Customer Service

Shades of George W. Bush and Victoria's Secret all in one. We got fooled again last week by our own ineptitude and inability to learn from history when retailer Target's website crashed under the weight of a highly successful marketing campaign. The last time anything remotely similar happened was...

Of the nearly 6 million people who consider home their primary place of work, 2.8 million -- slightly more than 2 percent of the population -- are employed by someone else, not "self-employed," according to the U.S. Census Bureau. When accounting for those working at least one day from home, the Te...

NanoRep, the developer of a help-desk application that employs a self-learning knowledge base, has just taken its fledging product global. An automatic language conversion feature now translates information into 34 languages, explained nanoRep CEO Doron Herzich. "The system can learn which language ...

Recent announcements in the CRM space have been all about crossing bridges to streamline customer contact functions and making customer service representatives' lives easier and more productive. And all it's taking is a click of the mouse. LiveChat, a developer of real-time software and Web analytic...

Assistly, a SaaS customer service company, started out with the goal of helping its user base incorporate communications from all channels into the customer service hub. That means messages sent via social media, including tweets and Facebook posts, and even replies to routine transactional emails s...

At CRM Evolution, Brian Vellmure, founder of Initium Technology, gave a talk on the future of customer relationships. He peered well into the future, envisioning an era when the Internet anticipates customer needs and delivers advice automatically. That can only happen when companies develop suffici...

By this point in the evolution of e-commerce, most e-tailers know the benefits of live engagement. Website visitors are three times more likely to make a purchase when they have the support of a sales representative. Just as in brick-and-mortar stores, interacting with a knowledgeable person in real...

Whenever I talk about CRM to people who aren't CRM experts, I find the discussion devolving into an examination of the real common denominator in all of this: the human aspects of doing business. The "R" of relationships resonates far more strongly with people than the "M" in management, and for goo...

Avaya is delivering multimedia capabilities to the front line with its announcement of two new contact center products designed to bring agent-assisted and automated customer service up to speed with the social networking world: Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2 and the Avaya Experience Portal. Avaya Au...

If you are a regular reader, you know that from time to time I write about things that appear to be tangentially related to CRM -- at best. My favorite alternative to straight ahead research and reporting on CRM is a strange sounding thing called "peak oil." For those of you not familiar with the i...

CDC Software's Pivotal CRM Customer Service and Support has launched, with major changes to the application's integration with social media and email, and more configuration options. This module was developed for the Pivotal 6 platform, which was built on the .Net Framework. The biggest jump in func...

Imagine a customer service agent who can do virtually no wrong. She typically answers questions in about three seconds, with an astonishing 94 percent accuracy rate. She puts callers at ease, offering them information about related issues without making them listen politely through an entire spiel o...

Last week Marc Benioff was in Boston with another regional Cloudforce tour event, and Stephen Denning has written a good book. There is a connection between them. The day after the Boston Bruins clinched the Stanley Cup, Benioff was in Boston, and thank goodness the company decided on a noon start ...

Customer experience can make or break a company. The pressure to manage costs has never been greater, but it's a fatal mistake to view customer service channels as a cost center. The solution? An at-home workforce that delivers excellent results: 10 percent higher customer satisfaction; 30 percent m...

If you like speaking with live customer service reps about service issues without having to first endure a long and frustrating wait on the phone, then shop at Sierra Trading Post. That is one conclusion that can be drawn from a study of online retailers released by StellaService, which found that...