customer Service

20 years of ecommerce – and the impact on every business

Published on: August 20, 2014
Author: Lloyd Buxton - Business Development

The first secure ecommerce transaction took place 20 years ago when a lucky shopper paid $12.48 plus shipping to buy Sting’s album, Ten Summoner’s Tales, from NetMarket. From these small beginnings online sales have grown to hit £93 billion in the UK last year, according to IMRG, and are expected to top £100 billion in 2014.How we shop today is radically different to 1994, ...

Being TRUE to your customers

Published on: August 15, 2014
Author: Pauline Ashenden - Demand Generation Manager

In increasingly competitive markets, customers look for experiences that match their expectations and needs. Essentially this means that as consumers continue to become more savvy at researching and comparing brands, companies need to realise that when it comes to customer experience, they need to create a brand promise and deliver on it. After all we live in a world filled with technology-empower...

Mapping the customer journey pain points

Published on: August 12, 2014
Author: Pauline Ashenden - Marketing Manager

All organisations understand that customers go on a journey when they interact with them. However, this is rarely a straightforward trip, but more of an expedition with twists and turns, ups and downs, spanning many channels.Along this journey, Jeff Toister, the author of Service Failure: The Real Reasons Employees Struggle with Customer Service and What You Can Do About It – identifies thre...

The growth of customer engagement – and the impact on your revenues

Published on: July 28, 2014
Author: Olivier Njamfa - CEO & Co-Founder

Delivering the right service, products and overall experience has always been central to building a successful business. Companies know that retaining existing customers is far cheaper than winning new ones, and have built systems and processes to ensure that they can provide what customers want cost-effectively.This trend has been accelerated by two key factors. The recent recession made consumer...

Marrying the physical and virtual customer experience: the ‘new normal’

Published on: July 23, 2014
Author: Pauline Ashenden - Demand Generation Manager

In most sectors, the customer journey is growing in complexity, spanning interactions across multiple channels with customers interweaving digital interactions with physical (in-store or branch) experiences. Customer service and the customer experience needs to evolve in order to stay on top of these changes.Previously a lot of information people might have needed before a purchase was delivered f...

The viral impact of poor customer service

Published on: July 18, 2014
Author: Pauline Ashenden - Demand Generation Manager

Social media has radically changed the relationship between customers and companies, tilting the balance of power towards the consumer. Poor experiences can now be transmitted around the world in seconds, hurting brand reputation and potential revenues.US cable company Comcast is the latest business to find itself in the global spotlight, after a simple request from a customer to cancel his i...

5 impacts that Amazon has had on customer experience

Published on: July 04, 2014
Author: Pauline Ashenden - Demand Generation Manager

Last month Amazon turned twenty. In 1994 founder Jeff Bezos left his job, drove to Seattle and set up the business in his garage. Originally going to be called Cadabra (as in Abracadabra), the name changed to Amazon after fears that people would mishear it as “cadaver”. It now offers over 230 million separate items for sale in the US alone and had 2013 revenues of $74.5 billion.Amazon ...

Delivering patchy performance - UK retailers and customer service

Published on: July 02, 2014
Author: Lloyd Buxton - Business Development

The UK retail landscape has changed radically in the last ten years. The rise of the internet, new competition, increasingly demanding consumers and the slowdown caused by the recession have triggered the demise of many long-standing players, transforming the sector.How are the UK’s top retailers coping with these challenges? To find out, the Eptica Multichannel Customer Experience Study eva...

The UK insurance customer experience – struggling to deliver?

Published on: June 20, 2014
Author: Pauline Ashenden - Demand Generation Manager

Insurers in the UK are under unprecedented pressure. Margins have been slashed by the rise of the internet and price comparison sites, competition is growing, customer loyalty is at an all-time low and claim costs and regulation are both increasing.Against this backdrop,the balance of power is shifting overwhelmingly in favour of consumers. They expect more, for less – and want answers faste...

How the G-Cloud helps make the public sector digital by default

Published on: June 13, 2014
Author: Pauline Ashenden - Demand Generation Manager

Today, the public sector currently faces two major challenges. At a time of major pressure on budgets, the need to decrease costs and increase efficiency is paramount, whether your organisation is operating in central or local government or within the health or emergency services.Additionally, citizens and patients now want to contact the public sector through more and more digital channels. Wheth...

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