Customer Service Solutions

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 […]

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 […]

Retailers and brands have offered chat for years, but recently it has gained traction thanks to new technology advancements and consumers’ overall comfort using chat. Forrester’s Consumer Technographics® shows that 42% of US online adults said that it was important for retailers to offer live online chat on their websites, up significantly from 27% in […]

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 […]

The upheavals of 2020 forced customer service organizations to rapidly shift their operations. But which changes will become permanent? Explore the future of customer service in this episode of What It Means with VP, Principal Analyst Kate Leggett and Principal Analyst Ian Jacobs.

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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.

More and more customer service organizations turn to robotic process automation (RPA) to make agents more effective. The technology offloads repeatable tasks from agents, enforces compliance to process and policy, and allows agents to focus on work that matters. Yet contact centers often don’t see the initial ROI of RPA play out as they scale […]

Before we drown in dashboard dystopia, let’s swing the pendulum back to create meaningful metrics and measurement that will move your business forward and at the same time drive the outcomes that your customers want. At Forrester’s Customer Experience North America virtual event on June 16–18, we have an entire track dedicated to meaningful measurement where we’ll explore how both CX professionals and marketers can up their measurement game across six dimensions.