The British high street is not dead. There, I’ve said it. Yes, Debenhams and the Arcadia Group stores are closing. Yes, the pandemic has put high street stores under immense pressure. But I don’t think this is the end of our town and city centres. I think this is an opportunity to transform the retail industry and start afresh. We need to start by rethinking our approach to customer experience (CX).

Any kind of meaningful transformation takes effort and focus. Transforming your customer experience through a cloud migration is no different.

Unless you know what problems you’re trying to solve with the cloud, you may not see the contact centre transformation you had hoped for. But once you have a plan, the sky’s the limit.

You may have heard there’s a new kid on the block. At Google Next 2020, Google Cloud have introduced “Dialogflow CX” and the DVELP team have been having some fun experimenting with this new bot-building tool. We’re now ready to share our initial thoughts on what Dialogflow CX could offer our clients.

In our season finale, Aileen Allkins, CEO and Founder of Aileen Allkins Consultancy (AAC) joins the pod booth to discuss whether the Customer Service Industry is on the precipice of a paradigm shift in the way they operate or whether businesses will go back to the way they were

Language has been our default way of communicating for around 150,000 years.

Delivering such a high-quality customer experience approach at scale – one that’s consistent across both digital and physical engagement channels – has always been challenging. That’s where Service Cloud Voice fits in, allowing you to integrate your enterprise voice telephony into Salesforce CRM.

Take your first step towards a digital voice channel. Intent Capture and Analysis (IC&A) uses Google Cloud’s Contact Centre AI to uncover reasons for calls into the contact centre. By capturing customers intents and categorising the reasons for calling, you build rich insights to help support business decisions.

As you’d expect, Google Cloud’s contact centre solutions include some of the best automation and AI tools out there.

• 3-year services agreement to support and optimise core contact centre and workforce optimisation solutions

How to get your teams working together and feeling better.

Senior CX leader Kate Thornton shares her experiences of working on the ‘front line’ and the benefits of properly involving your staff when innovating and problem-solving.

If you haven’t tried speech analytics yet and don’t know where to start, this article is for you. I’m going to share my experiences and tops tips for setting up a speech analytics programme. I’ll also show you how to get the most out of speech analytics to support teams across your business.

How to make your automation and AI process smoother.

Using the cloud to power your CX is just the beginning of the story. The rest is written by you and your team.

Sabio to deploy Genesys Cloud Customer Experience platform

In a recent ‘FinTech Finance Virtual Arena’ episode, Barry Webb of BGL Group and I discussed digital customer experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. More importantly, how the insurance industry has adjusted to the new digital environment focusing on customer experience.

One of the online panels at this year’s ‘Future of Utilities Summit’ focused on the shape of things to come for customer experiences, and I was pleased to be invited to discuss this with Eileen Brown (Customer Experience Director at Northern Gas Networks), Mark Royle (Chief Executive Officer at Zebra Power) and our moderator Sarah Lockett.

Tis the season of gift-giving – and returning. January sees retailers flooded by returns as consumers send back unwanted gifts and regret those sales bargains. The cost to shops of this activity is huge. But there are some simple things retailers can do to support customers and reduce returns.

Find out what customer experience or ‘CX’ is and why it matters. Discover how to improve customer experience to benefit both your business and your clients.

A customer experience strategy is vital to help businesses navigate both the good times and the bad. It’s your plan of action to help you focus on your priorities and deal with issues when they arise. Find out everything you need to know about customer experience strategy.