Business Reporter

Why learning more about your customer is good for business “I am not a number, I am a free man”. So said Patrick McGoohan, starring in the cult 1960s TV series The Prisoner. Your customers may sympathise with him – to your disadvantage. Many companies treat their customers as just a series of transactions. It [...]

Contact centres are on the brink of a revolution that will pay huge dividends for customers and companies A whole new role for contact centres beckons; that of rapidly understanding and efficiently communicating precise details about customer demand to the whole company. Armed with this insight, contact centres can now be equipped to serve the [...]

Companies are turning to social media as a fast and cost effective way to gauge customer experience Upload a holiday snap to Facebook, re-tweet a news link or even advertise your employment credentials… Social media has got us all hooked as we key-tap, scroll and touch-screen our way through our daily lives. So it comes [...]

In a world of constant communication, reaching out to customers seems easier than ever – but the question on everyone’s lips remains: how can we get it right? Question: what’s a business without customers? Answer: bust. It’s obvious, and yet organisations still struggle to get to know their customers and make them a business priority. [...]

It may have started as damage limitation, but Panasonic’s move into social media has become a profitable as well as powerful way to talk to customers When an incorrect story about a TV recall went viral, Panasonic knew it had to embrace social media. “We hadn’t recalled any TVs but with people posting that we had [...]

Should you keep your business in-house or use external contractors? We look at the pros and cons of outsourcing through two companies with very different approaches Don’t kid yourself that outsourcing is yesterday’s news – participants in Inner Circle’s Customer Experience Strategy Summit made it quite clear that it is still a knotty question they grapple [...]

Measuring customer experience can leave behind a trail of overwhelming and uninformative information. How can you turn mess into success? Can speech analytics deliver the call experiences your customers deserve? Firstly we should review why businesses want to deliver excellent customer service. The answer is a simple one; because happy customers are good customers. According [...]

Adopting cloud services can improve customer experiences by enhancing service quality, advisor productivity and resolution effectiveness The things that can be achieved with today’s contact centre technology are truly amazing. Organisations can instantly route callers to global service experts simply by recognising the number they’re calling from. They can deliver comparable levels of service regardless [...]

If customers like you, they’ll tell someone else. With social media, that can reach a very wide audience Consumers are increasingly looking to social media to help them make purchasing decisions. A Europe-wide survey of 3,000 consumers by software firm eGain found that more than one in five people made a decision to buy goods or [...]

Experts thrash out the importance of top-line support when it comes to shifting customer service up a gear Customer Service experts must speak the language of business if they want their bosses to take more than a passing interest in the customer experience, according to Maria McCann, director of customer services at Spotify. “You have to [...]