Customer Service

In today's highly competitive B2B software industry, it's not enough to staff a call center and sit back and wait for customers to reach out when they need you -- it's imperative that you take the initiative. When customers have so many solution vendors to choose from, service becomes a strategic di...

Even among companies that admit their journeys need work, most believe they know the areas that need improvement. This is classic company-first thinking on what should be a customer-first concept.

Customer service is a big deal in e-commerce, as many customers view it as an important factor in their purchasing decisions. Providing a flawless customer experience is integral to optimizing customer retention -- particularly important with ever-lucrative subscription services.

Your new salespeople have very specific expectations of how their workday should flow. These 20-somethings want to sign a contract poolside, then post about it on Instagram -- #workingpoolside, anyone? They want to approve a purchase order on the go as they head to post-work Pilates and pizza. They ...

What's the big deal, I thought? Last week Salesforce announced it was paying in the range of $1.35 billion for ClickSoftware, a private field service automation and workforce management company. At first, I attributed it to a slow summer news cycle when many people in the industry are off trout fish...

E-commerce has exploded since Amazon and eBay were founded in 1995. Today, e-commerce is part of everyday life. By 2023, retail e-commerce sales in the U.S. are projected to surpass $735 billion. Even industries like food, healthcare and banking, which previously were dominated by offline transactio...

The contact center uses familiar benchmarks to determine if a call, chat or email is successful or not. Call metrics such as net promoter score, handle time, and amount of silence are correlated with positive or negative outcomes. However, insights from speech analytics technology prove that these m...

The definition of "baggage" varies depending on whom you ask. For instance, a travel agent or a road-weary businessperson will describe a container used to carry personal belongings on a trip. A therapist might describe emotions from previous relationships that hamper a person's ability to have a he...

Recent events have led to many people learning about a long-understood rhetorical tactic called "Gish galloping." Named after creationist Duane Gish, it is the technique of confronting an opponent with a rapid-fire series of arguments -- including half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies. C...

Social media has become a part of everyday life. The number of worldwide users is expected to reach 3.02 billion by 2021. Apart from the growth in the number of profiles, consumers have been devoting more of their time to engaging with social media sites. One-seventh of the average user's waking lif...

With the sharing economy becoming more saturated with products and services, how do companies differentiate themselves from their competitors? The answer: customer service. By 2020, customers will give more weight to customer service than to the price or product itself.

Long an obsession of science fiction writers, "artificial intelligence" in the modern era of fast-paced technological innovation is a term that is as ubiquitous as it is nebulous. For the payments technology industry, however, the term describes advanced analytical technology that has an outsized po...

NICE inContact has released the Spring 2019 version of its CXone cloud-based contact center software, with multiple AI-powered updates for smarter customer and agent engagement, plus enhanced CRM integrations.

CRM guru Samson Lee has a new idea about customer experience. I don't know that I agree with it, but Lee has a way of making you question your assumptions and possibly change your viewpoint. Lee describes extreme experience in his paper, "Replace Customer-Centricity with Extreme Experience," as the ...