The Christmas shopping season is now in full swing across the UK and competition between retailers has never been fiercer.This is particularly true in the electrical and computing sectors, where consumers have a huge choice of online and offline outlets to buy from. Electrical products are also becoming more complex and converged – for example smart, internet-connected TVs are expected to be...
Most organisations today have a multi-channel strategy, allowing customers to contact them by email, phone, the web, branch and increasingly social media. Ensuring that you can respond to them via the channel of their choice is a key part of delivering high levels of customer service. After all, if you begin a conversation on email you don’t want to be forced to call the contact centre ...
Delivering excellent customer service is a central part of business today, whatever industry you are in. While sectors such as retail may be very visible when it comes to customer service initiatives, improving service can deliver huge benefits in other, more traditional, sectors such as insurance.The perfect example of this is Ageas Insurance Solutions (AIS), one of the UK’s leading persona...
With the UK in the grips of recession, this will be a make or break Christmas for many struggling retailers. There’s just a month to go until Christmas and while predictions are that consumers will still be spending, they are going to leave it much later and shop around searching for bargains. Customer service as well as price will be a key factor in where they decide to spend their hard-ear...
Next year’s London Olympics will put the UK in the spotlight. Millions of visitors are expected to come to the country, providing a much needed boost to the economy. And provided they enjoy the experience many of these tourists could turn into regular visitors, coming back year after year for holidays across the country. Outside the spectacle of the games themselves, what will make the ...
New research demonstrates wide variations between online buying behaviour across the globe. The survey, from Pitney Bowes, asked 10,000 consumers from 10 countries about their online shopping habits and preferences and uncovered some interesting differences.Overall 93% of consumers had shopped online, 49% in the last 30 days, showing the mass market appeal of ecommerce around the world. In the UK,...
If you needed a reminder of the importance of customer service to the bottom line, this week’s £2 million fine for utility npower for mishandling customer complaints demonstrates the financial cost of poor customer service processes. The punishment, levied by energy regulator Ofgem, follows a £2.5 million fine for British Gas in July 2011 for similar issues. In its judgement...
The increasing use of mobile phones for a wide range of activities beyond voice calls is being extensively written about at the moment. A report from the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) and Cap Gemini, for example, has found that the proportion of mobile based online shopping in the UK has jumped by more than 800 per cent over the past year. Over the same period in the US the mobile ...
If you work in customer service, you’ve got to feel a bit of sympathy for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) after the customer service disaster that befell it this month. A European outage gradually turned into global disruption, leaving countless users with delayed or non-existent access to email, text and the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service. The problem lasted several...
While it has been around for many years, live web chat is definitely an underused channel by companies. Despite the fact that more and more people are using chat channels such as instant messaging or Skype, companies have shied away from deploying it, particularly for customer service. Mainly this is down to the perceived cost of chat, as it requires a real agent to answer questions online. T...