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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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 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...