Customer Service

I had my annual meeting with my friends at Walker Information the other day when they were in Boston talking about their latest report. I have written about Walker before, and it gives me pleasure to do so again -- and to point out that I have no business relationship with them; I just like what th...

Companies that seek to automate the customer service process to cut costs often alienate customers instead, as Part 1 of this two-part series reveals. Some companies, though, are finding ways to incorporate informed, personal interactions into their customer service programs, and are treating every...

"Your call is important to us. Please hold." "We've automated our phone system for your convenience." "Our agents are busy helping other customers." As consumers, we are all too familiar with these rote statements that are somehow supposed to make us feel all warm and fuzzy while we cool our hee...

American consumers would rather have to deal with a rude or condescending customer service agent on the phone than one who speaks with a foreign accent, according to a survey released earlier this year. The survey seemed to indicate that the arguments against outsourcing of certain operations -- fro...

Online surveys are becoming more popular and easier to use, and while their ability to find out exactly what customers want promises a goldmine for CRM, their real potential is not always tapped. "There's a lot more work that needs to be done by the organization than simply ask the questions and loo...

One of the most advanced communication hubs in the world crashed unexpectedly in Seattle on Sunday afternoon, July 30, 2006, due to a string of malfunctions in the facility's electrical power system. The facility, called Fisher Plaza, is billed as one of the most secure data centers and telecommuni...

The service revolution in CRM -- and, in fact, throughout customer-facing strategies -- is well underway in many companies. The reason the remainder of the industry doesn't see it yet is because many CRM vendors' responses to the revolution are so slow that they make lagging economic indicators loo...

Loyalty Lab, an on-demand CRM application for consumer brands, has introduced Loyalty 2.0, an upgraded product to help retailers and grocery stores incorporate e-commerce channels into their first-generation loyalty programs, and to better segment their customers. It is part of the summer 2006 relea...

Wincor Nixdorf, a German-based provider of IT applications for the banking and retail industries, has introduced its eServices platform in the United States for the first time. Bits and pieces of the application, which connects Wincor Nixdorf service management with customers via an electronic netw...

For many companies, there is an uncomfortable truth that even with CRM systems in place, one big gaping hole comes up again and again in customer experience: it's the nagging issue of saving customers time. Does your CRM system really respect your customer's time, rather than your sales person's tim...

FrontRange has upgraded its HEAT Service and Support, a help desk and external customer support tool, for the first time since the beginning of last year, excluding the handful of patch versions the company has issued since then. This version, release 8.4, focuses on improvements to the user interfa...

When designing a Web page, where exactly should one place the icon to let the consumer know Live Chat is available? On the home page? In the service section? Should that icon be flashing? What color should it be? Believe or not, a group of executives spent at least half an hour of earnest conversati...

Governments are turning to private sector techniques -- namely benchmarking -- to ensure that their back-office processes meet industry performance standards, according to a new study by Accenture. The resulting savings are, at least in theory, being applied to constituent-facing processes. "We know...

Trying to get your hands around organizational change is a difficult challenge for most companies, but it is even more daunting when you are trying to identify the needs of employees that support multiple product lines and span numerous geographic locations. Today, Web-based surveys continue to tak...

ATG continues to build out its e-commerce platform -- an area into which it has been pouring resources for the last two years -- with the introduction of three separate but related sets of e-functionality. These include new navigation or search capabilities for users that ATG calls "searchandising,...