Employees are at the frontline of delivering the right experience to customers. No matter how strong your processes are, customer service comes down to the people who provide it. Staff who fail to show empathy or, even worse, are rude or sound bored risk damaging your brand and hitting customer loyalty. In comparison, agents who go the extra mile, being helpful...
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...
Organisations today understand that customer service is everyone’s job and cannot be solely left to agents in the contact centre. However, in a multichannel world consumer expectations are high – they want to receive consistent, personalised service no matter how they make contact and certainly don’t want to have to repeat themselves when they move between channels. Customers don...
The New Year always bring a plethora of predictions as companies and analysts look at what is likely to happen in the next twelve months across the customer experience market.
A recent report from Hypatia Research Group highlights how Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has become business critical to every organisation. However, the study, Next Generation CRM: All about Business Process Excellence points out a key issue with many existing CRM implementations. Essentially, while they act as a database for tracking customers, what they have bought and what th...
When customer service became formalised into a specific department the primary channels were the telephone and post. Hence staff were organised in a call centre, as a large part of their job was answering telephone calls, along with responding to letters from customers.A lot has changed since then, with a plethora of new channels now available for customers. The rise of email, the web, social medi...
Delivering the best possible customer experience requires a combination of focused strategy, well-trained staff, a customer-facing culture, robust processes and the technology to underpin the end-to-end customer journey.Strong, well-implemented systems that are straightforward for agents to use are vital. But in a market where customer service technology can mean anything from a standalone Twitter...
Figures just released by the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) show that the number of complaints made by consumers increased by 24% in the third quarter. 31,386 complaints were made to the FOS, which deals with issues escalated by consumers beyond their financial services provider, between July and September 2011.Commentators have highlighted factors such as the worsening economic situation for t...
The reason that contact centres came into being was to provide a central place for delivering service to customers, initially via telephone and then expanding to include new channels such as email, the web and now social media.However forward looking companies now realise that customer service can’t be just left to a small part of the organisation – the contact centre – no matter...
In the move to a digital world it is easy to overlook that a huge percentage of customer communication is still through traditional mail and fax – so called white mail. This is particularly true in industries such as banking and insurance where legal requirements mean documents need to be signed and returned. And in many cases customers feel more secure having signed and posted a document ra...