Ian Jacobs

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.

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.

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. […]

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 […]

The recently published report, “The Forrester New Wave™: AI-Fueled Speech Analytics Solutions, Q2 2018” report identified the 11 most significant players in this market: Aspect, CallMiner, Clarabridge, Cogito, Genesys, Invoca, Mattersight, NICE, OpenText, Tethr, and Verint. Based on our comprehensive criteria, Forrester identified CallMiner and NICE as Leaders in the space today. Forrester’s clients can […]

The recently published report, “The Forrester New Wave™: AI-Fueled Speech Analytics Solutions, Q2 2018” report identified the 11 most significant players in this market: Aspect, CallMiner, Clarabridge, Cogito, Genesys, Invoca, Mattersight, NICE, OpenText, Tethr, and Verint. Based on our comprehensive criteria, Forrester identified CallMiner and NICE as Leaders in the space today. Forrester’s clients can […]

Your customers are walking, talking contradictions. Forrester data shows that more than half of them want you to value their time, follow them across channels, and answer their questions quickly and easily. At the same time, these customers are overwhelmingly worried about how they share personal data – 60% of online North American adults believe […]

Over the past year, Forrester clients have been brimming with questions about chatbots and their role in customer service. In fact, in that time, more than half of the client inquiries I have received have touched on chatbots, artificial intelligence, natural language understanding, machine learning, and conversational self-service. Many of those inquiries were of the […]

Over the holidays, I was a guest on the Modern Customer Podcast, a wonderful podcast hosted by Forbes’ blogger Blake Morgan. She describes the podcast as providing “surprising and counter-intuitive insights on customer experience, social customer service and content.” No pressure there, then. During our episode, Blake and I discussed the ways that increased usage […]

We’ve all heard the idea so much it is now approaching hackneyed cliché: technological-driven disruption can—or will—hit every industry. Uber and Lyft have monkeyed around with the fundamental order of the taxi and livery business. 3D printing threatens manufacturing. And so on and so on. The result of all this disruption: customer experience has become […]