Customer Service Solutions
Customer service can make or break any customer relationship. Read tips on finding and implementing the right customer service solutions for your firm.
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Blog
Google’s Latest Experiment: What The Future Of Notifications (Could) Look Like
Google’s "Little Signals" aims to alleviate alert overload. What can brands take away from this?
Blog
A Tale Of Two Behemoths
Some years, Enterprise Connect is the place where the world’s biggest vendors make significant announcements in the unified communications or contact center space. 2022 was one of those years, with both Amazon and Google making significant noise in the contact center space. Amazon Let’s talk Amazon first: It announced its new forecasting, capacity planning, and […]
Drive Engagement With Your Digital Experiences
A five-step breakdown of how to get customers to embrace new digital experiences.
Blog
Customer Service In 2022: The Times They Are A-Changin’
It’s been two years (!) since the pandemic began, and customer service organizations have managed the impossible: moving thousands of agents home practically overnight and rapidly deploying new digital channels, all while supporting millions of COVID-19-stressed customers. Our world has changed, and customer expectations have changed with it. Customer service leaders must shake off decades […]
Blog
CCaaS Hits An Inflection Point
Rapid Uptick In Customer Adoption With particularly good reasons and with great intentions, contact centers have been one of the last domains within companies to move their core technology to the cloud. As a critical customer-facing function, contact centers have so much at stake that it makes sense for them not to take chances with […]
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400 Million Reasons To Pay Attention To Contact Center AI
Trends in the conversation intelligence market are getting very interesting. Learn more this blog post.
Blog
Cure The Automation Hangover In Customer Service
Close your eyes and I’ll set the scene: It’s 2016. Chatbots are all the rage. News articles are predicting the death of the contact center as we know it. AI, the prophesied hero, powering the agent who doesn’t need breaks and can engage with 100 — no, 1000 — customers at once. Infinitely scalable human-like […]
Blog
Seven Steps To Help Your Customer Service Heroes Through The “Container-Challenged Christmas”
Retail contact center agents (aka customer service heroes) typically deal with stressed-out shoppers during the holidays and the return period that extends through March. The shipping and supply chain crisis, however, will make the interactions of the past a walk in the park compared to what’s to come this season. As the season progresses, expect […]
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“Predictive” Marks A New Era In Customer Experience Management
Forrester has launched a new feature in its FeedbackNow platform that lets brands move into the predictive era of customer experience. Learn more here.
Blog
Cancel The “Cost Center” Culture In Customer Service
In my past 30 years in the contact center industry at organizations such as 8×8, Genesys, IBM, and RingCentral, I’ve watched the same movie over and over and over again … too many contact centers are laboring under the tyranny of being a cost center with schizophrenic goals of making customers happy while “doing more […]
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Agent Desktops: The Silent — And Costly — Tax On Your Agents’ Time And Energy
Coauthored with Kate Leggett. I’ve asked before if it’s a given that employees should use frustrating systems. Should employees be forced to endure extra effort just because they choose to work at a company? Do their managers believe workers have to strain to feel like a full days’ work has been done? Kate lives this […]
Blog
Unified Agent Augmentation Tools: A Fractured And Disorganized Landscape In Customer Service
Agent augmentation tools make the lives of contact center agents easier by enabling them to deliver high-caliber customer support. Yet today’s technology is siloed; there isn’t a unified agent augmentation solution that aggregates all of the tools that agents need and/or should have. This gap in the customer service technology market creates the conditions for […]
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Three Key Findings From Our State Of Chat In Retail Research
Retailers and brands have offered chat for years, but recently it has gained traction thanks to new technology advancements and consumers’ overall comfort using chat. Forrester’s Consumer Technographics® shows that 42% of US online adults said that it was important for retailers to offer live online chat on their websites, up significantly from 27% in […]
Blog
Genesys To Acquire Bold360 — Heating Up The Battle For Digital Channel Dominance
Few companies deliver great service because of the disjointed and overly costly tech ecosystem. Today, you need: Queuing and routing technologies to capture voice, digital, and social inquiries and route them to the right agent pool. Workforce optimization technologies to manage agent staffing, monitor the quality of service that they deliver, and coach them. Customer […]
Podcast
How Customer Service Will Evolve In 2021
The upheavals of 2020 forced customer service organizations to rapidly shift their operations. But which changes will become permanent? Explore the future of customer service in this episode of What It Means with VP, Principal Analyst Kate Leggett and Principal Analyst Ian Jacobs.
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Adopt Three Practices To Boost Resiliency For Customer Service
Organizations that can rapidly react to changing customer behavior will lead. Those that struggle to meet the demands of this altered economy will fall further — if not entirely — behind.
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How Customer Service Can Emerge Stronger From The Pandemic In 2021
The pandemic exposed some gaping holes in customer service technologies and processes. Learn the three key areas where customer service organizations should focus in the year ahead.
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Customer Service Technologies Are Variably Effective: Know Your Options
The pandemic has elevated the importance of the customer service organization — and uncovered gaping holes in customer service processes and technologies. Read three key takeaways from our recent survey into customer service tech.
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Brands Bear (Some) Blame For Conditions At Outsourcers
Between really bad press (here and here) and bankruptcy (here), large contact center outsourcers have seen a rough last few months. Bad press for outsourcers spells trouble for and affects the brands that contract with them: Consumers will react regardless of whether the news comes from the company itself or up the supply chain. Negative […]
Blog
Facebook Looks To Monetize Messaging By Acquiring Kustomer And Extending Into Customer Service
Facebook announced its intention to acquire Kustomer for $1 billion, adding digital customer service to its portfolio. Why the focus on customer service? It’s because customers hold the power in interactions with companies. Customers demand easy, effective service that values their time and provides them with personal experiences that are in context of their actions. They increasingly use self-service and digital channels to interact with […]
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Predictions 2021: It’s All About Empathy, Digital, And Virtualizing Customer Care
The purpose of customer service is no longer just to alleviate run-of-the-mill inconveniences; it is to provide fundamental and necessary services for consumers devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn how customer service will evolve in 2021.
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