By the time you read this most people will have completed the bulk of their Christmas shopping, particularly anyone buying presents online. And the latest figures show that more and more consumers are now purchasing on the Internet. Online sales are still climbing – hitting £10.1 billion in November 2013, according to the IMRG Cap Gemini e-Retail Sales Index, up 10% on 2012.There are a...
Citizens today are increasingly embracing digital channels, such as the web, email and social media. Led by central government and its Digital by Default agenda, the public sector is therefore changing how it communicates to match the needs of citizens, patients and other audiences. More and more services can now be completed online, from renewing a tax disc to registering children for school.Digi...
Now is the time of year when everyone looks forward and makes their predictions for 2014. Rather than add my thoughts to this debate, I’ve taken a look at the views of the great and the good from this time last year – and seen how many have actually become a reality. I’ve tried to be as extensive as possible in my research, spanning analysts, publications, experts and other softw...
Customer service teams face growing challenges, particularly around understanding and responding to the growing number of unstructured queries they receive through digital channels such as email, social media and the web. In previous posts we’ve explained what linguistics (the scientific study of language) is and how it re-writes the rules for successful customer service. In this article, I ...
We’re now well into the Christmas shopping season, with Cyber Monday behind us and both retailers and analysts releasing their first figures for sales. This seems to show a strong start for many retailers, helped by promotions around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. John Lewis said online sales for the week ending 30 November were 35.7% higher than last year, while ChannelAdvisor reported that...
As companies expand, delivering the same, personal, high quality service is vital to their continued growth. Customer service teams can be spread across multiple locations and have to cover multiple brands and a greater range of products. This means that traditional methods of collecting and sharing knowledge (such as physical folders or handbooks) no longer provide fast answers to staff, leading ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...