I was able to accompany our communication sales director, Sam Heiney, up to Seattle this week to the Annual Call Center Exhibition. It was our first time attending this show – we wanted to get a better understanding of who was in attendance and exhibiting and have some conversations with other vendors. I think Sam and I both increased our awareness of the issues facing contact centers, the technological solutions currently available, and how Live Guide could be a valuable addition to a contact center environment as a best-of-breed chat and remote control solution.

At Tuesday’s keynote, both Tim Rondeau of Activision and David Kellogg of Salesorce.com, were singing the praises of online chat as a customer service channel. David, Salesforce’s SVP and GM of the Service Cloud, echoed what we’ve seen in watching trends in chat utilization when he predicted that the use of chat would double by 2014. Actually, since the use of chat nearly doubled between 2009 to 2011 – from 19% of all consumers to 37% – this is likely a conservative estimate of growth. Read More >

One key to great customer service is connecting customers with the right person to answer their question the first time.  This recently got easier at Netop with the addition of a form preview capability in Live Guide, our live chat support tool.  When a customer requests support through live chat, we have them fill in some basic information in a simple online form. Read More >

E-commerce professionals flocked to Earls Court throughout last week for Internet World, Europe’s largest event for digital business. Celebrating its 20th year in 2012, the show is one of the longest running in the industry.

As part of this event, I was asked to give a presentation on strategies for improving online customer experience and sales. Key to this is real-time interaction on your website, a step that very few companies have taken, according to our recent UK research project. Read More >