There are lots of stories about companies that have delighted their customers. Take Sainsbury’s renaming its Tiger Bread based on feedback from a three year old girl that it looked more Giraffe-like or US restaurant Morton’s Steakhouse delivering a meal to an arriving passenger who tweeted, asking to be met by a porterhouse at Newark Airport.Examples like this are undoubtedly good PR a...
In increasingly competitive markets, customers look for experiences that match their expectations and needs. Essentially this means that as consumers continue to become more savvy at researching and comparing brands, companies need to realise that when it comes to customer experience, they need to create a brand promise and deliver on it. After all we live in a world filled with technology-empower...
Cross-channel sales, also known as web-influenced sales, are purchases that are touched by a digital channel but are not completed online. According to US data from Forrester, cross-channel sales are becoming increasingly important and are worth four times more in total than online sales alone. In fact, the analyst estimates that cross-channel sales will reach $1.8 trillion by 2018.A big par...
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...
Web chat is growing rapidly in popularity with studies consistently showing that this service is highly valued by customers. For example, a 2013 survey by eConsultancy found that web chat had the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, scoring 73%, compared with 61% for email and 44% for phone. Speed (79%) and efficiency (46%) were the top reasons given for its popularity. A ...
Everyone understands the importance of the customer experience to increasing loyalty and attracting new business, but how do UK brands fare in practice? Not that well, according to the first Forrester UK Customer Experience Index (CXi). Most of the 2,000 UK consumers it researched rated their experiences with 28 leading brands between ‘very poor’ and ‘OK’ – and no bra...
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...
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...
Now is the time of year when everyone looks forward and makes their predictions for 2014. Rather than add my thoughts to this debate, I’ve taken a look at the views of the great and the good from this time last year – and seen how many have actually become a reality. I’ve tried to be as extensive as possible in my research, spanning analysts, publications, experts and other softw...
We’re currently celebrating National Customer Service Week (NCSW). Organised in the UK by the Institute of Customer Service, it aims to raise awareness of customer service and the vital role it plays in the economy. Similar events are taking place around the globe.While it has been going for a few years, NCSW has never felt more relevant and necessary. Customer service has moved centre stage...