Customer Service

"Smart" shopping carts have been around for a while, but until recently, they haven't managed to gain much traction. Now, some momentum is building, according to proponents of the computer-rigged market baskets that -- with a swipe of a card -- can flash an alert that a customer's favorite brand of ...

With the release of its August '08 version, RightNow Technologies continues to shift both its platform and its lineup of products and features to Web 2.0. This latest upgrade includes a customer portal that offers widgets, video, forums and blogs. Its studio development environment now allows users ...

Do loyal customers translate into steady sales or profits? Intuitively, the answer should be yes -- and indeed, customer loyalty is a significant metric by which companies rate their performance. However, there a few problems with the concept of customer loyalty and a corporate strategy to develop i...

It's not easy to find something to like about air travel these days -- the industry, after all, has the lowest customer satisfaction ratings in the economy -- but Gail Bower, president of Bower & Co. Consulting, has: the self-service kiosks that just about every airline now uses to handle automa...

NetSuite has added new features to its NetSuite CRM+ flagship product, focusing on building new and tweaking existing marketing automation and knowledge management workflows for customer support and service. NetSuite also announced support for Firefox 3, the latest version of the Web browser from th...

Never before has the voice of the customer been so loud. And never before have companies been so keen to not only pay close attention to the wants, likes, experiences, preferences, opinions, suggestions and complaints of customers, but to carefully analyze and act upon the information in a systemati...

Microsoft held its Worldwide Partner Conference last week, and Sonoma Partners' Mike Snyder summed up the event's highlights. "Once again, Microsoft CRM was a featured product at the conference! Microsoft sells thousands of products, but CRM gets plenty of attention," he wrote. "During the opening k...

You're the manager of a Hilton Garden Inn, and it's the height of family vacation season. The lobby is abuzz with kids toting skateboards and moms pushing strollers; your front desk agents are overloaded with check-ins. In the middle of all this, a harried business traveler calls to the front desk f...

The Google-Salesforce.com partnership grows ever more intertwined. The latest development occurred Monday when Salesforce.com released a Google Data client library for the Force.com platform that provides access to the full suite of Google Data APIs using Apex code, allowing developers to integrate ...

The Internet has seen massive adoption. Online retailing has continued to dramatically build its customer base and more and more companies are sending their offline customers to the Internet for service and support. To service both these old and new customers, the Internet has already had an abundan...

As we've said here before, blogs have been an excellent leveler of the playing field for consumers. Had a poor customer service experience or are just feeling aggrieved with a service provider? Complain to management, yes, but then blog about it. While such posts are generally considered to be the r...

Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo has filed a civil lawsuit against Time Warner Cable, alleging it deceived and ripped off its subscribers, providing inferior service for months. The complaint accuses TWC of engaging in numerous fraudulent acts and business practices that resulted in consu...

The Cluetrain Manifesto, written 10 years ago by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, has won over a sizable number of devotees with a simple premise: As the Internet introduces new levels of communication among consumers -- and between consumers and companies -- those co...

Results of a customer satisfaction survey released this week are timely for one industry in particular, as it faces a perfect storm: the collision of potentially stringent new regulations affecting customer service with a host of economic factors that are driving perception of that service deeper in...

If you could clone your best agent hundreds or thousands of times over, you could ensure that each and every customer calling your contact center receives the same high-quality, friendly and informed response. In reality, natural language speech self-service is probably the closest and best alternat...