CUSTOMER — December 2013

The New On-Demand Society

The TV show Parks and Recreation features a character called Tom who starts a business called Rent-A-Swag that offers his boy-size luxury wardrobe to parents of teenage boys, who might not want to invest in expensive clothes that their children will probably just outgrow quickly anyway. Although the most promising of Tom's efforts, this concept might sound ridiculous. If fictional history is any guide, ...Read More >>>

FEATURES

Accolades

TMC Announces CUSTOMER Product of the Year Awards
CUSTOMER and its parent company, TMC, are proud to announce the Product of the Year Awards. Congratulations to all these distinguished companies.

Ask the Experts

Think Outside the App: A Great Experience Begins With the Customer
Smartphones, tablets, mobile information consumption, and mobile transacting. It's why more businesses are trying to develop the kind of mobile apps they believe their customers want. Yet with an estimated two-thirds of mobile customers needing to interact with a contact center agent at some point in the mobile service experience, there's often an abrupt disconnect.

Success

CFI Group Helps Benz Financial Give Customers a Sweet Ride
Mercedes Benz Financial Services USA, which is the provider of financial services and products to Mercedes Benz dealers and retail customers, didn't want customers for a day or a year. It wanted customers for life. So the institution knew it needed to upgrade its customer feedback program from one that followed a marketing-based approach primarily focused on attracting customers to one more focused on retention and satisfaction.

Deliver

Five Ways to Bring PLM into the Web 3.0 World
Product lifecycle management was born in a world where customers walked into a store to buy and being social meant inviting friends over. While retailing has evolved significantly since the 1980s, PLM has pretty much been stuck in the same groove.

Target

Customer Service Rightshoring: Striking a Balance in an Omnichannel World
There's a lot of talk about contact center rightshoring - and with the discussion comes misperceptions. What is rightshoring, and where does the approach fit in today's complex omnichannel environment?

InfoCision Edit Series

Strengthen Your Message and Build Customer Loyalty by Keeping the Customer at the Heart of Your Big Data Efforts
There's a lot of big buzz about Big Data these days, and with good reason. When applied effectively, data delivers a couple of significant advantages: (1) providing better customer experiences and (2) making customer-care operations more efficient. That's an incredibly powerful one-two punch.

Ask the Experts

Crossing Boundaries for Contact Centers: Knocking Down Geographies and Walls
The benefits of cloud communications are well documented. Faster deployment, future-proof applications, business continuity, predictable monthly payments. When contact centers turn to the cloud, they can also scale easier, support at-home agents, and add multichannel services.

Rethinking Communications

Amazon Mayday - What it Means for Your Contact Center
With today's technologies, customers are increasingly expecting a high level of personalized service, but most businesses simply don't have enough resources to properly support that. And just when you thought expectations were high enough already, along comes Amazon's Mayday button. The Mayday button allows customers to get a live connection to an agent for technical support in 15 seconds or less.

Engage

Is Mobile Part of Your Customer Care Strategy?
We use our mobile devices for every part of our daily lives - from checking the weather for our morning commute, shooting off a quick e-mail response on that proposal, even shopping online for our holiday gifts. There is no question that consumers are understanding and adopting the mobile way-of-life more and more; however, despite this fact, some companies have not properly implemented a customer service strategy that takes full advantage of the emerging mobile lifestyle.

AudioCodes Edit Series

WebRTC and the Contact Center: Like Chocolate and Peanut Butter, the Sum is Sweeter than the Parts
WebRTC - a web technology that would extend the native capabilities of web browsers to enable voice, video and data sharing without separate client or plug-in software - has been getting plenty of attention lately. Evolving under the IETF and W3C standards process, much of the technology leadership comes from a team of developers at Google who see it as a game-changing communication technology. Innovative web-based applications include collaboration systems (like Google Hangouts), distance learning, gaming and more.