customer service

Customer service today breaks the barriers of pre- and post-sale engagements. Thanks to digital adoption and omnichannel engagement strategies, customer service activities span the entire customer lifecycle. Customers make no differentiation on whether they are seeking support before or after a purchase journey and expect a consistent experience with every interaction. Consequently, customer service has also established itself as an active channel capable of creating incremental revenue streams for every business.

Phone experiences are increasingly becoming suboptimal as more and more customer service journeys begin before customers pick up the phone. This is because most companies deploy their communication channels in silos, which means that: (1) Agents have no knowledge of the customer’s prior digital interactions and (2) they cannot easily understand a customer’s prior actions […]

Product makers have pushed tech smarts beyond our phones and PCs into gear and gadgets, but many smart, connected products are not so smart. Whether it’s the latest connected harvester or a new smart speaker, the user experience often falls short of rising expectations. Adding sensors and remote control using internet-of-things (IoT) tech in products […]

Medallia continues its buying spree — adding to its numerous acquisitions in 2019 and its purchase of video feedback platform LivingLens in February of this year.[i] Acquiring Voci will strengthen Medallia’s overall offering primarily by enabling clients to tap into contact center insights and data. This move will also help Medallia customers overcome one of […]

Airlines have a major role to play in the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic because they are part and fabric of this interconnected world, carrying people and cargo.

Customer service organizations use robotic process automation (RPA) as a tactical and short-term approach to digitize common agent tasks. There are two forms of RPA: unattended and attended RPA. A task can start with an agent and be supported by attended automation, which can kick off unattended RPA to complete the process. Customer service leaders […]

Retailers: Customers care about your commitment to social and environmental sustainability. This holiday season, be sure to weave your brand values into your messaging.

Get the most out of your organization’s Salesforce implementation by selecting the right partner. In our recent Forrester Wave™ evaluation, we identified the 10 providers that matter most and how they stack up. Watch below to learn more, and find the full Wave report here.

Not all customer service vendor solutions are a good fit for your organization, and choosing the right one depends on the number of agents you have, your growth projections, your business model, the type of industry you are in, and whether you are looking for a standalone customer service solution or one that is part […]

In this short take, I discuss the lessons learned from evaluating 14 vendors for the Forrester New Wave™: Conversational AI For Customer Service, Q2 2019. Check out the video below. For more insights, Forrester clients can dig into the full evaluative research here. And if you have more questions, reach out via inquiry.

Many organizations, particularly in North America, think that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) doesn’t apply to them. On May 25, 2018, the day the GDPR went into effect, I happened to be in Canada doing an in-person workshop with a large financial services client. In a session about contact center trends, I mentioned […]

Happy customer service agents mean happy customers — and happy shareholders. Engaged agents also have better job performance, are more productive, and stay in their jobs longer — which is one of the costlier factors in managing customer service operations. Customer service leaders have to balance their job demands with technology and training. They also […]

Back in August of last year, I asked for good examples of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality, and mixed reality (MR), all together known as extended reality. Unsurprisingly, I saw plenty of examples of the type my original post complained about: visually stunning but almost entirely useless for anything other than showing off. Then there […]

Consumers really don’t like your chatbot. It’s not exactly a relationship built to last — a few clicks here, a few sentences there — but Forrester Analytics data shows us very clearly that, to consumers, your chatbot isn’t exactly “swipe right” material. That’s unfortunate, because using a chatbot for customer service can be incredibly effective when done […]

As the holidays approach and the post-holiday return rush quickly follows, a few things will occur simultaneously: Hundreds of millions of customers will make purchases, total holiday retail sales will push the $720 billion mark, and millions more will send odd, ill-fitting, or unwanted gifts back from whence they came. It’s in this frenzy of […]

We recently published a case study about Carbon, a 3D printing company known for its innovative technology and, now, its proactive customer service model. Over the course of several months, we spoke with the Carbon team and asked them how they use IoT data that streams from their printers to predict customers’ problems before they […]

As of 2018, the market for contact center technology has fully shifted to cloud. The remaining outliers of demand are large, highly customized implementations that preserve legacy on-premises software or organizations that wish to maintain the technology inside their firewall. Agility, flexibility, and the ability to rapidly shift capacity are all key elements that AD&D […]

Increasing channel diversity and automation will make interactions more complex, requiring highly skilled agents and intelligent processes to assist them. Here’s my take on five valuable use cases for AI in the contact center.

I attended ServiceNow’s Knowledge18 conference, held in Las Vegas on May 7–10. It’s a well-attended conference, by 18,000 people who use one or more of the company’s cloud service management, HR, security, and customer service products, which are all built on an enterprise-grade platform. At the conference, there was a lot of emotion spent talking […]