Weekly Review: 06/19

Happy Friday! Here’s our picks for the best customer service, customer experience, bot and mobile articles of the week, in no particular order.

5 Reasons Why Your Customer Service Should Include Chatbots

It’s an exciting time to be involved the customer service and communications space. There are more ways to interact with a brand than ever before (email, Twitter, even Snapchat), but one of the most new and exciting advancements is chatbots.

Why AI Is Well-Suited for Business Communications

 Business communications have traditionally been person to person—someone answers the phone, sends an email, etc. But in recent years, business communications have started incorporating automation in their IVRs, live chats and call routing. In fact, 53.6% of contact centers today use IVRs. However, some businesses have moved beyond using automation in their business communications—they’re using […]

5 Lessons Learned from Customer Service Failures

This guest post is written by Erica Strother Marois, the Community Specialist at ICMI.  We’ve all been on the receiving end of poor customer service. Long wait times, annoying IVRs, unforgiving return policies, and a lack of channel options can all be maddening. And inevitably, these frustrations spill over to the front line employees. Customer service […]

Year End Review: Customer Service Trends in 2015 and Beyond

As we look back on 2015, it’s tempting to refer to that age-old adage: “The more things change, the more things stay the same.” This year, that couldn’t be further from the truth. That’s because 2015 was the year the technology really made its presence known in customer service. Automation, artificial intelligence, social media, CRM […]

What Can You Do to Kickstart Your Self-Service?

Today’s customer service is becoming increasingly digital—35% of interactions now take place on digital channels. In response, more and more businesses are providing support across a variety of digital channels, including but not limited to SMS, social media, and web chat. And while the use of these channels is growing rapidly, the use of digital self-service […]

10 Striking Statistics on Self-Service Today

Today’s self-service is becoming more and more prevalent, spreading across channels from  web to voice to text to social. It’s a powerful, flexible form of service that more customers are using and businesses are adopting. In fact, over 50% of businesses today are using self-service, and 64% plan to invest in and extend it to other […]

Self-Service: The Next Channel You Can’t Ignore

Self-service has been around for generations, from the advent of personal shopping in grocery stores to the global presence of ATMs. But it was really in the last quarter century that self-service hit its stride, thanks to the rise of the Internet. Customers can solve their own problems or answer their own questions thanks to […]

Self(ish)-service: How Misused IVR Ruins the Customer Experience

People hate IVR, everything from its automated voice to its endless wait times to its frantic button mashing. In fact, only 13% of consumers think IVR is easy to use. Callers can never be sure if they’ll encounter an effective self-service tool, an ineffective self-service tool, or a call routing system. However, most experiences end the […]