It’s less than a month from Black Friday, which is now seen as the first milestone holiday shopping day on both sides of the Atlantic. Retailers have therefore spent the past months ensuring that everything is in place for the festive period. From making decisions on stock levels to fine-tuning marketing campaigns, websites and stores, companies have been working hard to prepare...
Consumers are sending an increasing number of questions to companies, across more and more channels. This rising volume of customer interactions, covering everything from questions about products and post-sales queries, to complaints and positive feedback, threatens to overwhelm many organizations.The numbers are vast. Over 1 million people view tweets about customer service...
From Berlin to Bermuda, and San Francisco to Singapore, consumers increasingly demand a superior customer experience from the organizations that they choose to buy from. Across every industry there has therefore been a major focus on delivering this customer experience as well ascontinually improving it to match rising expectations.Providing an excellent customer experience is a journey,...
At a time when customer experience is becoming everyone’s job, it is vital that organizations break down any internal barriers that disrupt the customer journey. Only by working together,across departments, will customers receive the right levels of service and consequently remain loyal to a business.However, many companies remain organized in a traditional departmental...
We’re now coming to the end of National Customer Service Week, which highlights the vital importance of customer service to businesses and puts the spotlight on the great work done by those in this sector. It also looks at sharing best practice to further improve standards, ultimately benefiting consumers everywhere.On that note, let us focus on the positive side of customer...
Recent research from charity Citizens Advice found major differences between how UK utilities handle customer service. The top performing utility (SSE) received just 47 complaints per 100,000 customers, yet another had 944 – over 20 times more. A further four companies had over 400 complaints per 100,000, within the three months between April and June 2015.
In an era of ever-more demanding consumers, organizations need to understand and engage with customers if they are to retain their business and loyalty. Research backs up this need for empathy. An Eptica study found that 78% of consumers said they had been frustrated by responses that didn’t answer their question, while nearly a third (31%) complained that replies from companies failed to...
In previous decades an organization’s brand was something it controlled, with how it was perceived in the market driven by expensive advertising and marketing campaigns. The rise of social media and increasingly demanding customers has changed all of this. In highly competitive markets brand reputation and values are built on the experience that consumers receive and share on social media.
In the past contact centers were often viewed as a cost center, meaning that the primary goal of companies was to run them as efficiently as possible while still responding to customers competently. As companies are becoming more customer-centric, this is approach is changing. Now businesses realize that they need to use the customer experience as a differentiating factor if they want...
The supermarket sector is one of the most competitive sectors in the UK. A combination of new entrants, aggressive price cutting and changing shopping habits is affecting all food and drink retailers, from the largest to the smallest. As well as moving to discounters, consumers are increasingly looking for convenience alongside price, choice and quality by choosing to shop...