Customer Service

eGain is touting a report from Forrester Consulting and my friend Ian Jacobs purporting to show that omnichannel customer service is stagnant or worse when it comes to delivering service that customers need and want. Ian does good work and I am in agreement with him on this, but I have trouble with ...

Target may be implementing price matching, but there are other ways to compete. Customer experience is the new battleground in retail sales, and winning this battle requires winning over customers with truly personalized service. Despite all the advancements in technology, from personalized retarget...

Apple made a bold move on the customer support front this summer: The company started publishing customer support videos for its Beats by Dre headphones via the product line's Twitter account. The strategy is notable primarily because Apple published how-to videos natively on Twitter, taking a proac...

Growth of the Internet of Things in broadband households extends the life, utility and functionality of all connected solutions in the home. It also puts new pressures on existing support solutions to meet consumers' expectations. Sixteen percent of U.S. broadband households owned a smart home devic...

It's a business truism that customer service can make or break customer relationships, so it stands to reason that contact centers should be considered a critical part of the enterprise and equipped accordingly. However, half of 225 global contact centers surveyed in April were using agent desktop t...

American consumers have access to enterprise brands through more touchpoints than ever before. In the past, enterprises controlled the times, policies and marketing funnel for customer interactions. When things went wrong, customers reluctantly picked up the phone to call customer support, fully exp...

Microsoft on Thursday announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire FieldOne, developer of a cloud-based field service management solution. FieldOne's technology will add a new dimension to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. FieldOne provides field service management tools for work order management, au...

Customer experience is more than the experience of trading money for a product or a service. It's the experience leading up to that, and the experience customers have with what they've purchased, all the way until they stop using it. Why is it, then, that the concept of "customer experience" seems t...

Red Hat and Samsung Business Services on Tuesday announced a strategic alliance to deliver the next generation of mobile solutions for the enterprise. The alliance, announced at the Red Hat Summit 2015, combines the strengths of each company -- Samsung's mobile device portfolio and Red Hat's open so...

It occurred to me at Salesforce's Marketing Cloud event held last week in New York that CRM has come full circle in a fundamental way. I was never a fan of labels like "CRM 2.0" or "Social CRM" or whatever else came along, principally because those monikers didn't signify anything new in doing busin...