Customer Service Solutions

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Trends in the conversation intelligence market are getting very interesting. Learn more this blog post.

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 […]

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 […]

Forrester has launched a new feature in its FeedbackNow platform that lets brands move into the predictive era of customer experience. Learn more here.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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.