Customer service and customer experience blog for call center professionals
Three years ago Gartner reported that by 2018, more than 50% of organizations would implement significant changes in their efforts to improve the customer experience. In other words, the battle for delivering the best experience was predicted to become even fiercer.
My thoughts? Gartner was bang on: We see more and more companies trying to improve their customer experience efforts (just look at the awards we gave out last year), and doing so will only become more critical.
The customer experience has grown to be one of the leading determinants of customer satisfaction in the contact center. A recent study by Dimension Data shows that 82% of companies recognize the customer experience as a competitive differentiator, and 77.5% recognize it as the most important strategic performance measure.
With the sheer number of individuals talking about the customer experience, it can be hard to find great thought leaders, and as a CX manager it’s important for you to know who the most influential people in the space are. That’s why each year Fonolo sets out to determine the top thought leaders in the industry, so companies can learn from the best.
Congratulations to these 15 analysts who were selected because of their highly regarded knowledge of the customer experience. Continue reading
As a call center manager, it’s important for you to understand who the most influential people are in the space.
With the sheer number of individuals talking about the contact center, and all the noise this generates, it can be really difficult to find the great ones to follow. So we’ve compiled a list to make it easier for you.
Congratulations to these 20 thought leaders who were selected because of their highly regarded knowledge in the contact center. Continue reading
In December, we published a list of Top Analysts Covering Contact Center Technology. Those folks are a terrific resource for following the rapidly evolving call center industry. In the same spirit, we are now publishing a list of top analysts covering the topics of customer service / customer experience.
The customer experience topic has a lot of overlap with contact centers, since a finely-tuned call center is essential for delivering a good customer experience. In fact, there is so much overlap that some analysts could have gone on either list; We did our best to segment them appropriately.
Here is the list, in alphabetical order. Continue reading
Time for the 3rd installment of our list of top analysts covering contact center technology!
Our industry is blessed with a large and engaged analyst community. What’s really awesome about these folks is how open they are. Just by following their blogs and tweets, you’ll get tremendous insight into the latest trends. (You’ll also get some entertaining arguments and witty exchanges.)
The community has both institutional analysts (working for Gartner, Forrester, etc.) and independents. The former have the budgets to do large studies, crunch the numbers and give us useful quantitative nuggets (“44% of US online consumers say they like having a chat invitation“, says Kate Legget), but often they pull their punches when it comes to specific predictions. That’s where the independents really shine: “WebRTC is the most important new communications technology of the decade“, says Dean Bubley, while Dave Michels says, “WebRTC is for losers“.
You will see some new faces, this year as the list has grown to 21. The growth is partly because we decided to expand the scope and include analysts that focus on adjacent spaces, like WebRTC. At the same time, we tried to maintain a balance between institutional and independent analysts. We would love to hear from you in the comments if you feel we’ve left someone out.
Congratulations to the 21 who were selected! Continue reading
Last week, Fonolo hosted yet another insightful Google Hangout, discussing top questions about multi-channel customer service. To save you some time, we’ve extracted video snippets of the answers to each question.
Let’s take a quick look at the panelist introductions: Ian Jacobs Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, Keith Dawson Principal Analyst at Customer Interaction Ovum, Art Rosenberg Principal Analyst at The Unified-View, Jon Arnold Independent Industry Analyst at J Arnold & Associates, and Shai Berger CEO and Co-Founder at Fonolo. Continue reading
Delivering high quality customer service over multiple channels may not be easy, but it is expected. Today’s consumer uses a variety of channels and touch-points to interact with your organization and they expect the same level of service regardless of the channel they use. The experience that a customer has with you over the voice channel should be the same if they were chatting with you, sending you an email or tweeting at you.
To highlight the importance of a multi-channel customer service strategy, we’ve compiled 5 of the most important statistics that you simply can’t ignore. Continue reading
When it comes to the contact center and customer service space, two analyst firms dominate the landscape of thought leadership: Gartner and Forrester. Let’s compare side-by-side what they say about some of the leading issues of the day.
We’ll take a look at some recent opinions given by the top analysts at each firm regarding the topics below and how they affect customer service and contact centers.
One of the major forces reshaping the call center is the conversion to SIP. New data from Forrester shows the trend gaining strength. Their recent survey of IT decision makers shows that 55% of companies either have or are planning to replace PRIs with SIP trunks (see figure).
The SIP protocol covers all enterprise communication, not just contact center. However, for many companies, the journey to an all-SIP environment is starting with their call center.
It’s a logical subset to start with for two reasons:
In our post, SIP is Seeping into Call Centers, we talked about how a SIP-enabled call center can add 3rd party enhancements (like speech analytics), implement call-attached data (that actually works), and add advanced features like visual IVR and virtual queuing.
If you’re interested about call centers and SIP, here are 5 must-read articles (well actually, 4 must-reads and 1 must-watch, to be accurate.)
The call center is headed for major disruption. From smartphones to social media to the cloud, there are epic forces coming together to change an industry that has been relatively stagnant for the past decade. Since the call center is at its heart, the broader field of customer service will also be drastically impacted.
If you care about this topic, we sourced the top 12 analysts you should follow (in alphabetical order):
