Today, customer service is a global industry. Consumers all across the world are demanding faster responses to their questions – and increasingly the power of the internet and technology means that the answers can come from contact centre agents located in different countries.Africa is a growing location for contact centres due to its skilled workforce with multiple languages and strong ties...
Today, the customer really is king. The combination of ever increasing competition and greater customer expectation mean you need to deliver higher and higher levels of service, whatever sector you operate in.And, to be fair, most organisations understand the importance of customer service but many are failing to deliver what consumers actually want. This could be down to a lack of budget, not lis...
Excellent customer service combines great people and strong processes, underpinned with the right technology. Experience shows that it is vital that these three elements are balanced – after all the best people can’t do their jobs if their IT doesn’t provide them with accurate and up to date information that meets their needs.Unfortunately we’ve all heard stories of well-in...
When it comes to customer service, consumer expectations only move in one direction – upwards. The combination of excellent service from market leading companies and increasingly high standards are continually raising the bar. This means companies need to be continually investing in improving their service to delight customers and match their peers.The perfect example of these increased expe...
We’re currently part way through National Customer Service Week (1-7 October), which acts as a focus for the importance of customer service to UK businesses. Led by the Institute of Customer Service, each day during the week has a separate theme - from Bringing your Strategy to Life to Improving Processes and The Future.The sheer breadth of subjects covered and the enormous number of o...
Organisations today operate in a multi-channel world. Consumers want the freedom to be able to contact them through a whole variety of channels – the web, email, phone, social media, chat and letter. And they want to be able to use different channels for different interactions – so they might ask a general question on a company website and call or email with a specific enquiry about th...
First Contact Resolution is a key metric for customer service teams. After all if you can satisfactorily deal with an incoming query or complaint quickly, without needing to follow up then it benefits everyone. The customer is happy as they have their answer and don’t need to escalate their query while the contact centre can close the file without needing to call back, delivering an efficien...
Web chat has been around for a while. However, despite this it has yet to really achieve mass market uptake. This is due to a number of factors. As it uses real agents to answer queries cost is perceived as high, while there has been confusion between live chat and over hyped pre-programmed chatbots. Finally, companies have worried that customers will be annoyed by pop-up chat windows appearing wh...
In an era where organisations are looking to reduce expenditures wherever they can, it is vital that they don’t make cuts that actually lead to increased costs – or cause valuable customers to take their business elsewhere.This is particularly true when it comes to customer service – after all it is easy to believe that cutting corners in the contact centre won’t affect how...
Eptica has won the Social Media Customer Service category at the prestigious Asia Pacific Customer Service Consortium (APCSC) Expo International Awards. This award was in recognition of Eptica’s innovative social media customer interaction suite and its successful implementation at low cost airline AirAsia.By deploying Eptica as a centralised customer Self-service system, AirAsia is now...