When interacting with organisations, customers value convenience, speed and consistency above all. Self-service systems deliver in all three of these areas, which is leading to their widespread adoption on the web. But self-service isn’t stopping there. Advances in speech recognition and voice to text technology mean that companies are beginning to look beyond websites to applying self-servi...
In most sectors, the customer journey is growing in complexity, spanning interactions across multiple channels with customers interweaving digital interactions with physical (in-store or branch) experiences. Customer service and the customer experience needs to evolve in order to stay on top of these changes.Previously a lot of information people might have needed before a purchase was delivered f...
As part of a global company I see the increasing importance of the customer experience to businesses in different sectors, all around the world. However, there are also major differences when it comes to preferred local channels, specific requirements and, in some cases, technology.These differences are visible even between two mature markets such as the UK and France. Following the release of the...
Personal recommendation is one of the most powerful sales tools in the world. People naturally listen to the experiences of their friends and family and take them on board when making similar purchases. And the rise of the internet and the potentially limitless choice it brings has made recommendation even more important. How do you choose between hundreds of similar products, when you are being c...
Poor service costs UK brands £116 billion every year. That’s the headline figure from new research from Accenture, which found that over half (53%) of British consumers had switched provider in at least one industry in the last twelve months. To put this in context, the equivalent of 12 per cent of UK consumers’ annual disposable income is being switched due to bad service.Accord...
Over recent years, we’ve seen organisations focus heavily on customer service. Greater competition, even in mature markets, and increasingly demanding consumers have moved service and the customer experience up the business agenda. The rise of social media has also provided a global channel where customers can quickly share their views, redrawing the relationship between consumers and brands...
Showing the importance of technology to the banking customer experience, IT issues caused problems for some Lloyds Banking Group customers trying to use their debit cards on Sunday. The group, which also includes TSB, Bank of Scotland and Halifax, has 30 million customers across the UK, although only a minority were affected by the glitch, which lasted 3 hours.Lloyds has since confirmed that the p...
Offering an excellent Customer Experience (CX) is a key goal for today’s organisations. It has the potential to deliver tangible benefits such as better customer loyalty and a more efficient path to acquiring new customers. But how far down the road are companies to delivering excellence in this area and what differentiates those doing it well from the others?IT industry analyst Forres...
New figures show that retail sales in December increased at the fastest rate for nine years. Statistics from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) found that sales in December were up 5.3% on 2012, and 2.6% greater than November 2013. 12% of sales were through the online channel. Separate research from the IMRG-CapGemini eRetail Sales Index show that UK shoppers spent £91 billion online in...
Analyst group Forrester has just released its 2014 predictions for customer service. It lists 12 trends that companies should be paying attention to, if they want to engage with customers and deliver the right experience for them in the year ahead.These trends are organised into four topics:1. Deliver pain free customer service Covering areas such as omnichannel, mobile and stand...