Multichannel Customer Service

Retailers must gear up for mobile influenced cross-channel sales

Published on: August 08, 2014
Author: Lloyd Buxton - Business Development

Cross-channel sales, also known as web-influenced sales, are purchases that are touched by a digital channel but are not completed online.  According to US data from Forrester, cross-channel sales are becoming increasingly important and are worth four times more in total than online sales alone. In fact, the analyst estimates that cross-channel sales will reach $1.8 trillion by 2018.A big par...

5 key benefits of natural language powered self-service

Published on: August 06, 2014
Author: Pauline Ashenden - Demand Generation Manager

When interacting with organisations, customers value convenience, speed and consistency above all. Self-service systems deliver in all three of these areas, which is leading to their widespread adoption on the web. But self-service isn’t stopping there. Advances in speech recognition and voice to text technology mean that companies are beginning to look beyond websites to applying self-servi...

The changing face of the high street

Published on: August 01, 2014
Author: Pauline Ashenden - Demand Generation Manager

We’re used to stories of doom and gloom on the high street. The combination of the internet, out of town superstores and the recent recession have decimated the number and range of shops available in town centres, with many long-standing retail chains going into receivership.However a new report from the University of Southampton’s Retail Research Group points to major, positive change...

Escaping the downward customer service spiral

Published on: July 30, 2014
Author: Derek Lewis

Customer satisfaction with UK companies is worsening. That’s the stark headline finding from the latest Institute of Customer Service (ICS) UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI).Researched every six months, the Index fell in July 2014 for the third consecutive time, with over half of organisations seeing a drop of at least one point in their ratings. Satisfaction levels fell in 12 out of th...

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...

A Shock to the System?

Published on: July 16, 2014
Author: Lloyd Buxton - Business Development

Figures released this week by the Energy Ombudsman show that complaints against energy companies in the UK are at their highest ever level. They more than doubled, from 10,598 in the first six months of 2013 to 22,671 in the same period of 2014. 84% of complaints related to billing and this news follows previous large fines for misselling for a number of utilities.Driven by a desire to open up the...

The importance of the agent user experience to delivering customer engagement

Published on: July 07, 2014
Author: Robin Tandon - Senior Product Marketing Director

Contact centre agents are at the front line of providing customer service, acting as the public face of an organisation. It is therefore critical to give them the training, tools and information they need to deliver a superior and joined-up customer experience.However, as they have often grown in a channel-based, ad hoc manner, many contact centres struggle to integrate information from different ...

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...

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