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.
In a conversation with Alex Bard, CEO of Assistly (now desk.com, part of salesforce.com), I learned a few interesting things about customer service solutions for small to medium-size businesses...
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...
Its exciting news to see Oracle announce its intention to acquire InQuira. We have been waiting for this news for a long time. The reasons are multifold: Today’s contact center ecosystem is...

What are some alternatives to the homegrown system (Lotus Notes) we use as a repository for customer complaints? We looked at one company, but are looking for more alternatives. The company we...
Step 6 of my 10-step program on how to master your service experience is to make your agent tool set more usable. This is because the work environment of a customer service agent is...
In customer service organizations, collaboration should take place around cases and content, and should involve not only collaboration between customers and customer service agents, but internal...
Profiles Of Eight Leading Customer Service Outsourcing Vendors
This report outlines the building versus sourcing part of Forrester's solution for application development and delivery (AD&D) executives looking to build, buy, or outsource a customer service...

Consumers' preferences for customer service channels are rapidly changing. And it's not just the younger generation of consumers — there's disruption and change across all ages and...

We believe we can increase sales with our call centers in our direct marketing organization if we can figure out how to transform our phone interactions into selling activities instead of...
Woodmen of the World, a fraternal benefit society that provides insurance and investment products, was consolidating the operations of three divisions into one and needed a solid knowledge management...
There is no single metric against which to benchmark the performance of your customer service organization. It’s like flying a plane—you can’t do it by just looking at your altitude...
Outsourcing contact center operations helps organizations deliver better customer service. In Forrester’s recent survey of 304 North American and European network and telecommunications...
Upon reading Forrester's January 28, 2010, "Rating Customer Service Experiences, 2010" report by Bruce D. Temkin, I utilized the customer service experiences article to identify companies that had...
There’s been lots going on with what Forrester calls the “interaction-centric customer service vendors”. These are the vendors that manage the high-volume, transaction-oriented...
Twenty-Four Solutions For Delivering Differentiated Customer Experiences
Customers demand superior service and support as the price for their ongoing loyalty and patronage. To help you navigate the complex solution landscape to fill your customer interaction management...
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...
Business process professionals supporting customer service operations understand the need for data but do little to take responsibility for its quality. Data management professionals, on the other...

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...
This post originally appeared on destinationCRM. Customers want efficient, effortless service from the touchpoint and communication channel of their choice. They want to receive accurate,...
Use Knowledge To Power Personalized Customer Experiences
Customer service managers agree that the right knowledge, delivered at the right time in the service resolution process, is critical to a successful interaction. But they struggle to tame the volume...

VMware, a provider of virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions, needed a way to broaden the reach of its customer service web self-service site so that it could offer proactive as well as...
Outsourcing contact center operations helps organizations deliver better customer service. In Forrester’s recent survey of 304 North American and European network and telecommunications...
It’s exciting to see the news of yet another acquisition in the world of customer service with the announcement of KANA Software’s intent to acquire Sword Ciboodle. Today’s...
Part 4 of my 10-part blog series on how to master your service experience is short and to the point: Understand what your customers are trying to do and keep this in mind when designing and...
Step 7 of my 10-step program on how to master your service experience is to think outside the customer service box. We know that customers don’t choose to interact with you...