In NelsonHall’s 2017 report, ‘Multi-Channel CMS – Delivering Digital Customer Experience’, I forecast that the chat channel, in all its forms, would become 18% of the global CX services outsourcing market by 2020, growing by 30% CAGR. What fuels this sizable growth are the many benefits to brands offering sales and support over text channels, the advancement o[...]

This month, Capgemini is launching a new version of its omnichannel cloud platform, Odigo™. I interviewed Erwan Le Duff, Head of Prosodie-Capgemini, about the new platform features, the evolution of self-service, and the future of customer experience. Below is a video of highlights from the interview, followed by a brief introduction to Odigo and a full transcript of the interview.  [...]

The traditional (and now universally accepted as outdated) model for multi-channel support looked something like this, with differences primarily between the types or number of channels: However, as customers became digital and mobile, the model has shifted to something like this: This model originated with marketers and retailers, where omnichannel means the ability to purchase in t[...]

HCL has undertaken ~200 use cases spanning finance & accounting, contact, product support and cross-industry customer onboarding, and claims processing, using products including Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, UiPath, WorkFusion, and HCL’s proprietary AI tool Exacto. This blog summarizes NelsonHall’s analysis of HCL's approach to Business Process Automation coveri[...]

The idea that the future model of customer experience includes a high level of automation is already widespread. A whole ecosystem of developers and vendors is catering to an emerging mass market of bots and virtual assistants. And users and brands are discovering more applications of automated support over text and voice as bot libraries grow rapidly. While the learning curve for users is [...]

NelsonHall’s latest Customer Management Services market analysis report, ‘Targeting CMS in High Tech’, identifies the need for increased customer service quality as the number one market driver. This is followed closely by cost reduction in second place, with increased revenue generation (through subscription sales, renewals, and paid-for technical support) third. The report a[...]

The biggest advantage of automation in CMS has been the ability to simplify, optimize and remove redundant workflow steps in the contact centers’ internal processes with the goal of improving the customer experience, and an end-game for vendors of increasing the number of value-add projects with their clients. Wipro’s Marvel CX is aiming to do exactly that. Marvel CX’s compone[...]

I recently presented at the CCA’s annual Convention in Glasgow, Scotland. One of the key themes was ‘The Digital Game’, with sessions examining how organizations are responding to demand for digital customer services as part of the ongoing transition from call to contact centers. The future of customer engagement was illustrated using examples of newer channel usage, including vi[...]

Since the first customer and marketing databases in the 80s, to the fully-fledged CRM platforms of the 90s, to the cloud-based CRMs of the 00s and the Social CRM of the 2010s, CRM platforms have had the same goal and challenge – to successfully match customers with companies. With the proliferation of more channels, and changing customer expectations for effortless and real-time interaction,[...]

Over the last few years, social media has gradually achieved a small, but highly significant place within customer care and sales channels. CMS providers jumped to provide solutions as early as 2010-2011, but not until recently have these solutions reached a maturity level that has enabled them to go beyond simple monitoring of comments, posts and tweets. Aegis developed its proprietary social [...]

The future of contact centers is in automation, self-learning AI, support for IoT, and engaging customers and agents at a new level. These were the major themes at the fourth annual Customer Engagement Summit in London on November 26th. Close to 700 delegates and 60 speakers met to compare notes and listen to success stories in robotics implementations, results driven by analytics, and connecting [...]

Two common themes in the marketing collateral of vendors providing Customer Management Services (CMS) are the use of analytics and transformation.  For analytics, a popular claim is the use of big data for predictive modeling within contact centers. But is it really happening? The reality is that, while certain vendors are using data for simple predictive modeling, this is still a distinct[...]

During a recent visit to London I had the opportunity to visit the HGS contact center in Chiswick. The 500-seat center is focused on supporting accounts with broad language capability needs and it also provides specialist client programs beyond traditional customer care support. The industry sectors supported from the center include automotive, consumer packaged goods (CPG), government, and health[...]

Work at home agent (WAHA) CMS BPO specialist Arise Virtual Solutions announced this week it is hiring 6,500 WAHAs (who will be equivalent to 3,250 FTEs) across Arizona, North Carolina, Texas, Michigan and Virginia. This marks a turnaround for Arise after what was a difficult 2013 marked by loss of volume in some key contracts and delays in new signings. These hires will represent a 26% increase[...]

NelsonHall recently attended a briefing with BT in which it launched MeetMe with Dobly Voice, into its audio conferencing service. BT MeetMe with Dolby Voice aims to improve the ease of conferencing calls by: Improving the audio quality – audio will use a high quality Dolby codec ‘of reasonably similar size’ to competing conferencing systems Voice Separation &[...]