To Queue or Not To Queue? Only if you get Value for Effort

Customer Effort
May 13, 2013
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Queuing – it may be a British pastime but it’s not exactly something that we relish doing. How many times have you just shrugged and walked away when it’s “not worth the effort”?

We are busy people who want to minimise the amount of time, energy and effort we put into things that we don’t value. Things like trying to navigate around a complicated and badly designed website, setting up a product or service or trying to get answers from a contact centre. Sometimes we don’t want to be “wowed” by customer service. Sometimes we just want it to be easy. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Contact centres, Featured, Global, IT Infrastructure Tagged With: , , , , ,

Easy Does It: A New Take on Loyalty

Guest blogger Dr. Nicola Millard
April 16, 2013
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Every business wants to have loyal customers – but loyalty is always a rather strange concept in business. We often only discover that a customer isn’t loyal when they never speak to us again! We’ve had ‘customer recommendation’ and ‘customer delight’ as benchmarks for loyalty for a while – but happy customers may still go to the competition, so measuring satisfaction might not be the best way to test loyalty.

A survey of 75,000 customers published in 2010 in the Harvard Business Review made a startling statement – you don’t have to delight your customers, you just need to make it easy for them! This seemingly went against all the common wisdom about customer satisfaction that had gone before it. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Contact centres, Featured, Global, IT Infrastructure Tagged With: , , , , ,

Can’t all sectors use social media like retail?

Hotspot’s a cool move for bank
February 15, 2013
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Retail rules the social media game. But our research has shown that not all sectors are equal in the social media world – and some have a much harder job than retailers to get engagement from their customers on social.

Part of it is down to different audiences. Retailers have the brands that we like to talk about – but we rarely share the intimate details of our finances in the pub (not to mention the fact that banks face a legal and regulatory minefield around giving financial advice in public).  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Contact centres, Financial Services, Global, Retail, Social business Tagged With: , , , , ,

Big Ideas from the Big Apple

Big ideas from the big Apple
February 14, 2013
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It’s a tough time for traditional retailers – as the number of prominent casualties on the UK high street in recent weeks testifies. However, the National Retail Federation show in New York last week showed how retailers could fight back using a combination of design, innovation and showmanship. 

It is very apparent that online retailers are out innovating the conventional high street. Companies like Amazon, eBay and Apple are setting the benchmark for both price and service – with 78% of customers expecting the same level of online service from older brands as new online players, according to BT’s new Autonomous Customer research. The same survey also tells us that convenience is more important than price for 1 in 3 customers. For traditional brands to survive, they need to be as, if not more, innovative using the one advantage that they have over online – their physical presence. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Global, IT Infrastructure, Retail, Supply Chain Tagged With: , , ,

The Genius of the Telephone.

As fast as a call but no accent
February 7, 2013
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I will admit that for many years I dreamt of being Maggie Philbin or Philippa Forrester and present TV science programmes. So I leapt at the chance when I was asked to appear with Dr Michael Mosely on a BBC programme celebrating the invention of the telephone, ‘The Genius of Invention’ (BBC Two).

On arrival “on set” it was fabulous to see BT’s network control centre in Oswestry, Shropshire, looking so 007-ish, having had a makeover from the BBC lighting team. Oswestry is both the eyes and the ears of the UK’s communications network. It ensures every one of the five billion calls passing over BT’s “core” network every month gets through to their intended destinations 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – whether you are ringing your aunt in Sydney or a contact centre in Sidcup. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Featured, Global, Innovation, Inside Technology, UK Tagged With: , , ,

The Good, the Bad and the Paranoid: Why Customers Choose their Channels.

Are your customers fickle?
January 28, 2013
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The last blog looked at channel shift from the perspective of making channels “useful, usable and used”. This blog takes a wider look at why people choose the channels that they choose.

Where the customer is, how much time they have and what channels are accessible to them at any one time will inevitably determine their choice of channel. Some customers may not be able to access the Internet because they lack physical access to it, or they lack the confidence to use it. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Contact centres, Global Tagged With: , , ,

Useful, Usable, Used – A Tale of Two Ticket Machines.

Useful, Usable, Used - A Tale of Two Ticket Machines -contact
January 25, 2013
2s

The holy grail of customer experience strategy at the moment is to move customers from expensive human channels to cheaper self-service channels. Call it channel shift, digital by default or zero people intensity – the intention is to get more people to embrace self-service and do more things themselves.

However, the first question to ask, in order to create an effective digital channel mix, is why people use the channels that they do now. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Contact centres, Global, Social business Tagged With: , , ,

Turning New Year’s Resolutions into Revolutions?

shutterstock BW_116895082
January 2, 2013
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After playing buzzword bingo last year – with big data, agility and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) all proving to be triple word scores during 2012 – the time has come again to make some predictions for 2013.  Since my crystal ball is still on the fritz (it’s been reported), as usual I have no more insight than anyone else in the futures business. 

So I want to take a different approach and look at what New Year’s resolutions could develop into New Year’s revolutions in the way that we work, using technologies that are already established. The challenge is often whether we, creatures of habit, are willing to embrace this change. [Read more...]

Filed Under: 2012, Contact centres, Global Tagged With: , , , , ,

Who’s really driving the collaboration train?

It’s good to chat (INFOGRAPHIC)
November 15, 2012
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I will maintain to my last breath that I’m an iPhone user because it’s the best technology out there and the only smartphone that does absolutely everything I need. Really I will.

If I was talking about someone else however, I’d point out the extremely high likelihood that the iPhone buyer had bought into the whole apple status thing, because ‘everything they needed’ (and maybe more) was available from other suppliers, potentially at lower cost. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Collaboration, Global Tagged With: , , , ,

#socialmediauseful?

social-media-icons1
November 9, 2012
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The term “Social media” inherently comes with a problem – it’s called “social” media and so some people dismiss it as a tool that can help people become more productive at work. However, work IS social – it’s just social in a subtly different way to our lives outside work. The one thing that employees have in common is their employer – so conversations about seemingly trivial things may well evolve into something much more valuable to the business.

There are also many flavours of social media  — from a Facebook page, Twitter feed and LinkedIn profile through to a specialist forum bringing together expertise, providers, customers and anyone with a passing interest. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Global, Social business, Unified Communications Tagged With: , , , , ,
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