Our blog
The increasing impact of AI on European contact centres
The latest 2022 Odigo-Davies Hickman tracking research, involving 1,035 European business leaders, explores the impact of 11 different applications of artificial intelligence for customer experience (AI for CX) across Belgium/Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and...
15 seconds delivers connectivity, community, relatability & learning
What next for video culture?As early as 2002, and before phone streaming, The Henley Centre publicised an emerging shift in the way people receive information - away from the written word and towards the audible-visual word or video. Having recently hit the...
More cash in our pockets, will we ever be a cashless society?
The restrictions necessitated by the pandemic precipitated a rise in the use of cards and mobile wallets while the accompanying decline in the use of cash for transactions has led to questions about its future. Adoption of credit cards initially slow By repeating the...
What the latest Service Excellence standard BS ISO 23592 tells you
Service excellence aims to create exceptional value for organisations’ stakeholders and provide customers with outstanding levels of customer service. Service excellence can be achieved by going beyond satisfying customers’ expectations. It is reached by offering...
Shopping apps in 2021: Is customer support improving?
A year on from our initial research into shopping apps and their usability, Davies Hickman has revisited the 30 apps in our 2020 study to reveal whether any improvements have been implemented to make the customer experience more enjoyable and the process easier to...
If you could live an extra hour a day, how would you spend it?
It comes as no surprise that the COVID-19 crisis has precipitated a revolutionary change in how we live our day-to-day life. Time that people previously spent commuting to work, gathering with friends and family, going out for dinner came to an immediate halt after...
How are European businesses investing in AI-based NLP technologies to improve CX?
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) rapidly develops, the value of AI technologies, specifically natural language processing (NLP), in improving customer experience (CX) has attracted businesses’ attention. Through Smart Speakers consumers now have some trust in these...
How mobile banking apps can meet customers’ needs
It is evident that the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of fintechs have increased the number of traditional banks shifting towards digitalisation. As mobile banking apps become more popular, Davies Hickman has researched 20 mobile banking apps, including fintech and...
Consumers, one year on
How Google Search reflects the change in consumer priorities during the Covid restrictionsCovid has not only precipitated a revolutionary change in day-to-day living, it’s also demolished traditional working practices. While consumers’ adaptations to this new lockdown...
Customer insights for thought leadership
Thought leaders are the informed opinion leaders and go-to people in their field of expertise, inspiring others with innovative ideas. Brand thought leadership is the informed opinions of an enterprise. The enterprise will have the ability to scale their vision to...
Applying Mental Availability for B2B marketing success: Do buyers think about your brand?
Chris White and Marcus Hickman The mental availability of B2B brands in buyers’ minds is critical to drive business growth. Understanding how your B2B brand relates to the needs and context of buyers compared to your competitors is vital and enables you to...
WFH – is video conferencing enough?
For ten years we’ve been researching and tracking office workers’ use of video conferencing and chat. Now it has become synonymous with the new working from home (WFH) practices that Covid-19 has forced many to adopt. Editorials have been written in praise of video, although doubts about its role remain for some. In the past, remote…
Market research in business – social media
We are constantly reminded that we live in a networked world with the twenty-first century being hailed as the Networked Age. However, in The Square and the Tower Niall Ferguson argues that social networks are nothing new. He characterises the network outsider as suspicious of a world controlled by powerful and exclusive networks…
What’s your view on taking loyalty penalties public?
It’s no secret that customers don’t trust organisations the way they used to. In customer research, we often see over-simplified questions about trust, yet questions about loyalty, particularly loyalty penalties, feature less often. Is this because businesses are too nervous to ask, as they might not like the answers?
Recruiting and supporting Customer Service Managers, with no industry experience
Whilst it is increasingly recognised that frontline customer-facing employees are responsible for delivering an organisation’s strategy, the development programmes designed for frontline customer service management have often failed to deliver the improvements
Do consumers prefer text-activated or voice-activated chatbots?
When we talk about ‘chatbots’, we often conflate two different things: text-activated and voice-activated bots. It sounds trite to point out that they are, in fact, very different! Indeed, it’s rare to find a bot that can be activated by text and voice. So, given the...
What the latest Contact Centre Standard BS EN ISO 18295 tells you
Customer contact centres (CCCs) have an important role in the interaction between organizations and their customers. They vary in their levels of service quality and consumer protection, and work to many different levels of efficiency. BS EN ISO 18295-1 Customer...
6 steps – how thought leadership can energise B2B content marketing
We define thought leadership as research that has original insights which challenge industry thinking. Thought leadership is a catalyst to new strategies and whilst it benefits from the rise of content marketing it is also being challenged by it. The distinction...
Understanding data and statistics: six pieces of guidance
For those who are loyal listeners to Tim Harford’s More or Less programme on Radio 4, Professor David Spiegelhalter will be a familiar name. He is often interviewed to help listeners make sense of controversial or contradictory statistical results. In a similar field,...
Why is customer service more popular than ever?
The promise of digital transformation was automation, simplification and reduced demand failure. Implicitly, and often explicitly, there has been a related prize for organisations providing products and services – that of less need for expensive, people resourced,...