Online retail is becoming ever more competitive, meaning that for retailers the experience and service they provide for their customers is crucial to winning and retaining business.So new research from Experian should act as a wake-up call to ecommerce companies. It found that an estimated £1.02bn of online shopping transactions were abandoned by UK consumers in 2011, with 20% giving up on t...
The current recession is claiming more victims amongst hard-pressed retailers, with Game the latest company to file for administration. And new figures show that it is not just bricks and mortar retailers that are suffering, as UK ecommerce growth is also slowing. While UK shoppers spent £5.4 billion online in February 2012, this was the weakest growth since January 2010, with sales only cli...
The launch of the new Apple iPad has dominated many sections of the media over the last week as retailers and rivals have tried to capitalise on the buzz around the launch.However an unfortunate pricing error has led to the wrong sort of headlines for Tesco. A misplaced decimal point saw the retailer advertise the new iPad 3 for £49.99, rather than £499, on its website. As news spread ...
Social media opens up a whole new way of communicating with customers. However companies need to understand that it is fundamentally different to other channels. Social media is much more of a two way conversation and, as it is held in public, the world can see the results. So while many companies have moved onto social media and are using it for customer service, what is vital is how engaged...
The Christmas shopping season was bruising for some retailers, with high street names such as Hawkins’ Bazaar, La Senza and Black’s Leisure all plunging into bankruptcy. Overall sales were up by just 2.2% on December 2010 according to the British Retail Consortium, while e-commerce continued its rise, with online sales up by 30% compared to the previous year.One of the key trends highl...
Given how close we are to Christmas Day, we thought it would be a good idea to scrutinise the customer service practices of Father Christmas himself. While this might risk us not getting any presents here at Eptica, what lessons can those running customer service departments learn from the man in red?We’re rated Father Christmas against some common customer service benchmarks to see how he d...
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...
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...
Eptica’s International Customer Service Summit highlighted customer service excellence through the second annual Eptica Customer Service Innovation awards. Dixons, AirAsia and Ageas were amongst the companies to receive awards for service transformation based around Eptica’s multichannel customer interaction management software. Winners achieved outstanding results in the ca...
The internet has been buzzing this week about a major customer service failure by Australian fashion retailer Gasp. The story started when bride-to-be Keira O’Neill visited the Gasp store in Melbourne. After trying on a wedding dress and resisting the hard sell of the shop assistant he was apparently rude to her and her friends. Unsurprisingly Keira complained, politely, by email to the...