Ian Jacobs

Agent augmentation tools make the lives of contact center agents easier by enabling them to deliver high-caliber customer support. Yet today’s technology is siloed; there isn’t a unified agent augmentation solution that aggregates all of the tools that agents need and/or should have. This gap in the customer service technology market creates the conditions for […]

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Nuance for $19.7 billion in its second-largest acquisition after LinkedIn. For the past 15 years, Nuance has been the largest independent speech recognition vendor servicing healthcare and enterprise customer service markets. With this acquisition, Microsoft gets serious healthcare chops, an arsenal of conversational AI assets (including […]

Between really bad press (here and here) and bankruptcy (here), large contact center outsourcers have seen a rough last few months. Bad press for outsourcers spells trouble for and affects the brands that contract with them: Consumers will react regardless of whether the news comes from the company itself or up the supply chain. Negative […]

The purpose of customer service is no longer just to alleviate run-of-the-mill inconveniences; it is to provide fundamental and necessary services for consumers devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn how customer service will evolve in 2021.

Let’s just get it out of the way at the start of this blog: COVID-19 has remade retail and has forced a rapid shift toward digital customer service interactions. And now the holidays are nigh, and e-commerce seems to be the order of the day (or the “plague year”). To help with this rush of […]

Twenty-two customer service executives shared their victories and challenges during the coronavirus pandemic. Read key takeaways from this conversation about customer service during COVID-19.

COVID-19 Is Proving That Consumer Voices Can Influence Business Decisions Last week, major corporations learned firsthand the power of values-based consumers. Many received harsh backlash after applying for and receiving funds from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), intended to help small businesses keep their workforces employed amid the COVID-19 crisis. The US government allocated $349 billion to the program, but many small businesses were denied after larger players received […]

To help brands navigate the historic customer service challenges posed by the current pandemic and subsequent need for mass mobilization of a remote workforce, Forrester has created a four pillar framework for a building a successful work from home contact center.

Learn why now is the right time for brands to move to a work-at-home model for contact center agents.

The brand damage of poor customer service outsourcing had become apparent. So, why are more companies considering outsourcing more?

Can chatbots help meet your holiday hiring needs — and should they? Forrester Principal Analyst Ian Jacobs explains in this video.

AI will change how organizations staff, run, and manage their customer service teams. Read Forrester's 2020 customer service predictions to learn more.

For all their promise, chatbots are still decidedly imperfect. With good reason: The processes underlying their functioning are numerous and complex. But, there's hope.

In this short video, I ask a simple question with no simple answer: How can customer service organizations avoid wild swings between a focus on experience and a focus on efficiency if macroeconomic conditions deteriorate? Let me know your thoughts on what your organization is doing to avoid this oft-repeated behavior. Email me at ijacobs@forrester.com. […]

Chatbots rely on natural language processing (NLP) to understand you. Before they can process a language, they must learn it. Read more.

In this short take, I discuss the lessons learned from evaluating 14 vendors for the Forrester New Wave™: Conversational AI For Customer Service, Q2 2019. Check out the video below. For more insights, Forrester clients can dig into the full evaluative research here. And if you have more questions, reach out via inquiry.

Will chatbots save you money? Your short-term savings likely won’t outweigh the long-term damage caused by continuously frustrating your customers.

Consumers really don’t like your chatbot. It’s not exactly a relationship built to last — a few clicks here, a few sentences there — but Forrester Analytics data shows us very clearly that, to consumers, your chatbot isn’t exactly “swipe right” material. That’s unfortunate, because using a chatbot for customer service can be incredibly effective when done […]

As the holidays approach and the post-holiday return rush quickly follows, a few things will occur simultaneously: Hundreds of millions of customers will make purchases, total holiday retail sales will push the $720 billion mark, and millions more will send odd, ill-fitting, or unwanted gifts back from whence they came. It’s in this frenzy of […]