The customer service industry is blessed with a large and engaged community. Keep up with trends and best practices by following these top 16 analysts!

1. Top 16 Analysts
Covering Customer
Experience

2. “The customer service industry is blessed with a large and engaged
community. Just by following their blogs and tweets, you’ll get
tremendous insight into the latest best practices, stats and trends!
Shai Berger
Co-Founder & CEO, Fonolo

3. Congratulations to the 16
who were selected!
1. Bruce Temkin
2. Ed Thompson
3. Elizabeth Herrell
4. Esteban Kolsky
5. Harley Manning
6. Jim Davies
7. Kate Leggett
8. Megan Burns
9. Natalie Petouhoff
10. Omer Minkara
11. Paul Haggen
12. Peter Ryan
13. Richard Snow
14. Sarah Reed
15. Sheryl Kingstone
16. Sumair Dutta
* Listed in alphabetical order

4. Bruce Temkin
“Driven by a shift in
technology capabilities and
consumer behavior, leading
companies are refocusing
the primary purpose of
contact centers from
handling individual calls to
building customer loyalty.
These changes will morph
contact centers into what
I’ve called Relationship
Hubs.
Managing Partner, Temkin Group
Focus: Customer experience
Recommended Reading:
• Customer Experience = Success + Effort + Emotion
• 14 Customer Experience Trends for 2014
Blog

5. Ed Thompson
“Social media adoption can
take several paths to CRM.
However, more than 80%
of organizations follow a
common pattern.VP and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner Research
Focus: CRM strategy and implementation,
customer experience management
Recommended Reading:
• What’s New with CRM, Social CRM and CEM?
• The CRM Team Perspective on Social in 2015 (Subscribers Only)
Blog

6. Elizabeth Herrell
“Despite the growing
complexity of channels,
customers demand
simplicity in their
experiences. This
customer-centric cohesion
requires a new paradigm in
user experience. Get ready
to make the shift as the
front office comes to the
back office to form a new
engagement strategy.
President, Communication Initiatives
Focus: Unified and social communications, contact
centers, customer experience.
Recommended Reading:
• Why Speech Analytics Improve Customer Care (Membership Required)
• Social Communities Spur Innovative Customer Support
Blog

7. Esteban Kolsky
“Chat has had a love-hate
relationship in the contact
center since its early days in
the late 1990s. Early on
touted as the replacement for
the telephone (with many
advantages over it) due to
the low-latency nature of its
operations, chat has
succeeded (few times) and
failed along the myriad
electronic channels we
brought along to form a
contact center.
Independent Analyst
Focus: Customer experience, CRM, social media
Recommended Reading:
• Fixing The Suckiness of Predictive Analytics
• The Silent Rise Of Chat in Customer Service Adoption
Blog

8. Replace hold-time with a call-back
on all channels.
In-Call Rescue Mobile Rescue Web Rescue
Call-Back Software for the Call Center

9. Harley Manning
“Ultimately, Forrester covers
customer experience not
because it’s a “feel good”
topic but because it’s the
best way we know to retain
customers, get that next
sale, and win new
customers.
VP, Research Director, Forrester Research
Focus: Customer experience practice
Recommended Reading:
• What Customer Experience Professionals Need to Know About the Customer Life Cycle
(Subscription Required)
• The Path to Customer Experience Differentiation
Blog

10. Jim Davies
“VoC is now being viewed as a
must-have strategy… the
focus on understanding
customers by listening to them
and using that understanding
to market differently, sell
differently, support
differently… a lot of companies
are now realizing they can’t
really differentiate by
traditional means, but really
understanding the customer
can help them to do that.
Research Director, Gartner
Focus: CRM
Recommended Reading:
• VoC: Voice of the Customer? Very Often Confused!
• The Impact of VoC on Digital Commerce (Subscribers Only)
Blog

11. Kate Leggett
“Customers are using more
communication channels
for customer service than
ever before. They are also
contacting customer
service organizations more
frequently. Companies are
rising to this challenge as
overall satisfaction with the
quality of service over all
communication channels is
trending upwards
VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Focus: Customer Service: trends, research, and
technology
Recommended Reading:
• Customer Service Channel Usage Highlights the Importance of Good Self-Service
• Forrester's Top Trends for Customer Service in 2015
Blog

12. Megan Burns
“I think of CX as the 'eat
healthy and exercise' of the
business world. Everyone
buys-in to the idea of
treating customers well, at
least in public. What they
don’t do is change their
behavior or encourage
change in the people who
work for them.
VP & Principal Analyst, Customer Experience,
Forrester Research
Focus: UC, call center, SIP, VoIP
Recommended Reading:
• Getting Executives Engaged in the CX Transformation
• Want Better Customer Experiences? Adopt the Six Disciplines of CX Maturity
Blog

13. Natalie Petouhoff
“Traditional viewpoints of
the customer via marketing,
sales, service and support,
and commerce are
collapsing…. Customers
expect an organization to
act as one entity and their
front office experiences to
match other experiences
regardless of touch point.
Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation
Research, Inc.
Focus: Customer service, CRM, contact centers
Recommended Reading:
• What You Don’t Know About APIs Could Hurt Your Ability to Deliver Great Customer Experiences
• The State of Customer Service and Support in 2015
Blog

14. Ring! A happy caller is
connected.
Customer dials in, hears
option to “Press 1 for a
call-back.”
Customer relaxes while
Fonolo waits on hold.
Fonolo’s cloud-based solution easily hooks into your existing call center
infrastructure, with minimal impact to your business processes.
Adding Call-Backs the Easy Way

15. Omer Minkara
“The average number of
channels companies use to
interact with customers has
changed from five in 2012
to six in 2013 to nine in
2014. This validates that
the value in emerging
channels is not a myth, but
a reality – one that contact
centers must address.
Research Director, Contact Center & Customer
Experience Management, Aberdeen Group
Focus: Customer experience across multiple
interaction channels (e.g. social, mobile, web)
Recommended Reading:
• Engineering Continued Success in Omni-Channel Customer Care: Keep An Eye Out for Emerging
Channels
• Answering the ROI Question for Customer Experience Management
Blog

16. Paul Haggen
“An effective way to ensure
that experiences meet
customers' needs is to
bring customers and
frontline employees into the
design process through co-
creation. When they are
face-to-face with a design
team, customers can
provide … firsthand
accounts of what they want
and seeds of ideas to build
upon...
Senior Principal; Head of Customer Experience &
Innovation Strategy, Forrester Research
Focus: Customer experience strategy,
organizational culture, leadership structures
Recommended Reading:
• Why Behavioral Economics for Customer Experience? (Free Registration)
• How Three B2B Firms Measure Customer Experience (Membership Required)
Blog

17. Peter Ryan
“Contact center outsourcers
interested in targeting
laggard e-commerce
markets such as Canada
should look at the evolution
of countries in which online
shopping and associated
multichannel consumer
support are more common
(such as the UK or the US).
Principal Analyst, Ovum
Focus: Business process outsourcing, offshore
contact center delivery, social media outsourcing
Recommended Reading:
• The Retail Sector Offers Opportunities for CRM Outsourcers
• Canadian Multi-Channel Growth Spells an Opportunity for CRM Outsourcers
Blog

18. Richard Snow
“Organizations must
consider systems that help
them build smart mobile
apps that can automatically
connect to a contact center
agent at the click of a
button without losing the
context of what the
customers was doing in the
app.
Global VP & Research Director (Customer and
Contact Center), Ventana Research
Focus: Customer experience management, voice
of the customer programs, experience design
Recommended Reading:
• Research Agenda: Customer Technology for 2015
• Technology Requirements for Providing an EPIC Customer Experience
Blog

19. Fonolo Success Story
“We were able to deploy Fonolo in just
15 days…we saw an immediate
impact on our abandonment rate…
on our busiest days it was
down 33%.”
Watch the video: Read the case study:

20. Sarah Reed
“Customer service can be
complicated! It doesn’t
matter if you support two or
ten channels, or have two
or ten locations; the
challenges facing most
contact centers are
considerable. And – the
complexity intensifies as
we expand the mix of
customers, channels, and
sites we support.
Senior Manager, Deloitte Services LP
Focus: Offshore outsourcing, customer experience,
contact center management
Recommended Reading:
• The Drivers of Today's Customer Experience (Infographic)
• The Mobile Customer Service Marathon

21. Sheryl Kingstone
“It's about the interaction,
not just the next best offer.
With technologies like
Bluetooth Smart, entire
shopping lists can be
delivered on-demand
based on a particular
grocery store and lists can
be dynamically organized
based on in-store location.
Director, Yankee Group/451 Research
Focus: Customer experience strategies, cross-
channel communications, mobile experiences
Recommended Reading:
• Bluetooth Smart and New Technology for Immersive Customer Experiences
• NICE Systems' Analytics Platform Visualizes the Customer 'Journey' (Registration Required)
Blog

22. Sumair Dutta
“The traditional driver for
self-service investments
was cost elimination and
the reduction of the burden
on the service organization.
Now, there is the
realization that customers
often resort to self-service
channels as a first attempt.
Chief Customer Officer, The Service Council
Focus: WFM, customer service contact centers,
multi-channel support, social support, mobility
Recommended Reading:
• Getting More with Self-Service
• The Service Leader’s Checklist When Leading a Business Transformation

23. 10 Growing
Customer Service
Trends for 2015
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