Customer Service

As people head off to enjoy the last holiday weekend of the summer, few are thinking about the next stretch of holidays ahead: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah and New Year's. Rest assured, though -- retailers are giving the matter plenty of consideration. Labor Day weekend signals the start of the ...

Google may be No. 1 in terms of overall usage of its search engines. However, it appears to be falling short in one very important, non-tech metric: customer satisfaction. For the first time, Yahoo has overtaken Google to claim the top spot in this area, according to the University of Michigan's Ame...

Opposing tensions are much in evidence in the legal wrangle over individual privacy rights and security in the digital environment. The dizzying pace of technological innovation continues as individuals and organizations public and private struggle to come to grips with its implications and ramifica...

Some 9.1 percent of families in the U.S. do not have a deposit account of any type, according to a recent household survey from the Federal Reserve. This market segment lives check to check and typically avoids opening bank accounts because of a lack of funds combined with a deep distrust of banks.

While wireless carriers are shuddering in the face of the iPhone's launch, Sprint Nextel has sent letters to some of its more demanding customers telling them, in effect, "you're fired." The number of customers let go is unknown, according to press reports, and Sprint did not return calls for commen...

ATG has introduced a service center application for its e-commerce suite, ATG Commerce, that builds on some of the company's previous acquisitions. The Commerce Service Center contact center application integrates e-commerce functionality with back-end order administration, sales support and custome...

The saga of the $54 million lawsuit against a Washington, D.C.-area dry cleaners over a missing pair of pants has come to an end, with Washington Superior Court Judge Judith Bartnoff ruling that the plaintiff, Roy Pearson, had not proven the store had lost the pants. Now, Pearson, an administrative ...

Last year, SAP spin-off company Tealeaf introduced software that allows call center agents and other customer service representatives to see what customers see through their Web browsers through an application called "cxReveal." Now, the company has announced an upgrade to that software that integra...

ATG has updated its e-commerce platform to include automated affinity selling for retailers and other e-commerce providers. It is the biggest update the vendor has made since it rolled out its v. 6.4 platform last summer, spokesperson Tucker Walsh told CRM Buyer. This release enhances the company's ...

Call centers for PC companies placed dead last in customer satisfaction in a survey released Tuesday by an international consulting group. The Ann Arbor, Mich.-based CFI Group found PC call centers scored a 64, the lowest customer satisfaction score of all the industries surveyed. "Scores in the six...

Video rental purveyor Netflix and TV shopping channel QVC led a customer satisfaction index of the top 100 online retailers released Friday by ForeSee Results. The index, calculated twice a year by the firm, ranked the Web sites of Netflix and QVC, with scores of 85, as the kings of customer satisfa...

Broadband providers have been pushing so-called triple play offerings as a means to fatten their coffers, but those services are also contributing to increasing support costs and drooping customer satisfaction. "The competitive environment that characterizes today's broadband and value-added service...

Mortgage lenders have improved their online customers' experience over the last year, but many Web sites still fall far short of meeting their visitors' needs, according to a report released Tuesday by a financial services customer satisfaction research firm. In a Web site study of 26 major online m...

The State of Texas has charged electronics retailer Radio Shack with violating state identity protection laws, claiming the company dumped thousands of customer records behind a store near Corpus Christi and possibly exposing consumers to identity theft. Radio Shack is not denying the transgression ...

When Royal Caribbean tapped Steelcase Applied Research to help it outfit a new call center in Oregon, the cruise line didn't require any guidance on what chairs it wanted its reps to use. In fact, the company had given a great deal of thought to what might seem to outsiders to be the most basic of a...