Transversal held its Best Practice in Online Self Service Summit last week, inviting a number of its high profile clients and partners to come along and speak to share their experiences of industry issues around customer contact and of working with Transversal. The Summit took place in Cambridge, Transversal’s home town, at the Corpus Christi College, a part of Cambridge University, and despite the severe weather conditions, had a great turnout with the likes of Tesco, Mycustomer.com and Parcelforce all in attendance.

To view videos of each presentation, visit the following link: http://www.transversal.com/summit2010/

The speakers included our very own Davin Yap, CEO of Transversal, who kicked the day off to a great start by introducing the line-up of guests in store. To begin the day, we heard from Tony Sheehan of Ashridge Business School about Knowledge Management and its changing landscape, Rudi Sellers, the Senior Global Digital Strategy Manager of Barclays who discussed a driving change in self-service and the positive impact Transversal has had on Barclays’ own mybarclaycard website.

We also heard from Anne Marie Forsyth, the CEO of the CCA (Customer Contact Association), who focused on the changing face of customer contact as it evolves and becomes a challenge for the existing model. Brenda Shields, the head of consumer modernization of The Royal Mail then shared her experience of employing self-service strategies using Transversal, by creating “Ask Sarah” to improve their customer’s experiences online which had a massively positive effect and exceeded expectations in reducing costs and calls faster than they had anticipated.

John Rush, the Head of Service Development of the BBC spoke about the BBC’s journey towards self-service, and highlighted Transversal’s core role to aid this move. Transversal’s partner company, Inxmail were also in attendance, with Peter Ziras, the CEO, taking the time to inform all on the key role email marketing currently has to play. Additionally, Catherine Tausney, the Head of HR for Aviva was amongst the speakers, relaying her comical struggle and eventual victory in using a self-service system for Aviva’s internal HR system, and she pointed out in particular how instrumental Transversal’s solutions were in aiding her to do this.

All in all, it was a very successful and insightful event, with Transversal’s VP of Professional Services Heather Richards, running through the top 10 tips for Successful Self-Service Implementations to summarise. We hope all of those that attended enjoyed it as much as we did, and following its success, we are waiting in anticipation until the next one.

Cyber Monday is Christmas come early for many online retailers. In recent years, consumers have chosen the Monday after America’s Thanksgiving to flock online and do as much Christmas shopping as possible.

This year, the pattern continued. According to IBM Coremetrics’ annual Black Friday and Cyber Monday Report, online shopping increased 20% on last year. The search engine Bing has also reported that their traffic shot-up by 40% on last year. Clearly, consumers knew that this was the day to get the best bargains and they weren’t wrong. Huge online retailers such as Amazon.com and Wal-Mart Stores were advertising Cyber Monday deals as soon as the Black Friday (shopping extravaganza in America following Thanksgiving) was over.

However, some online retailers may be wondering why this upsurge in online shopping traffic hasn’t brought them the same amount of joy. One answer may be that online bargain hunters act in the same way as in-store bargain hunters; superficially scanning through bargains picking out those they like – with a buy now, return later mentality. With this in mind usability should be the key for any e-retailer looking to benefit from Cyber Monday. Online shoppers need to be able to browse bargains quickly and easily, if not they will simply move on to a different site that offers similar bargains but in a more convenient way. It is on days such as Cyber Monday that web self-service tools can really play a major part in increasing company bottom lines and making sure potential customers are getting the most out of e-retailing sites.

Cyber Monday has already become a tradition within the online shopping world and will continue to be a bargain hunters dream. However, if e-retailing sites are to continue take full advantage of future Cyber Monday’s they need to make sure they have all the necessary tools in place to ensure success.

It’s all champagne and celebrations at the Transversal headquarters at the moment! Their work with Mothercare has been awarded top prize in the ‘best technology partnership’ category at the prestigious Customer Contact Association Excellence Awards.

This is not the first year Transversal has been recognised for its partnerships; 2010 actually completes the hattrick! In 2008 Transversal’s work with BBC and Capita business services saw it win accolades as did its work with Royal Mail in 2009.

The awards programme at CCA is designed to recognise achievements of individuals and organisations committed to delivering outstanding customer service. Transversals success this year is in recognition for the deployment of web self-service technology at Mothercare encompassing its contact centre, website and in store point of sale terminals.

Transversal worked with Mothercare to develop ‘Ask Carrie’ an innovative virtual help assistant. This enables website users and contact centre agents to ‘ask’ questions using natural language, with relevant answers returned instantly. Customers are currently asking 2,000 questions per day using ‘Ask Carrie’ with only 3.5% of enquires needing to be escalated further. Within the contact centre environment, agents are now able to answer questions quicker and emails are answered promptly.

This accolade clearly shows that the implementation at Mothercare serves as a good model for the retail industry as many outlets across the industry undertake cross platform customer service deployments.