CUSTOMER — DECEMBER 2012

Personalized Service 2.0: Businesses Try to Bring the Customer Experience Full Circle

Delivering a personalized experience is a widely circulated concept these days. Everybody is talking about how businesses can and should leverage big data and otherwise cater to customers and prospects to build brand loyalty and expand average revenue per user. But while conventional wisdom indicates that organizations that provide such experiences stand to benefit handsomely, it can be difficult to figure out just exactly how to go about all this... Read More >>>

Salesforce Service Cloud Helps Businesses Transform the Customer Experience
Customer service used to be all about phone conversations and face-to-face interactions, but today many people prefer to communicate with the companies with which they do business via social media, mobile communications, or whatever mode or device is the most convenient at a given time..

Desk.com Helps Small Teams and Growing Businesses Deliver on the Promise of Social Customer Service
A social revolution is at hand. But it's probably not what you're thinking. What we're looking at here is an uprising in social media usage. And it's affecting how customers talk about and want to interact with businesses.

Benefitting from Call Recording and Screen Capture, and Avoiding Added PCI Compliance Requirements in the Processs
Contact centers know the value of call and screen capture recordings. They use recordings so contact center agents and their managers can review them for training, improved efficiency, resolving customer issues and documenting legal compliance.

Smarter Video: The Intersection of Customer Experience, Big Data and Personalization
A brand's knowledge of individual customer preferences is critical for nurturing long-term relationships. This ensures an optimal customer experience, which is becoming a strategic imperative for companies to differentiate themselves and maximize acquisition, retention and growth.

How to Realize the Benefits of Trigger-Based Marketing
Whether you're a mom-and-pop shop on the corner, or an international retail conglomerate, the old saying holds true: "People do business with the people they know, like and trust." Success is contingent on building relationships with your customers.

New Opportunities in Mobile Marketing
Using SMS to deliver mobile campaigns limits marketers to a 160 character maximum allowed per message. All marketers that use text messaging with their customers know how difficult it is to create an effective campaign to engage consumers when using such a limited plain text.

Customer Services Needs Multi-Persona Mobile Apps
It's getting very obvious that it is consumer BYOD that is driving all kinds of customer service activities to UC-enabled, mobile, self-service applications accessible in public or private clouds. Whether the mobile application servers are located on premises or on a cloud service is also becoming a business option The bottom line is that mobile apps are shifting the emphasis of UC ROI away from just internal collaboration benefits to include servicing all mobile end users (customers, employees), who can now be more accessible to automated business applications and to flexible, multi-modal communications with people (person-to-person).

New Study Addresses CRM in the Smartphone Age
The results of a benchmark study conducted by The Adcom Group for Virtual Hold Technology are in. They shed light on mobile app use and the need to improve the ease of transition from self-service in mobile apps to live human help.

10 Things Your Customers Hate About Doing Business with You (And what you can do about them)
In the course of over 20 years working in contact centers and customer experience, I've done my share of focus groups and usability tests. And when I'm at a cocktail party as I was last night and people find out what I do, they're always ready to tell me about a recent bad experience or their customer service pet peeves. Here's what I've been hearing..

Speaking My Language: TransPerfect Bridges the Communications Gap with Interpreter Services)
A non-descript office park in Tempe, Ariz., houses the 150-seat contact center run by a company called TransPerfect. An IKEA sits across the street, but, beyond that, there's not a lot of international flare to speak of in the area. However, inside the walls of TransPerfect are interpreters who may be communicating in any of more than 170 languages.

How to Optimize Customer Support for the Holiday Season
The holiday season is upon us. While it's a joyous time for most of us, it's also the busiest time for online stores, which are expecting the biggest shopping season in the year. If you run an online store that sells gifts, food, decoration materials or any other holiday items, make sure to prepare your customer support for the inevitable flurry of extra shoppers. Customer service can make a huge difference to stressed-out holiday shoppers, so it pays to keep a few tips in mind.

Leveraging Technology for Remote Agents
The economic pressures of the last few years have forced businesses to focus on cost reduction, often ahead of everything else. At the same time, customers have continued to demand "more and faster," meaning added channels, freedom from IVRs, and increased self-service calls to action, given the premium placed on time-to-service.

The Value of First Impressions: How Brand Ambassadors Enhance Customer Relationships with One Phone Call
Most companies know the key to long-term growth is generating repeat business. Repeat customers mean greater brand loyalty, higher referrals and a steady stream of sales. Adding a new customer also costs considerably more than retaining an existing one.