Online Customer Service Buyer's Guide 2009

About this Guide

This guide is aimed at organisations who are investigating the online customer service (OCS) market.

Details about the various trends and issues within the sector can be found, as well as advice on how to select a customer service solution to best fit your organisation and its overall business objectives.

The technology offered by vendors in this guide ranges from email management solutions and intelligent FAQs, through to virtual interactive assistants, live chat or instant messaging features and online survey or feedback tools.

The guide contains 15 of the leading UK suppliers, profiled across two related but slightly different aspects of successfully operating customer service activity online:

-)  Interaction - For example technologies such as intelligent FAQs and virtual or real agents.

-)  Understanding - Tools (generally online survey or customer feedback technology) which enable organisations to learn about the customer experience and create improvements for the future.

Additionally, companies including Lastminute.com, Mars, O2 and Virgin Atlantic also offer insight about effectively running online customer services.

Overview

Author: Jake Hird, Econsultancy
Pages: 139 pages
Structure: Market trends and issues, 15 vendor profiles

Contents

Like all our buyer's guides, the report starts with a look at trends in the marketplace, as well as our analyst forecasts for the growth of the online customer service market during 2009.

Trends within e-commerce include:

• Growth of e-commerce drives emphasis on OCS
• Greater focus on customer retention and engagement
• Customers expect an integrated, multi-channel experience
• Businesses need to consider channel hierarchy
• Use of OCS technology to drive sales activity
• Companies harness Twitter and user-generated content for customer engagement

The 15 suppliers profiled are:

ATG, Bazaarvoice, Clicktools, Confirmit, Creative Virtual, Danesoft, Globalpark, InQuira, InstantService, iPerceptions, nGenera Customer Interaction Management, Parker Software, RightNow Technologies, Synthetix, Transversal.

You can download the free sample to see the full list of contents.

Who Is This Guide For?

This particular buyer's guide is aimed at organisations and businesses trying to understand and select online customer service solutions, or who are currently reviewing their activity in this area. It is also relevant for anyone wishing to engage, understand or research the complexities involved in this market.

Related Resources 

We recommend that you also read the Econsultancy / cScape Online Customer Engagement Report 2009 for further information about supporting and engaging with customers online.

You can download a free sample of the Online Customer Service Buyer's Guide.

back to top

Featured suppliers

ATG UK

Bazaarvoice Ltd

Clicktools

Confirmit

Creative Virtual Ltd

Danesoft

Globalpark

Instantservice

nGenera CIM (Formerly Talisma)

Parker Software

RightNow Technologies

Synthetix Ltd

How much does this report cost?

You can purchase just this report for $400.

However, become a Silver subscriber and you get total access to all our reports for as little as $495.

As a Silver subscriber you get complete access to 700+ of our reports for a whole year. This includes all past reports and all the new ones we publish during the year.

Get access to Econsultancy's multi award-winning reports, research and guides. You join our community of the world's leading digital marketing and e-commerce practitioners. Read testimonials from other subscribers to see how valuable they find Econsultancy as a resource to help them become smarter digital marketers.

Cheapest and fastest way to get this report: Become a Silver subscriber now »

Consider your options: Find out more about why you should subscribe