Last month’s Gartner Customer Strategies & Technologies Summit provided a perfect opportunity to review where the customer experience market currently is – and to look forward at the next challenges and opportunities for companies. One of the key points raised is that while senior managers now understand the importance of customer experience, many are unsure...
We live in a world where time is of the essence, and everyone is trying to cram more and more into their lives. This has a major impact on the customer experience – consumers increasingly choose companies that value their time and minimize the effort they need to put in when making a purchase or finding out information. For example, online consumers don’t want to break...
Amongst consumers, chat is fast becoming a mainstream channel for customer service. Thanks to the rise of messaging applications, people have grown used to having text based, real-time conversations, meaning they feel increasingly familiar with chat in a customer service scenario.Research indicates that millennials in particular are very comfortable using chat for customer service from...
Delivering a great customer experience is vital to every organization today – and much of the responsibility for delivering this comes down to contact center agents. They are at the frontline of every business, and their performance is crucial to your brand reputation, consumer satisfaction and overall customer retention. Rising contact volumes, across more and more channels...
At a time when brands face an increasing volume of customer service interactions, across more and more channels, some may feel tempted to question whether they will ever get on top of delivering the service that consumers want. It can feel like they are running on a treadmill with the pace continually being ramped up, increasing the likelihood that they’ll be catapulted off the end before to...
At a time when consumers want a fast, seamless experience, knowledge is at the heart of delivering excellent customer service. For example, Forrester found that 55% of US adults say they are likely to abandon their online purchase if they can’t find a quick answer to their question. The same applies within the contact center – if they are to solve customer queries over the telephone...
People now spend more time online on their smartphones rather than on their PCs or laptops. This is fundamentally reshaping how individuals have conversations with brands – they now have the ability to get in touch at any time, wherever they are, and they expect a fast response. Ten years ago if you experienced poor service in a store you’d have to wait to get home ...
Over the past fifteen years, the importance of customer experience has grown dramatically. It is now increasingly central to the lives of consumers, meaning that companies that satisfy their needs benefit from a competitive edge over their rivals. On the flipside, a poor conversation with a company can ruin the customer’s day and cause them to switch to an alternative supplier...
The combination of growing competition and more demanding consumers means that customer experience is now recognized by businesses everywhere as crucial for success. Analyst reports back this up – research from Forrester found that companies with superior customer experience demonstrate improved revenue growth, while Gartner analysis predicted that by 2016 89% of...
For the majority of consumers digital channels, such as the web and email, are now the default method of researching and buying insurance. This is driving major change in the market, as forward-looking businesses invest in the digital customer experience.