Whether it’s deploying machine learning to write a new Friends script, applying the power of IBM’s Watson supercomputer to create an entire trailer for a movie, or Sony putting it’s software to work to generate a new song in the style of The Beatles 2016 has certainly been the year when Artificial Intelligence placed itself firmly on the agenda.

It’s practically unthinkable that only a few years ago, customer service was viewed by the majority as little more than back-office business administration. Thankfully, times have changed.

Bright report reveals how UK industries perform when it comes to customer service.

Today, investment company Old Mutual Wealth, was announced as one of the top 25% performers in Europe’s leading bespoke customer service benchmarking survey, Bright Index.

Last week’s news that WhatsApp was updating its privacy policy caused an inevitable privacy backlash, particularly as it became clear that the changes would in effect enable WhatsApp’s owner Facebook to harvest user data for improved targeting.

When US industry group Interactions sampled some 1,300 customers online earlier this year, only 3% said they actually liked using IVR services when contacting organisations.

The Power of Three - Introducing the Bright Link

Christine Howard joins the Bright team as one of our new client relationship managers.

The backbone of a solid customer experience strategy lies within the survey tools in place. The best way of finding out what your customers think is simply by asking them.

It was great to see Avaya again positioned as a Leader in the new 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Centre Infrastructure announced at the start of this month.

What is on the horizon? Given that contact centre forecasting disciplines have been in place for the last 25 years, it’s probably fair to say that it’s an area where innovation has been slow to take hold.

For the last couple of years we’ve been highlighting the potential of WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) - the Google-owned open source project that effectively turns the Web into a powerful open communication platform.

For companies with medium to large customer service operations, and in particular those that utilise call centres to respond to queries from existing customers and facilitate the conversion of initial enquiries from potential customers, the ‘voice of the customer’ (VOC) is crucial.

We are all aware that providing a great customer experience should be the cornerstone of commercial common sense right? I mean who worth their salt doesn’t?

Having attended Nuance’s annual Customer Experience Summit in London earlier this week, it’s clear that self-service automation is making real inroads.

With the announcement today that HSBC will be rolling out voice and fingerprint biometric verification for its 15 million plus mobile banking customers, it’s pretty clear that biometrics technology is now going mainstream in the UK.

Well, as I sit here and reflect on our Disrupt event a week on, I can only settle on one word...WOW! 

A cloud on the industry horizon - survey fatigue

With so many different technologies and opportunities available, it’s often daunting for contact centre management to determine exactly what to do next to improve customer experience.

In this interview Simon Thorpe meets some of the management team and explores how real-time feedback can help drive both agent and customer satisfaction.

Early encounters with speech analytics transcriptions might quickly lead you to the conclusion that this technology isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.