The financial services industry is currently facing major issues when it comes to customer service. Following scandals such as the misselling of products such as Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) and major technology problems at RBS, consumer confidence is at an all time low. No wonder that an increasing number of customers are looking to take their business elsewhere.As part of its remit to prot...
Good customer service should have two aims. Obviously the first is to satisfy customer questions and solve any problems that they may have. Failing to do this means you will lose customers and revenue as well as negatively impacting your brand.The second, and ultimately even more important, objective should be to use customer service information to improve your products and services. Customer serv...
Web chat has been around for a while. However, despite this it has yet to really achieve mass market uptake. This is due to a number of factors. As it uses real agents to answer queries cost is perceived as high, while there has been confusion between live chat and over hyped pre-programmed chatbots. Finally, companies have worried that customers will be annoyed by pop-up chat windows appearing wh...
In an era where new channels such as social media and mobile are receiving huge attention, email customer service can sometimes feel a little last century. After all as a channel that has been around for a while, companies must surely have implemented a strategy to successfully cope with email – and nowadays people are all migrating to other channels aren’t they?Unfortunately for anyon...
In the past the UK utility industry has had a poor reputation for customer service. This has led to tough action from regulator Ofgem, for example fining npower £2 million and British Gas £2.5m for mishandling customer complaints in 2011.This week the government launched a new raft of planned measures that will tighten protection for consumers even further. These include direct compens...
Figures just released by the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) show that the number of complaints made by consumers increased by 24% in the third quarter. 31,386 complaints were made to the FOS, which deals with issues escalated by consumers beyond their financial services provider, between July and September 2011.Commentators have highlighted factors such as the worsening economic situation for t...
Eptica’s International Customer Service Summit highlighted customer service excellence through the second annual Eptica Customer Service Innovation awards. Dixons, AirAsia and Ageas were amongst the companies to receive awards for service transformation based around Eptica’s multichannel customer interaction management software. Winners achieved outstanding results in the ca...
In an increasingly multichannel world it is easy for organisations to think they know how customers want to be contacted and to force them to use certain channels for reasons of convenience or cost.The problems behind this approach are highlighted in some new research from data specialist Acxiom, which compared actual consumer contact preferences with how marketers thought they’d like to be ...
The continuing bad news from the UK retail sector, with sales growth slowing and more than one in ten high street shops vacant means retailers need to focus clearly on customer service if they are to successfully compete in a challenging market.Nowhere is this competition more intense than in the fashion sector, with sales of clothing and footwear actually declining in July. However one brig...
When you think how many personal and business emails you receive every day, the number can be daunting.But multiply that by a factor of one hundred or more and you get an insight into how many emails the average contact centre receives. The sheer ease of writing and sending emails, whether via PCs or increasingly through smartphones or tablet computers means that, for many, they have replaced lett...