Customer Service

RightNow has enhanced its retail industry-specific app with chat and feedback functionality -- changes that give users more outreach options to customers using self-service channels. "With this app, retailers can incorporate feedback into chat," said Susan Meriwether, VP of product marketing, "to ma...

A frustrated Best Buy customer has filed a $54 million lawsuit against the electronics retailer in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Her complaint? Best Buy lost the laptop she had brought in for repair; the tech staff was evasive about its whereabouts; and the store refused to compens...

An increasing global customer base is driving companies to provide "follow-the-sun" customer support services. In order to enable this level of support, agents are now being located in any part of the world. The challenge is to merge technologies and provide seamless, accurate and real-time customer...

As social media become more embedded in our lives, tragedies like the Megan Meier case -- the Missouri teenager killed herself after a fictitious friend invented by the mother of a neighborhood girl left nasty messages on her MySpace profile -- may be the inevitable fallout. Corporate Web 2.0 usage...

Companies' integrated voice recognition applications are being stretched thinner and thinner. Even with the best interface designs in place, customers are still abandoning calls before completion. Forty-three percent of companies surveyed in the Aberdeen Contact Center Analytics benchmark report are...

B. Joseph Pine II has been interested in the vendor-customer relationship for a long time. Pine and his partner, James H. Gilmore, have written numerous books and articles that lie at the heart of the CRM approach to business. Together they have written The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre &...

On New Year's Eve, Richard Rabins, cofounder of Alpha Software, posted a thank-you to readers on his blog. "Your suggestions, advice, criticisms, peer support and sweat equity were crucial to expanding the Alpha Five universe in 2007," he wrote. "Every new application you deployed, every peer you s...

The new year is here and marketers are putting the finishing touches on their budgets and plans for 2008. However, before we move forward, there are some trends from 2007 that are worth continuing in the coming year. One trend that is top of many minds is the increased focus on customer relationship...

2006 was the last year e-commerce vendors introduced new functionality to their Web sites that were visible to consumers, such as better search features and click-once-to-buy shopping carts. Coincidentally or not, it was also the last time aggregate customer satisfaction with online retailers regist...

Was it the "Year of the Frustrated Customer?" Here are a few highlights: Airline passenger complaints to the U.S. Department of Transportation were up 70 percent, as last summer saw the worst delays in 13 years of record-keeping; Verizon was ordered to pay $1 million to customers the company termina...

When the last of the ribbons float to the ground and the mountain of wrapping paper is folded up for recycling, chances are that most households will have at least a couple of gift items that don't quite fit the bill. Many gift recipients will be among the mob that hits the malls in the days after C...

John Fleming and Jim Asplund are the coauthors of Human Sigma: Managing the Customer Encounter. They believe that when it comes to human systems -- a company's employees and their relationships with customers -- businesses have dropped the ball. Their view is that by moving the customer experience a...

Linda LaBeau didn't know her rights as a credit-card holder. She did know she was getting constant calls from a collection agency for a debt she wasn't sure was hers. Angry, scared and frustrated, she asked The Watchdog several smart questions. We found some surprising answers. Turns out consumers h...

With holiday season promotions escalating into top gear, the term "free shipping" is popping up on many e-commerce sites. While the promotions do attract the attention of consumers, the meaning of the term and the impact of such promotions on retailers' sales are decidedly mixed at this stage. Ship...

AT&T is revamping its policies to allow consumers to prorate their early termination fee according to how long he or she has been on the plan. The company is also allowing customers who switch plans or change phones during the course of their contract to maintain the same contract instead of re-...