Companies have been talking about getting the customer experience right for many years, but 2012 could be the year that companies move from paying lip service to the customer experience to actually putting in place a strategy and action plan to improve it. That’s the view of analyst Forrester in its 2012 Customer Experience Predictions. Customer expectations of how they are treated are ...
Customer service is a serious business – do it right and it delivers increased sales and customer satisfaction. Do it wrong and it can destroy a brand in the eyes of customers. However there is definitely a lighter side to the profession, as the Top 20 Funniest Customer Service stories of 2012 shows. Collected by Henley Business School for CDC Software and appearing in mycustomer.com they de...
Senior management have often been accused of being ambivalent about customer service, committing in public to delivering an excellent experience to consumers, but then either cutting the customer service budget or failing to provide the board level support needed to excel.New research from the Economist Intelligence Unit seems to point to a change, with managers waking up to the bottom line impact...
Given the current budget pressures on the public sector, there is a major move to outsource services to try to deliver better value for citizens. Whether for central or local government, areas such as IT, payroll, cleaning and waste collection are now being provided by private companies with this trend set to intensify.This affects customer service in two ways – firstly, customer contact is ...
Last week Apple announced record quarterly results, with revenues of nearly $30 billion. The figures include sales of 9.2 million iPads, triple the number sold a year ago. Apple also revealed that 47% of Global Fortune 500 companies were testing the tablet ahead of potential adoption.Clearly, the iPad in particular and tablet computers in general are here to stay. So what does this mean for custom...
It is widely acknowledged that the UK is the largest online market in Europe – hitting £44 billion in 2010, and expected to reach £51 billion this year. However other countries are growing as fast, if not faster, with the entire European population turning to email and web channels. Forty per cent of EU consumers bought goods and services over the Internet in 2010, with sal...
The advent of faster ways of connecting to the web means that it is now about much more than text. People are accessing an expanding amount of video content, as shown by the phenomenal growth of sites such as YouTube, which currently receives 3 billion hits per day and adds 48 hours of content every minute.Video consequently has huge potential for delivering customer service. If a picture is...
Failing to answer customer service queries has an obvious impact on an organisation – customers and prospects get upset and vote with their wallets, leading to a loss of sales and a dent to the brand. Nowadays more and more consumers also broadcast their concerns on social media, generating further impact on company reputation.What is less well-explored is the other consequence of customer s...
Businesses and individuals send and receive millions of emails every day. Yet when it comes to email customer service, companies seem to see it as a low priority in terms of speed and quality of service, either failing to answer queries or taking an age to respond.That’s what Eptica’s research into email customer service with 100 top UK companies found. The 2011 Eptica UK Multichannel ...
A large number of UK companies are still failing badly when it comes to online customer service. That’s the headline finding of a major new report – The 2011 Eptica UK Multichannel Customer Service Study, which found a chasm between the best and worst performers in delivering service to consumers.The study surveyed 100 leading UK organisations in multiple sectors, analysing their abili...