About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.

Vikram leads the forecast team, which is responsible for producing all forecasts within M&S research. He is focused on the consumer commerce areas including retail, travel, and financial services. He is keenly involved in understanding the evolution of consumers' online behavior and technology adoption.
Vikram came to Forrester Research through its acquisition of Jupiter Research, where he started in July 2000. Prior to Jupiter, Vikram worked at IRI, a leading market research company, where he worked closely with some of the leading CPG companies.
Vikram often appears on TV, radio, and comments in the press on the US online retail and travel industry. He has been quoted in The L.A. Times, Business Week, The New York Times, CNN Money, and American Banker. He has also appeared on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, and Radio, NPR, Fox Business News, and ABC.
Vikram earned an M.B.A. from Virginia Tech and a B.Com from N.M College in Mumbai, India.
Step 8 of my 10-step program on how to master your service experience is to tame your knowledge problem. A good knowledge program is one of the foundational elements of a good service...
2012 is still a vivid memory for most of us. But it’s time to look ahead to 2013 and focus on the key trends that customer service professionals need to pay attention to as they plan for...
We all know that companies are trying to leverage social channels for customer service. But how can they be deployed in a way that adds value to an organization? Here are my thoughts: You can’t...

I know the customer service market is consolidating as it matures. I’ve been tracking the consolidation of the knowledge management, multichannel management and EFM space for a while. However,...
You have to admit that knowledge management (KM) is hard — it’s hard to explain, hard to implement, hard to do right. It’s not just technology. It is a combination of...
Siri, Apple’s voice-activated virtual agent (VA), has raised the profile of this technology category. Siri provides the right engagement paradigm: ask a question and get an answer - a right...
We live in a world of increasing complexity: an increasing number of communication channels, an explosion of social data, the intertwining of sales, marketing, and customer service activities, and a...
Hello customer service world – I’ve just joined at Forrester Research, responsible for customer service and call center business processes. I’ll be watching the customer service...
Assurant Solutions, a leading provider of specialty insurance, was considering novel ways to increase customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty and at the same time control operational costs. The...
Eighty-six percent of customer service decision-makers say that a good customer experience is one of their top strategic priorities. Sixty-three percent say that they want their customer experience...
MyCustomer.com recently asked me what my thoughts were about CRM — why initial CRM projects failed, what has changed to make deployments successful, and what the future holds for CRM. Here is...
Landscape: The Contact Centers For Customer Service Playbook
Locking in customer loyalty via deeper engagement and differentiated experiences will continue to be critical priorities for organizations in all sectors in the decade ahead. But navigating the...

In 2011, organizations will ramp up their multichannel customer service initiatives. This will be harder to do than in the past, as customers now expect more: They are increasingly online, want...
Navigating the complex contact center solution landscape continues to be challenging, particularly in light of the rapid rise of social computing, mobility, and voice of the customer initiatives...
We see a number of enterprises needing contact center transformations; these include upgrading their technology, such as switches, network, telephony, IVR, etc. We have the following questions: 1)...
MyCustomer.com recently asked me what my thoughts were about CRM — why initial CRM projects failed, what has changed to make deployments successful, and what the future holds for CRM. Here...
Contact centers for customer service are a nightmare in terms of the complexity of the technologies. At a high level, to serve your customers, you need to: Capture the inquiry, which can come in...
66% of customers say that “valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service.” A knowledge base is typically used to empower agents and customers...
Vision: The Contact Centers For Customer Service Playbook
As organizations strive to succeed in the age of the customer, business and IT professionals responsible for customer service struggle to understand changing customer behavior, re-engineer end-to-end...

Symantec, a provider of security, management, backup and recovery, data availability, and data loss prevention products, was considering novel ways to make relevant content available to its technical...
Forrester’s book Groundswell made the power of social media tangible with real-world examples and laid out a framework to help onboard organizations. However, many companies today still...