Technology has the power to transform how we communicate with each other, and has made huge advances over the last twenty years. We’ve seen the growth of email, the rise of social media and the emergence of web chat all provide new ways to interact with friends, families and organizations. In turn, this has revolutionized customer service, adding new channels an...
Retail is one of the most competitive sectors in the economy. Transformed by the internet, new entrants and ever more demanding consumers, retailers cannot afford to rest on their laurels.Customers are pushing retailers to innovate and deliver new services, improved experiences at lower prices. Loyalty is a thing of the past, with consumers are now able to choose from an enormous range...
Forrester recently reported that 69% of people still want to contact companies through email. However, UK brands are struggling to cope with the emails they receive, with performance overall worsening according to the latest Eptica Multichannel Customer Experience Study.Email volumes are increasing year-on-year, and in some sectors (such as retail), email makes up30% of...
The conversational, open nature of Twitter easily lends itself to customer service – in fact, the social network itself claims that tweets to major brands have increased by 2.5 times over the past two years, and that 80% of some company’s inbound social media customer service requests come through Twitter.However, resourcing customer service over Twitter can be difficult...
Over the past five years Eptica has regularly evaluated the multichannel customer experience offered by 100 of the UK’s biggest brands, across ten sectors. To do this we’ve posed as prospective customers, testing how easy it is to find information and answers to the routine questions that consumers might ask every day on the web and via email, chat and social media.Since we began,...
All brands should now understand the importance of social media to customer service. For example, over two thirds (67%) of consumers say they’ve used social media for customer service, rather than phoning or visiting a company website, according to research from J.D. Power. Over 1 million people view tweets about customer service every week. However, many companies are still...
We’re now into the busiest time of year for retail, with contact centers facing huge volumes of incoming queries from consumers on the phone, email, Twitter, Facebook and chat channels. This means that even if companies deploy effective web self-service systems to provide consumers with fast, consistent answers to their most commonly asked questions...
With so much money spent at this time of year, the Holiday period is crucial for retailers. In today’s competitive industry, a good Christmas can literally mean the difference between survival and going bankrupt. But getting it right isn’t easy – the internet has greatly increased competition, putting pressure on prices, while consumer demands are ever increasing. They ...
When it comes to customer service, consumers want the ability to contact you through their channel of choice and get the same positive experience - receiving fast, accurate and consistent answers - however they get in touch.Delivering consistency is therefore important to both customers and the organization itself. Inconsistency frustrates consumers as they cannot be sure that they’ve...
Thanks to the internet, retail is a global industry, with companies now facing competition from peers around the world. As we’ve discussed before, this means that a focus on the customer is vital – with businesses needing to understand what consumers want and provide them with a tailored experience that meets their exact requirements. At the same time as the internet has...