Delivering outstanding customer service is central to every business, but is especially important to midsize organizations, which may not have the brand recognition or marketing budgets of their larger competitors. These companies, who typically have between 100-999 employees, tend to have fewer resources to dedicate to implementing new systems and may not have the experience of deploying...
Earlier in the year I moved house and needed to change the existing energy supplier for the property. By the time all the paperwork was completed, I owed the old utility for a week’s energy. The bill arrived, and when I opened it I had a real shock. It was enormous – the company wanted to charge me $73,295.44 for just 7 days service! Clearly, there was some mistake...
Recruiting and retaining high quality customer service staff is one of the cornerstones of keeping consumers happy and loyal. Even with the rise of self-service options, for the majority of channels (email, social media, chat, phone, face to face) the experience created by the people you employ is crucial to the success or failure of the customer relationship. Gartner predicts...
While all industries need to ensure they are delivering an excellent customer experience, some seem to be intrinsically better at it than others. This concept is backed up by recent research carried out by service design consultancy Engine. Its survey found that consumers rated the public transport, utility, insurance and broadband sectors, as worst for customer experience and service...
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...
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...
Customer service teams are currently faced with multiple challenges. Consumers are asking an increasing number of questions and are demanding faster service, across more and more channels. At the same time budgets for coping with this growing volume of interactions are often flat or even shrinking. So how can companies deliver faster service to more queries, while improving efficiency?
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...
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 ...