UK banks are currently announcing their financial results for the first six months of the year, and lower profits caused by continued economic uncertainty are seeing further job cuts across the sector.Given this backdrop, it is a good time to look at how banks rate for customer service. The last ten years has seen a move away from branch based banking to people accessing their accounts and buying ...
The advent of faster ways of connecting to the web means that it is now about much more than text. People are accessing an expanding amount of video content, as shown by the phenomenal growth of sites such as YouTube, which currently receives 3 billion hits per day and adds 48 hours of content every minute.Video consequently has huge potential for delivering customer service. If a picture is...
Recent figures on Facebook usage seem to suggest that user growth is slowing – or even declining – in some Western countries. While this may be true, the percentage of the UK online population that are still signed up to the site is an enormous 58 per cent – hardly small. Therefore as a channel for consumer interaction it still needs to be part of every organisation’s...
A large number of UK companies are still failing badly when it comes to online customer service. That’s the headline finding of a major new report – The 2011 Eptica UK Multichannel Customer Service Study, which found a chasm between the best and worst performers in delivering service to consumers.The study surveyed 100 leading UK organisations in multiple sectors, analysing their abili...
New research has found that more than three times as many Indians use social media for customer service compared to the UK and US. In the study, by analysts Ovum, nearly four in ten Indian consumers had embraced social media to raise customer service queries – in contrast, only 12 per cent of UK and US consumers have done so. Indian consumers both used it positively (to promote good se...
It is an obvious thing to say, but companies need to make it as simple as possible for potential customers to buy their products or services. For example retailers with limited or confusing opening hours wouldn’t survive long nor would travel agents that didn’t give a clear price.The same is true when it comes to customer service – providing a clear, straightforward and consisten...
The theft of personal data from up to 77 million users of Sony’s PlayStation Network is obviously headline news, particularly as it follows similar security breaches at the likes of Play.com and TripAdvisor.Moving beyond the incident itself, Sony now has the job of reassuring its customers by ensuring that they have the latest, most comprehensive information about the breach and its potentia...
The next two weeks see an unprecedented number of bank holidays across the UK. Easter, the Royal Wedding and May Day mean that many physical shops will be shut, driving potential customers onto the internet.While this is good news for ecommerce sites, ensuring they have the right level of customer service support to match demand is tricky. Estimating how many contact centre agents are needed on pa...
Pretty much all customer facing companies have woken up to the power of social media and the new channels it provides for customer service. Lots of organisations are monitoring conversations on the likes of Twitter and Facebook, but a high proportion are not integrating it with their overall customer service strategy.In many cases the customer service side of managing Facebook pages or responding ...