CUSTOMER MAGAZINE – October 2016

Touchdown! Data-Driven Interaction Changes Sports Marketing Game

When Stanford University kicked off its first-ever Sports Innovation Conference, its focus was as much on how data was driving sports performance as it was on the use of data to drive greater fan connection. Indeed, for marketers in the high-stakes world of sports, the need for data insight....Read More >>>

News Briefs
Inbenta Provides Chatbot Plugin There has been a lot of action lately on artificial intelligence/chatbot front lately, as a slew of companies have introduced new solutions and features on this front. For example, Inbenta in July announced the availability of its Chatbot Development Platform for Facebook Messenger, Skype, and websites. It's a plugin that integrated with Inbenta's semantic search technology, and it enables a company to leverage its existing knowledge base to create the chatbot experience. - 10/27/2016

CUSTOMER Announces TMC Labs Innovation Award Winners
It's been an exciting year in the contact center and CRM spaces. Our 2016 TMC Labs Customer Awards are designed to highlight the leading companies in the industry and their recent innovations. - 10/27/2016

TMC Announces CUSTOMER Contact Center Technology Award Winners
The contact center space is a dynamic and fluid one, with companies buying and selling other suppliers, and everybody working to provide organizations with solutions that address our new impatient, mobile-centric, and omnichannel world. Here's a list of some of the companies that CUSTOMER magazine and TMC believes are doing it right. - 10/27/2016

Intraday Solutions
With intraday solutions, businesses can optimize their contact center personnel and other resources based on the specific conditions at a given time - such as higher call volume, imbalances across interaction channels, overstaffing, understaffing, or other factors. - 10/27/2016

How MyPillow Reduced Call Answer Times & Rewards Top Agents
That's why MyPillow recently sought out a better contact center and customer relationship management solution so it could shake things up at its business and realize better results from its TV advertisements. The company - which sells special pillows that adjust to any sleep position and body shape, have a cooling feature, and promote faster and longer REM sleep - ultimately landed on a solution from Davco Technologies Inc. and SkySwitch. - 10/27/2016

Intangible Concrete: Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins and Constitutional Standing
In Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, the United States Supreme Court provided guidance on, but no definitive answer to, the question of whether a plaintiff who suffered no tangible harm has sufficient standing to maintain a federal cause of action under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. - 10/27/2016

Customer Service is Evolving. Are You Keeping Up?
Some companies might view customer service as an afterthought. They might realize it's important to provide decent customer service at the bare minimum, as long as their products and prices remain competitive because success is ultimately determined by the bottom line. - 10/27/2016

Breakthrough Tech vs. Status Quo: Overcoming Indecision with Platform-based Solutions
The telecommunications industry never gets tired of launching what it considers breakthrough technology. This continued innovation is the cornerstone of technological evolution. However, the never-ending wave of new offerings has severely shortened the lifecycle of currently available solutions, including those in the contact center. - 10/27/2016

Countdown to Corporate Extinction: Why the Customer is Key for Survival???
The age of Netflix, Uber, and Twitter has brought with it a new type of customer - an empowered, well-informed, and demanding individual who knows what excellent customer service looks like - and how to gain attention if they don't receive it. The emergence of this new customer means that organizations are no longer in charge.??? - 10/27/2016

Improving the Customer Experience Through Open Source Analytics
For years, best practices in customer support centers meant arming representatives with historical data about the person on the other end of the phone, so they could propose the right solutions or offers. Now customers are far more likely to interact in real time over the web or social channels like Twitter and Facebook. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020, customers will manage 85 percent of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human. - 10/27/2016

The Long Reach of Reviews
Customer experience is what drives business, and nowhere is that more clear - painfully or otherwise - than when evaluating the power of customer and peer reviews, and their impact on your brand. That trend will continue as customers themselves take control of the messaging through social media and online review platforms, and the drumbeat of industry statistics on CX reflects it. Companies must leverage the power of customer reviews while planning tomorrow's products and services too; in fact, firms ahead of the curve are planning to compete on experience, rather than price and product detail. - 10/27/2016

How Consumers Feel about Social Media Customer Service, CX
Social media has long been a hotbed of dissatisfied customers, and many businesses have built and trained a staff to respond to any issues. But according to a recent study, customers who actually want to resolve their problems are harder to find on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. Since 2013, they've been turning away from social media and focusing on more traditional channels. - 10/27/2016

Building Better Mobile Apps for Sales
A recent Gallup survey shows that nearly three-quarters of Americans check their mobile phones at least once an hour, with 90 percent of that mobile-phone time devoted to using apps. With more than 2.2 million apps available for download, what are the best developers doing to keep these habituated smartphone users engaged? - 10/27/2016

How Paychex is Employing Voice of the Customer
Paychex is among the world's largest business process services providers. The company provides solutions and services related to accounting and finance, employee benefits, human resources, and payroll and taxes. Recently CUSTOMER had the opportunity to interview Kathy Clark, voice of customer manager at Paychex, about VoC and customer loyalty. Here's what she had to say. - 10/27/2016