Whether through advertising, search engine optimisation or simply building brand recognition companies invest significant resources in driving traffic to their websites. Then the customer journey begins in earnest, as organisations aim to move website visitors from browsers to buyers. Whatever you are selling, from books to insurance, it is vital that customers are guided through the process and p...
With the English weather remaining drab and grey and Easter coming up, many people are looking to book their summer holidays. But how they do it has changed dramatically over the last ten years due to the internet. The traditional trip to the High Street travel agent has been replaced by the web, which provides virtually unlimited choice of countries, flights, destinations and places to stay.Accor...
Despite the growth of other channels, email is still the first choice for a large number of consumers when it comes to contacting organisations. It provides a full audit trail for customers (and companies) and people often feel it is the best way to raise specific complex or technical questions – provided of course, you get a fast, accurate answer.Independently testing the quality of the ema...
There’s a lot of talk about the need to provide consumers with a superior customer experience. But how do organisations begin to implement a customer experience programme, who should be in charge and how does it differ from existing customer service activities?Eptica’s own research has highlighted a pressing need to improve the customer experience. The 2012 Eptica Multichannel Customer...
Successfully engaging with customers is critical to every organisation. Whether private or public sector, everyone needs to deliver the best possible experience to their stakeholders if they want to survive and flourish in today’s challenging economy. And the responsibility for delivering customer engagement spans the whole company – from customer service to marketing, sales and operat...
Amidst all the bad news on the high street there is one bright spot when it comes to physical retailing – the shopping centre. Despite national figures that show 1 in 7 British shops are currently unoccupied, there is major growth in high end shopping centres that act as destinations for consumers. In fact rents are rising by 5-6% in larger centres with very few shops left empty and multiple...
Eptica has been named in Gartner’s February 2013 Magic Quadrant for CRM Web Customer Service (WCS) Applications, marking the third consecutive year that the company has been included in the Magic Quadrant which contains just 13 companies worldwide.This continued inclusion follows a year of accelerating growth for Eptica. In 2012 the company raised £5.7m in a new funding round from new ...
With the discovery of horse meat within a number of processed foods, it is no exaggeration to say that the European food industry is facing one of its biggest challenges since the BSE epidemic. While horse meat itself is safe to eat (unless the horse had been treated with particular drugs), consumers believed they were buying beef-based ready meals and burgers from reputable suppliers and supermar...
Insurance is an industry that has been radically changed by the rise of the internet. The move online has increased competition, particularly with the growth of price comparison sites which have slashed margins and made customer loyalty a thing of the past. But moving to this new, multichannel, customer-centric and low margin world is proving to be a major struggle for many insurers still hampered...
When contact centres first opened they focused overwhelmingly on the telephone channel – indeed most were referred to as call centres for that very reason. As customer service has developed and become multichannel, email, web, chat and now social media have been added to the customer service mix, all normally handled by the same contact centre.However, the growth of multichannel service does...