The growth in online channels has dramatically changed how customers interact with brands in every sector. They now demand a better experience, across more and more channels, and are far less loyal to companies that fail to deliver what they want. As digital natives, they are empowered by the information they find online and use the internet and social media as their primary means...
Communications technology is now central to everyone’s lives. Whereas twenty years ago most people just had a fixed telephone line, today consumers rely on a combination of mobile phones, broadband, and wireless data, to communicate with the world, work remotely and stay in touch with loved ones. As the importance of telecoms has grown, so has the significance of the customer service...
Employees are at the frontline of delivering the right experience to customers. No matter how strong your processes are, customer service comes down to the people who provide it. Staff who fail to show empathy or, even worse, are rude or sound bored risk damaging your brand and hitting customer loyalty. In comparison, agents who go the extra mile, being helpful...
Earlier this year Eptica released the 2015 UK Multichannel Customer Experience Study. Covering 10 sectors, it researched the strength of the customer experience delivered by 100 leading brands across the web, email, Twitter and chat channels. Some of the key findings were that:On average UK companies could answer less than half (48%) of all questions as...
Last week UK government body HMRC said that it would spend an additional £45m to improve customer service for taxpayers. The money will be used to employ 3,000 more customer-facing staff, with a further 2,000 existing employees moved temporarily to help with the forthcoming tax credits deadline. The investment follows figures which showed that over a quarter (27.5%) ...
Customers are becoming ever-more demanding, across every channel, while competition has never been fiercer. All of these factors mean that the customer experience is now central to winning and retaining business for organizations of all sizes. Customer service is now everyone’s job, from the CEO downwards. But who should be in overall charge of ensuring that the organization...
The amount of time – and range of activities – that consumers carry out online continues to grow. It is now the first port of call for everything from shopping and banking, to researching and buying insurance policies, switching telecoms supplier or booking a holiday. No wonder that in 2014 UK ecommerce sales broke the £100 billion barrier for the first time, making up ...
Last week’s Gartner Customer Strategies & Technologies Summit in London provided a perfect opportunity to take the pulse of customer service and customer experience, and to look at future trends that companies need to start preparing for now. The two day event was certainly packed with presentations, and well attended by both vendors and end users, demonstrating the vital ...
One of the biggest complaints consumers have when they raise an issue with a company is that customer service agents don’t show sufficient understanding or sympathy for their plight. In contrast, when agents apologize and demonstrate that they realize that there is a problem that is causing inconvenience, customer satisfaction rises. This is even the case if the issue can’t be solved...
Across the financial services industry, providing a tailored, high quality customer experience is becoming vital for success. Whether a retail bank, insurer or provider of investment products such as pensions, organizations have to make the customer journey clear, seamless and easy to understand if they want to win and retain clients.The old model of a customer signing up to a bank for life or aut...