| Online Consumer Reviews Significantly Impact Consumer Purchasing Decisions
Consumer reviews play a major role in the decision to purchase products or services, according to the latest survey from Opinion Research Corporation. Nearly two-thirds (61%) of respondents reported consulting online reviews, blogs and other sources of online customer feedback before purchasing a new product or service, with search engines being the preferred method of conducting the research.
A whopping eighty-three percent of respondents polled indicated that online product evaluations and reviews had at least some level of influence on their purchasing decisions. Seventy percent of respondents said they seek out information online for a particular brand of goods and services, with travel, recreation and leisure at the top of list of services most researched. Though the majority of consumers surveyed said they sought out online reviews, only 32 percent reported posting their own online feedback on product or service experiences.
It is also important for providers to understand the role they can play in controlling how consumers utilize such information, and that consumer feedback can be harnessed to effectively inform decision-making processes.
The report points to Dell's innovative online forum IdeaStorm -- in which customers have offered 8,600 suggestions in a year, voted on them 600,000 times, and left 64,000 comments. The company has thus far implemented at least a dozen ideas as a result.
The survey also found that 38% of respondents first consult online product or service reviews when they began their shopping research and just over a quarter (27%) consult the Internet when they are trying to decide between two or three products or services. Another 21% are at the narrowing down stage to confirm that they are buying the right product or service.
The most researched product and service categories ranked as follows:
- Travel/Recreation/Leisure: 82%
- Electronic goods: 80%
- Household products/services: 66%
- Clothing: 55%
- Automotive: 55%
- Personal care: 40%
- Food: 24%
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Adoption of Self-service by Customers and Contact Center Increase Dramatically
Utilization of self-service in contact centers continues its upward trend and shows little sign of abating. Primarily driven by convenience for customers and cost savings for contact center, self-service has become a firmly established channel.
According to the 2008 Datacraft / Dimension Data Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report, 31% of all inbound transactions are completed on a self-service channel. Highest among these is Interactive Voice Response (IVR) self-service (15.5%), followed by Web self-service (13.7%), with speech self-service and Web co-browsing making up the balance.
Ten years ago, 90% of all inbound transactions were completed by a human agent. Today, human agent transactions only account for just over 50% of all inbound transactions.
However, contact centers still have a way to go in order to leverage the cost benefits of self-service. The cost of getting it wrong is significantly higher than the cost of getting it right. It requires a paradigm shift when making decisions to implement a self-service application. Customer expectations, increased complexity of inquiries, and highly dynamic environments are just some of the considerations that impact a successful self-service offering.
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Unified Communications: Lifeblood of the Contact Center
In a new study exploring unified communications in the contact center, Aberdeen Group examines the business reasons for adoption of unified communications, the relationship between unified communications and customer satisfaction, customer retention and year-over-year change in customer satisfaction, and how Best-in-Class usage of unified communications have provided business, business process benefits and operational efficiencies.
Unified communications must revolve around the needs of the business -- finding the right business process to UC-enable, and finding the right return on investment for the right departments. A small number -- 23% -- have some form of unified communications implemented but an astounding 50% of customers surveyed are or will be evaluating unified communications in the next eighteen months.
The report demonstrates a direct correlation between implementation of unified communications by Best-in-Class customers and the performance in three critical customer-facing performance measures: customer satisfaction, customer retention and year-over-year change in customer satisfaction.
End-user customer feedback has indicated that customers have already invested millions in existing telephony and VoIP technologies to support the contact center, and intelligent unified communications investment needs to complement and extend this existing investment. These same customers also demonstrate the high level of confusion as to exactly what unified communications is and what each of the software vendors label their collection of technologies.
The required actions for companies seeking to gain the most benefit from their implementation of unified communications include a commitment to identify the right business processes to UC-enable, implement policies and procedures designed to maximize effectiveness and efficiency of these cross-departmental business processes, establish a contact center unified communications strategy and approach, and implement metrics to monitor and measure contact center performance.
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