Over the past fifteen years, the importance of customer experience has grown dramatically. It is now increasingly central to the lives of consumers, meaning that companies that satisfy their needs benefit from a competitive edge over their rivals. On the flipside, a poor conversation with a company can ruin the customer’s day and cause them to switch to an alternative supplier...
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...
The combination of growing competition and more demanding consumers means that customer experience is now recognized by businesses everywhere as crucial for success. Analyst reports back this up – research from Forrester found that companies with superior customer experience demonstrate improved revenue growth, while Gartner analysis predicted that by 2016 89% of...
With an increasing amount of our time spent online, company websites are now more often than not the first port of call for consumers looking for information from brands. Being able to find answers to their questions quickly is therefore a vital part of the customer experience. According to the latest Eptica Multichannel Customer Experience Study, the good news is that most companies understand
For the majority of us, buying something that we really want gives us an emotional buzz. Whether it is a car, TV, clothes or even something as small as a book or new headphones, getting our hands on a new purchase makes us happy. Consequently, companies across all industries try extremely hard to make the buying process as simple, straightforward and engaging as possible. As we know...
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...
At heart, humans are social beings. This has a major impact on every interaction we have with the people around us. Think of the most basic transactions – the ones you remember most are those where you either had an extremely positive or negative emotional experience. Take visiting the grocery store, if the cashier was extremely helpful, asked about your day and took time to show that...
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,...