Engaging with customers is one of the key challenges facing businesses today. Building and maintaining strong relationships across multiple devices and channels requires a combination of reactive and proactive processes in order to meet the needs of demanding customers.Gartner has talked extensively about the Customer Engagement Center (CEC), the replacement for the Contact Centre that it believes...
Email is still a critical customer service channel for consumers, generally ranking second (to telephone) in customer preference studies. But the latest Eptica Multichannel Customer Experience Study reveals that many companies seem to be placing less value on email, despite the importance of this channel to their customers.
Organisations can find it difficult to deliver a consistently good customer experience across every channel and every interaction. Customer expectations are constantly rising, and the growth in enquiries, often through unstructured digital channels, increases the pressure on businesses to perform, time after time.A good starting point for meeting these needs is to break the customer experience dow...
Despite the growth of new channels, email is still a vital part of the customer service mix. Consumers like the fact that email provides an audit trail, is convenient and allows them to send emails in their own time, rather than having to respond instantly as on the phone or social media.With the growth in smartphones and tablets, you don’t even need to be in front of your computer to send o...
The UK insurance market is one of the most competitive in the world. The rise of comparison sites, increased regulation, low customer loyalty and an explosion in distribution channels have all combined to decrease margins for insurers. Recent research from Accenture found that UK home and car policyholders are amongst the least loyal in the world, with 57% looking to switch provider in the next ye...
Whatever part of the financial services sector you operate in, delivering an excellent customer experience is becoming a vital part of differentiating, increasing sales and retaining customers. However consumers are growing ever more demanding and less and less loyal. They want an excellent experience, whichever channel they chose – and they want it delivered quickly. Fail to deliver and the...
There’s widespread agreement that customer satisfaction is vital to every organisation. A Gartner poll found that 80% of executives thought it was more important than three years ago, with 95% seeing it as the key way of differentiating from competitors. Where there’s less togetherness is how you measure the customer experience. For example, many of the traditional metrics used...
At Eptica, our growth has always been driven by innovation that helps companies deliver customer service more efficiently, deepen engagement and increase satisfaction. So we’re delighted to announce record revenues for 2013, with our turnover breaking the $10m barrier for the first time, by hitting $10.6m. With an annual growth rate of 18%, we’re outperforming the overall software mark...
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...
Customer service teams face growing challenges, particularly around understanding and responding to the growing number of unstructured queries they receive through digital channels such as email, social media and the web. In previous posts we’ve explained what linguistics (the scientific study of language) is and how it re-writes the rules for successful customer service. In this article, I ...