Consumers in Asia Pacific are becoming more and more demanding. They want to receive a superior customer experience, personalized to their needs, on their channel of choice, with their questions answered quickly and consistently. If they don’t get what they are looking for, they are not afraid to change supplier, while sharing their opinions on social media. How can companies operating in...
Last week’s Gartner Customer Strategies & Technologies Summit in London provided a perfect opportunity to take the pulse of customer service and customer experience, and to look at future trends that companies need to start preparing for now. The two day event was certainly packed with presentations, and well attended by both vendors and end users, demonstrating the vital ...
In a previous blog post I highlighted the growing gap between customers and companies, and how this lack of understanding is undermining efforts to improve customer experience.This was demonstrated by the Eptica Study: The Power of Linguistics in Customer Service. Based on research with both consumers and agents, it sought to identify the frustrations that are undermining the UK customer...
In today’s time-poor world, consumers increasingly pick who they buy from, and what channel they use, based on ease of use. This can be seen in the growth of local shopping at the expense of out of town supermarkets, as well as the rise of techniques such as Click and Collect that make it simple to pick up online purchases at a convenient location.
Understanding what customers want, what they like and incorporating their ideas into future products and services is central to improving customer engagement. This in turn builds loyalty and customer recommendations, driving further sales.Consequently most large organisations run Voice of the Customer (VoC) programmes that aim to collect data from consumers and use it to make changes that impact t...
Today, businesses understand that they need to engage with customers, whatever the channel, if they want to be successful. Customers are demanding more, across every sector, and, with social media, they have a megaphone to publicise their experiences (good or bad), instantly, around the globe. The number of interactions is increasing dramatically and consumers want faster answers than ever before....
Talk of Big Data is everywhere, but it is increasingly moving beyond the hype cycle to deliver real results to businesses. To start with, let’s define what Big Data actually is, given there are multiple descriptions in the market. According to Gartner, Big Data is “high volume, high velocity, and/or high variety information assets that require new forms of processing to enable enhanced...
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...
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...