Attempting to predict the future provides some fascinating insights and can help planning, whatever industry you are in. This is especially true when it comes to customer service, as it often feels that we’re in the midst of constant change. Thinking further ahead gives the chance to add perspective and to make more gradual, planned steps on the road to the future.So I read with interest a r...
Poor customer service from airlines is frequently in the press. Take the infamous ‘United breaks guitars’ incident back in 2008 or the more recent case when Hasan Syed, a BA passenger, invested in sponsored tweets to show his anger at his father having his luggage lost. EasyJet also fell foul of the Twittersphere earlier this year when it initially refused to allow a passenger who&rsqu...
We live in an ever more complex world. Driven by the internet, consumers face an explosion in choice, both when it comes to the range of products out there and who to buy them from. Add in the growth in the number of devices and channels used to interact with businesses and you can see why customers are less forgiving of brands that do not deliver straightforward, fast service through their channe...
The African contact centre sector is growing fast. Both local and international businesses are now benefiting from its skilled workforce with multiple languages and strong ties to Europe. Demonstrating its expansion, Morocco now has 50,000 agents working in the industry, up from zero just a decade ago.One trend that is particularly driving customer service in the continent is the explosion in the ...
What is good service worth? For US Mercedes-Benz dealers it’ll be a share of a cool $60m in 2014. The automotive giant is rewarding dealers that earn high customer service ratings as part of a number of initiatives to ensure that the experience for buyers matches or goes beyond their expectations.And the focus on the customer experience isn’t solely being driven by Mercedes. In a move ...
Corporate reputation is a key component of the customer experience. That’s one of the key findings of the latest Nunwood research into the experience and service offered by UK businesses. The study, which is based on ratings by 7,500 customers on over 250 brands, aims to record customer satisfaction and its influence on future behaviour, such as loyalty and advocacy.Businesses that have suff...
An ever-increasing amount of customer contact is coming through digital channels such as email, social media and the web. Companies need to understand these queries and respond quickly and accurately if they are to win and retain customers. However an estimated 80% of this contact is unstructured (not organised in a pre-defined format), making it difficult and time consuming to analyse and act upo...
Across the world customer satisfaction is getting worse – and younger generations are saying goodbye to the phone channel. These are just two of the headline findings from Dimension Data’s 2013/14 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report. The 16th edition of the report is based on a worldwide survey of 817 companies in 11 industries and 79 countries. It paints a bleak picture of ...
In order to streamline and optimise its entire customer service operations, perfume and cosmetics group L'Occitane has chosen Eptica’s multi-lingual customer management interaction software.Eptica is being used to manage incoming emails, web self-service and telephone contacts, as well as to power L’Occitane’s new web chat service in Europe. Through a centralised knowledgebas...
In today’s competitive environment, organisations need to deliver consistent, rapid and personalised responses to consumers, based on understanding the tone and style of the language they use. And they need to do this faster and across more channels and interactions than ever before.Linguistics, the scientific study of language, provides the answer to this growing challenge. It enables compa...