New research has found that more than three times as many Indians use social media for customer service compared to the UK and US. In the study, by analysts Ovum, nearly four in ten Indian consumers had embraced social media to raise customer service queries – in contrast, only 12 per cent of UK and US consumers have done so. Indian consumers both used it positively (to promote good se...
While smartphones have been around for several years, their usage is now dramatically increasing, driven by the likes of Apple and Google’s Android operating system. Recent figures from analysts Canalys found that 101 million smartphones were shipped in Q1 2011, up 83% from previous figures.So what does this mean for customer service strategy? With more and more customers using smartphones t...
While channels such as social media are rapidly increasing in importance, for the majority of organisations email is still the communication channel of choice for customer service. It has the advantages of being quick for the customer, has an audit trail and is available outside normal office hours.Yet judging by customer complaints and even the views of industry figures many companies still...
It has been a year since a cloud of volcanic ash from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland spread across Europe, causing unprecedented disruption to flights. The bad news is that a new cloud, this time from the Grimsvotn volcano, is heading to the UK as we speak.The worry for both passengers and the aviation industry is that last year’s widespread disruption could be repeated. In 20...
Crowdsourcing is one of today’s big buzz words with more and more companies turning to their customers or the general public for input on everything from new products to marketing campaigns. The latest blue chip company to embrace the crowd is food retailer Waitrose, which is about to launch Seriously Chocolatey Rose-Infused Chocolate Ganache, a new dessert based on a recipe submitted by one...
Recent research from OFCOM has highlighted the number of complaints customers have with telecoms companies. The regulator itself receives an average of 450 complaints every day, covering everything from mis-selling to billing errors. And this figure obviously doesn’t cover complaints made to telecoms companies themselves that don’t get escalated to OFCOM.Given the fast moving and compl...
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a technology that has been around for a considerable amount of time. Because of its complexity it has often proved difficult to get right – Gartner estimate that fewer than 10 per cent of organisations have optimised the management of their customer relationships.The bad news for companies struggling with CRMis that the rocketing adoption of social m...
Pretty much every business today operates in a multi-channel environment. Even purchases that are completed in the High Street have often been extensively researched on the websites of retailers, product manufacturers, competitors and review sites.To meet this need Google is piloting a new Analytics feature called Multi-Channel Funnels which maps all the marketing channels that impact the final sa...
Pretty much all customer facing companies have woken up to the power of social media and the new channels it provides for customer service. Lots of organisations are monitoring conversations on the likes of Twitter and Facebook, but a high proportion are not integrating it with their overall customer service strategy.In many cases the customer service side of managing Facebook pages or responding ...