Driven by growing multichannel interactions with their customers, many businesses are moving away from call centres in favour of social media and virtual help centres to deal with customer complaints and queries.
The thought is that customers engaging with lower cost channels should be supported through siloed touch points and diverted away from higher cost call centres.
However, the power of the call centre shouldn’t be understated.
Online holiday bookings at a record high. According to the latest ITB World Travel Trends Report, 65% of all holidays are now booked online, compared to just 24% that are booked via travel agencies.
Mobile travel bookings are also on the rise, with one in five UK holiday-makers now booking holidays using a mobile device, according to a recent survey by Tradedoubler Insight Unit.
As competition moves from the high street to digital channels, it’s now more important than ever for online travel operators to ensure customers have the best possible experience across all channels.
Broken links, payment problems, poor navigation and a lack of information can force customers to competitors’ sites, ultimately losing business. To avoid this, online travel operators need to take action fast.
Great customer experience is one of the hardest things for your competitors to copy.
A strategy of continuous improvement can offer clear differentiation from competitors.
However, it’s only when we measure what customers are actually seeing and doing when they are interacting with our digital channels, that we can understand where they might have issues or unmet needs.
As a major battle begins for UK 4G customers, brands need to be prepared for a rapid increase in mobile customer experience expectations.
O2, the UK subsidiary of Spanish operator Telefonica, is due to launch its 4G service on August 29, finally providing a rival to EE’s market monopoly.
Meanwhile, Vodafone is expected to also launch its 4G service in August and Three is expected to follow suit shortly.
Ahead of the Apple App Store’s fifth birthday next month, some brands are beginning to seriously weigh up the benefits of investing in a dedicated app versus optimising their existing sites for mobile.
Choosing the most viable mobile strategy is now a major element in most businesses’ plans, and this is the key message emerging from the Mobile Experience Trends Briefing, which we recently launched with Econsultancy.
Last week we all waited with baited breath to find out ‘what’ exactly Apple was going to launch at this year’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC).
And when Tim Cook unveiled a new operating system and some product upgrades, many of us were a little disappointed, having hoped for a shiny new and exciting smart phone or tablet.
Capitalising on 2012’s success, mobile commerce is finally reaching its stride, and all the signs suggest that 2013 is a banner year for mobile.
Data shows that more and more consumers shop and buy through their mobile devices. In fact, a quick recap of 2012 shows that online shopping reached an all-time high during the 2012 Christmas period, with 30% growth on Cyber Monday alone. Sales soared and consumers flocked to their tablets, smartphones, and other mobile devices to make purchases.
What this also asserts is that marketers, ecommerce executives and retailers must examine the customer experience and eliminate customer pain points that block successful conversions for the retailer.
If a customer voices issues with mobile transactions, retailers must identify the issue and why it causes customers to react negatively, then they must resolve the issue immediately.
A lot has been made of the growth of digital device usage and the complexity it brings as we look to build an ever-clearer picture of customer behavior.
With more channels and ways of shopping at our disposal, the behaviour of individual consumers differs significantly from person to person. The result is that effective customer experience management now includes more data points than ever before.
By creating customer behaviour models that provide audience specific insights however, this digital maze is perfectly navigable.