Customer Service News & Articles

Via social media and other channels, marketing has become a conversation. But what is the customer saying? A new report from the Aberdeen Group attempts to find out. 

With all the talk of social media and other new approaches for customer service, it’s easy to overlook the importance of that old-time communication medium, email. This week, KANA Software released a new version of its email response management solution, which is now integrated with its KANA Experience Analytics customer support platform. 

Like any relationship, the customer-company relationship is the sum total of all the interactions. These days, those interactions take place across a variety of channels, and a new report from Lithium and Forrester looks at how customer service, a key location for customer interaction, must be in sync with overall customer experience efforts and throughout all social channels.

Just like prehistoric tribes were centered on survival, today’s online users gather together around an idea, except it can range from fans of kitten furniture to political groups.

Understanding what online customers are doing, and predicting what they will do, has become a major part of contemporary e-Commerce. But, with so many online channels and so many types of customer actions, how best to capture, display and interpret? Toward this end, customer analytics provider NICE Systems is now offering it Customer Engagement Analytics (CEA) platform, which it described as the “industry’s first to combine interaction and transaction analysis.” 

What’s the value for major brands of a Facebook Fan? According to a new study, the average is $174, an increase of 28 percent from 2010. 

There are many kinds of customer communities, from fans on Facebook, to private communities that congregate on company forums. But what makes people join up? What keeps them coming back? How can you start getting your customer community engaged?

Are you focusing your marketing efforts not just on acquiring customers but on the real value of their return buyers? There’s been a lot of discussion about how to engage customers after purchase, but according to new research from SumAll, a marketing analytics company, it takes between three and five years for the average business to create a customer base comprised 25% of return buyers. Are you doing all that you can to cultivate customers into buyers and beyond?

Last summer, customer service provider KANA Software bought Ciboodle, a contact center provider. KANA had been focused on Web-based customer self-service, and Ciboodle on the agent. This week, KANA is releasing its new version of KANA Enterprise, which brings self-service and agent support together in one platform. 

Four out of every ten customers would rather experience a trip to their Department of Motor Vehicles than contact customer care. With all due respect to your local DMV, that’s a sobering reflection of the state of customer service, but only one of many in a new survey sponsored by Aspect Software, a customer interaction management vendor. 

Got negative reviews? Think that you have them under control? Zendesk has released results from a recent study, which reveals the negative impact that the rise in social media and web review sites, like Yelp, have on a business' bottom line. 

Brand loyalty is certainly an important element of your marketing strategy, but new research shows that it’s trumped by experience. inContact, a provider of cloud contact center software and contact center agent optimization tools, has released findings of a recent Harris Interactive Survey that examined the current state of customer service and the changing preferences of consumers.

Enterprise social technology provider Moxie Software is integrating its Spaces by Moxie social software suite with the Microsoft Lync unified communications application.

Adobe touts its Adobe CQ platform and the various marketing solutions it supports and integrates with as a means for marketers to easily manage and deliver multichannel digital content. However, while Adobe’s promotional materials provide an interesting overview of CQ, there is nothing better than actual end user experience to illustrate how well a particular technology works.

It’s Oscar season again and while Argo and Life of Pi walked away with the awards this year, I've been thinking about a past classic. In this article of my ACM series, I look through the lens of three iconic scenes from The Wizard of Oz to see how case management can help create great customer experience.