Over the last few months, I have held discussions with a number of leading customer management services (CMS) vendors and their clients regarding the increasing need for advanced analytics to drive step changes in customer experience (CX). Here, I reflect on the changing role of analytics as they take centre stage as the key to disruptive CX. How times have changed When I first participa[...]

The traditional inbound phone sales process is giving way to a multichannel environment, where the customer is in control – usually visiting the company website first and expecting to connect with a sales rep immediately, more commonly over webchat, and then deciding on a purchase. The challenges for customer service teams are two-fold: Training agents to sell via chat, with all the re[...]

 2016 can be officially declared the year of the chatbot. For  the last few months the amount of attention from the media,  and from developers and venture capitalists, has turned chatbots from an ordinary customer service tool to a hyped  technology, tipped to replace apps and become the all-  encompassing digital interface  between customers and  brands. A[...]

Self-service has long been part of the customer service mix, dating back to user manuals, and progressing to the first IVRs, website FAQs, and experience sharing communities such as Amazon Help. Even though self-service support has a wide range of benefits and savings for consumers and businesses, its adoption has been slow – due partly to technological limitations, and to a tendency to use [...]

NelsonHall’s latest CMS market analysis focuses on the increasing importance of transformational CMS, whereby a vendor not only takes over the running of a client’s call center processes, but seeks to optimize these processes to achieve the desired business goals of the organization. In the current market, the need to reduce cost while maintaining or enhancing customer satisfaction [...]

Firstsource has just announced its strongest quarter since FY 2013. Revenue was up 12.1% y/y to Rs. 7,998m (~$128m) and margins increased 210 bps y/y to 9.3%. The margin improvement is due in part to Firstsource’s consolidation of unprofitable accounts in both its customer management business and in domestic accounts in India and Sri Lanka. Telecoms and media, Firstsource&r[...]