Customer Service

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...

Traditionally, the contact center has been a cost center. However, with the contact center transforming into a profit center, the selling of products and services has emerged as an opportunity for the center to improve agent and customer interaction. Yet the challenge will be balancing customer sati...

Who would have thought the meltdown in financial services could fuel the overhaul of the industry's customer service departments? Actually, it's just one of several factors driving companies to put customer service initiatives on the fast track in pursuit of compelling business advantage. The subpri...

Pharmaceutical companies manage large quantities of content about their product lines. However, unlike other industries, the challenge of managing this information is exacerbated by regulatory and compliance demands and the need to manage information from multiple "touch points" across a diverse cus...

After Best Buy lost the laptop Raelyn Campbell had brought in for repair, the D.C. resident filed a lawsuit demanding $54 million from the company. That eye-popping claim -- and the publicity it engendered -- was the culmination of a long blog campaign during which Campbell related her frustration w...

The contact center has become the focal point of the customer interaction. Customers spend more time researching products, managing account and order information, resolving issues, and utilizing self-service than they do within the traditional brick-and-mortar storefront. This requires contact cente...

Providing timely, reassuring and comprehensive customer service has been an axiom of good business for as long as people have been doing business. The inability of a business to provide competent, secure customer service is damaging to more than just revenues. Besides the direct monetary losses that...

Much ink has been spilled about what, exactly, has been the secret of Barack Obama's overwhelming success. There is no denying his charisma or the appeal of his message, but a behind-the-scenes look at how his political machine operates -- namely, how it empowers its people on the ground to operate ...

Avaya has introduced Intelligence Presence, a new software application that gives users -- both in corporate environments and call centers -- the ability to view so-called presence information across multiple sources. For example, it would allow a contact center rep engaged with a caller to see if a...

Contact consolidation is not for the lighthearted. For years, contact center management has been attempting to control costs by reducing the number of agents, physical sites and consolidating software and hardware solutions. Often these attempts are in conflict with customer and corporate demands.

RightNow has updated its flagship SaaS CRM product with new agent desktop functionality, customer-tracking abilities, enhanced analytics and chat features. The new version, which it calls "February '08," also includes a contextual workspace -- that is, a user interface for contact center service rep...

The customer is always right -- except for, of course, when he or she isn't. When it's inconvenient for the company, or when the customer asks for something that could negatively affect the company's revenue streams or business model, the customer is never right -- even when he or she is. That's why...