Kate Leggett

Customer service is a key driver of customer experience (CX), but technology silos often stand in the way of effective collaboration across CX and customer-facing teams. The recent announcement by Zendesk that it intends to acquire Momentive, parent of the well-known SurveyMonkey brand, has the potential to help users of both platforms break through this […]

Struggling to use cloud to differentiate your brand? Learn about the rapidly-growing industry cloud market in this blog post.

When it comes to your customer engagement strategy, digital experience (DX) and customer relationship management (CRM) teams are often viewed as different breeds with different priorities. DX initiatives have an outside-in view in supporting a customer’s digital journey. DX technologies include marketing, commerce, and content management technologies that are purchased by the CMO, CDO, or […]

Coauthored with Kate Leggett.  I’ve asked before if it’s a given that employees should use frustrating systems. Should employees be forced to endure extra effort just because they choose to work at a company? Do their managers believe workers have to strain to feel like a full days’ work has been done?  Kate lives this […]

Verticalization is back! Why? Horizontal business applications — as mature as they are — don’t fully support industry-specific workflows that span the front and back office. Manufacturers must track projects, schedules, time sheets, and labor efficiencies that are not core to customer relationship management (CRM) or inventory management. Healthcare providers must manage a patient’s health […]

COVID has upended business as we knew it, and sales organizations have felt this impact. Almost half of B2B US companies have slashed their sales teams. Sellers work from home, over digital channels, and sales managers have become much more data-driven and focused on post-sale engagement to preserve and grow revenue. There’s a much-needed increased […]

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 […]

For a 30-year-old technology category, it is amazing to see the CRM (customer relationship management) industry continue to grow at a staggering rate. Why? Because CRM is at the heart of every business that wants to compete on customer experience. It enables companies to access 360-degree views of customers in real time to drive reliable, […]

Few companies deliver great service because of the disjointed and overly costly tech ecosystem. Today, you need: Queuing and routing technologies to capture voice, digital, and social inquiries and route them to the right agent pool. Workforce optimization technologies to manage agent staffing, monitor the quality of service that they deliver, and coach them. Customer […]

Organizations that can rapidly react to changing customer behavior will lead. Those that struggle to meet the demands of this altered economy will fall further — if not entirely — behind.

The pandemic exposed some gaping holes in customer service technologies and processes. Learn the three key areas where customer service organizations should focus in the year ahead.

The pandemic has elevated the importance of the customer service organization — and uncovered gaping holes in customer service processes and technologies. Read three key takeaways from our recent survey into customer service tech.

Facebook announced its intention to acquire Kustomer for $1 billion, adding digital customer service to its portfolio. Why the focus on customer service? It’s because customers hold the power in interactions with companies. Customers demand easy, effective service that values their time and provides them with personal experiences that are in context of their actions. They increasingly use self-service and digital channels to interact with […]

Find out how Salesforce plans to use the $28B buy to extend the reach of its CRM platform.

CRM is widely used by companies both big and small. Gone are the days when it was purchased as a monolithic on-premises application. Today, it’s almost exclusively deployed in the cloud. As CRM moved to the cloud, business leaders in charge of sales, service, and marketing drove the purchase. Sales leaders only cared about how […]

Since the start of the pandemic, customer service organizations are doubling down on their investments in knowledge management because these solutions: Empower customer service agents to deliver successful outcomes. One of the top three drivers of customer service success is agent knowledge. The early days of knowledge management focused on streamlining access to curated content. […]

Phone experiences are increasingly becoming suboptimal as more and more customer service journeys begin before customers pick up the phone. This is because most companies deploy their communication channels in silos, which means that: (1) Agents have no knowledge of the customer’s prior digital interactions and (2) they cannot easily understand a customer’s prior actions […]

There is no single customer service solution that is ideal for all sizes of organizations, all industries, or all business models. For example, many companies selling and supporting higher-value, considered purchases have complex customer service processes that require collaboration between the account and customer service organization. Each customer interaction is also an opportunity to nurture […]

More customers are using self-service as a first point of contact during the pandemic. Learn how companies are working to improve the experience.