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Category Archives: Eric Head
Making Contact: Contact Centers Customers are Highly Satisfied
While a company’s contact center isn’t typically the first choice for engaging with a company, it still remains an important part in fostering the customer relationship. Today, ForeSee released its annual Contact Center Benchmark that affords company leaders an opportunity to determine how their centers stack up against industry averages. This year, the average customer satisfaction score for contact centers is 80 on ForeSee’s 100-point scale, ranging from 61 to 94, meaning – in general – contact centers customers are highly satisfied. For benchmark purposes we compared likely future behaviors of highly-satisfied contact center customers (those with satisfaction of 80 … Continue reading
Posted by Eric Head
Tagged Benchmarking, Customer Satisfaction, ForeSee News, ForeSee Solutions
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Siteshowing: Defying the Norm…or Defining the New Norm
Every once in a while I come a across a situation where I can’t decide if it’s completely brilliant or utterly insane. Such is the case with Bonobos. With a pure play online clothing retailer such as Bonobos, the retailer runs the risk of having site visitors wishing they could try on the clothes before punching in their credit card number. Unable to do so, they find what they want on the retailer’s site, log off, and head to the closest department store (Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Target, etc.) where they can discover similar styles (by other brands) to what they … Continue reading
Can Predictive Analytics Help Retailers Dodge a J.C. Penney-Style Debacle?
Barbara Thau of Forbes Magazine has a column today about how ForeSee’s predictive analytics help retailers like Perry Ellis, NFLShop.com, and Hickory Farms improve the customer experience and, as a result, the bottom line. The three examples highlighted in this article are just a few of the hundreds of retailers we work with across channels and around the world. An excerpt from the article: . . . retailers are increasingly turning to ForeSee for its predictive analytics capabilities. The company conducts customer satisfaction surveys for retailers, the results of which are fed into ForeSee’s statistical engine to forecast what changes … Continue reading
Posted by Eric Head
Tagged Customer Experience Analytics, ForeSee News, ForeSee Solutions
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Showrooming: Browsing Fees? Really?
So…when did window shopping become a crime punishable by a fine? I’m happy to pay a cover charge at the corner bar to experience a good local band, or at a museum to experience fine art. But to pay $5 just to enter my local grocery or electronics store is where I draw the line. Unfortunately, that is what some business owners are charging people as they enter their stores. Apparently this “just looking,” or browsing, fee will theoretically combat showrooming – when customers come to the store (the “showroom”) to look at the merchandise in person but then shop … Continue reading
Showrooming: Not as Bad as You Think
In today’s multi-channel, multi-device world, company leaders need to consider that a customer’s store experience can affect other channels in the company and vice versa. For example, over the last few years the term “showrooming” has become a popular industry buzz word. Showrooming simply means that some customers are coming to the store to look at the merchandise in person (the “showroom”) but then shopping online (often via mobile) to get a better price through a competitor. Sound perilous? Our research shows that showrooming isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Although almost a quarter of store purchasers measured reported using their … Continue reading
Posted by Eric Head
Tagged ForeSee Solutions, Mobile, Mobile Monday, Multichannel, Original Research, showrooming
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Happy Satisfaction to All, and to All…Truly Loyal Customers
Before Thanksgiving, Jeff Haden answered a reader’s question in a great Inc. article, “How to Cultivate Truly Loyal Customers.” It’s great article in a lot of ways but mostly because he uses an excerpt from the book, Managing Forward: How to Move from Measuring the Past to Managing the Future by Larry Freed, our president and CEO at ForeSee, that outlines the four basic forms of customer loyalty: Purchased, Convenience, Restricted, and True. True loyalty through customer satisfaction is what all companies should strive to earn regardless of what industry they’re in or whether they are multi-channel (web, mobile, store, … Continue reading
Don’t Let Deal Junkies Decide Your Fate
In an Associated Press article that ran in the Bangor Daily News, the headline asks the question: Can retailers wean shoppers off bargains? Before I answer that question let’s take a step back. The article talks about how “deal junkies” are forcing some pretty large and well-known retail chain stores to consider an everyday low pricing model, much like Walmart. This reinforces the point I was trying to make in my last post. We consistently find that for most retailers price is not the highest priority item. In ForeSee’s E-Retail Satisfaction Index: 2012 Top-100 Spring Edition, price is the highest … Continue reading
Posted by Eric Head
Tagged Customer Satisfaction, ForeSee Solutions, Multichannel, Original Research
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Not Buying It
Flying back from a client visit recently, I came across an article that really demonstrated the importance of understanding the true drivers of customer experience. Retail in general is a very competitive landscape right now. The margin of error is very, very small, yet some companies just don’t understand how important the customer experience is to their current and future success. In the article, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Kavita Kumar, writes about how J.C. Penney’s recent stumble is…(gulp)… driving customers to competitors. With big names at its helm (like CEO Ron Johnson, formerly of Apple and Target), Penney’s is trying … Continue reading
Posted by Eric Head
Tagged Customer Satisfaction, ForeSee Solutions, Multichannel, Original Research
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Measuring Your B2B Website is Only Half the Battle
When I read Larry Freed’s post about the 2012 ForeSee B2B Benchmark it led me to think about what an enormous impact a B2B’s website performance (or lack thereof) can actually have on the business’ contact center. You might not think that two very separate channels could directly affect each other and a company’s bottom line in very distinct ways. But they do. When I look at B2Bs, one of the things I find interesting about them is the fact that there is not as much freedom of choice as there is in the regular retail world where you might have … Continue reading
Posted by Eric Head
Tagged B2B, Benchmarking, Customer Satisfaction, ForeSee Solutions, Multichannel
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It’s 2012. Do You Know Where Your Customers Are?
Retailers, how many devices are your customers using to interact with you? Today, the website, store, contact center, Facebook page, iPad app, mobile website, and more are influencing your customers — often at different stages of the purchasing lifecycle, and sometimes more than one at a time. What’s harder to figure out is where customers go first and why: where they decide to research as compared to where they decide to buy; and where they comparison shop (sometimes it’s in the aisles of your stores, mobile phone in hand!). Today’s consumers can (and often do) become shoppers at any time … Continue reading
