It’s less than a month from Black Friday, which is now seen as the first milestone holiday shopping day on both sides of the Atlantic. Retailers have therefore spent the past months ensuring that everything is in place for the festive period. From making decisions on stock levels to fine-tuning marketing campaigns, websites and stores, companies have been working hard to prepare...
Consumers are sending an increasing number of questions to companies, across more and more channels. This rising volume of customer interactions, covering everything from questions about products and post-sales queries, to complaints and positive feedback, threatens to overwhelm many organizations.The numbers are vast. Over 1 million people view tweets about customer service...
From Berlin to Bermuda, and San Francisco to Singapore, consumers increasingly demand a superior customer experience from the organizations that they choose to buy from. Across every industry there has therefore been a major focus on delivering this customer experience as well ascontinually improving it to match rising expectations.Providing an excellent customer experience is a journey,...
In an era of ever-more demanding consumers, organizations need to understand and engage with customers if they are to retain their business and loyalty. Research backs up this need for empathy. An Eptica study found that 78% of consumers said they had been frustrated by responses that didn’t answer their question, while nearly a third (31%) complained that replies from companies failed to...
In previous decades an organization’s brand was something it controlled, with how it was perceived in the market driven by expensive advertising and marketing campaigns. The rise of social media and increasingly demanding customers has changed all of this. In highly competitive markets brand reputation and values are built on the experience that consumers receive and share on social media.
Over the last ten years, customers have become increasingly more demanding in terms of the service that they expect from companies. At the same time, and as part of the same trend, governments have acted to make it easier and more straightforward to complain, particularly in industries such as telecoms, utilities and finance. They have set up new regulators and ombudsmen...
Recent Forrester research pointed out the importance of understanding customer emotion and creating empathy with consumers if brands are going to deliver a successful customer experience. This was backed up by Eptica’s study ‘The Power of Linguistics: Consumers vs. Agents: Can the Gap be closed?’, which found that nearly a third (31%) of consumers...
Twenty years ago, the majority of banking was carried out face-to-face through an extensive branch network and most consumers remained with the same bank for much of their lives.Three factors have dramatically changed this. Firstly, new channels such as the internet have transformed how consumers interact with their banks, while increasing the range of services that they can carry out themsel...
Many studies show that people are much more emotional and less rational than we like to think. Research by Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, indicates that we have an intuitive, emotional side and a rational side when we are making decisions – and the rational side is less influential. Similarly, Steve Peters, a high profile sports psychiatrist and author...
One of the biggest complaints consumers have when they raise an issue with a company is that customer service agents don’t show sufficient understanding or sympathy for their plight. In contrast, when agents apologize and demonstrate that they realize that there is a problem that is causing inconvenience, customer satisfaction rises. This is even the case if the issue can’t be solved...