Interesting Snippets

IPsoft’s Eliza, a “virtual service-desk employee” that learns on the job and can reply to e-mail, answer phone calls and hold conversations, is being tested by several multinationals. At one American media giant she is answering 62,000 calls a month from the firm’s information-technology staff. She is able to solve two out of three of the problems without human help.

Lowe’s is deploying approximately 42,000 iPhones … By replacing scanner guns with iPhones, Lowe’s hopes to make it easier for store associates to answer customers’ questions and, eventually, complete purchases.

“The iPhone’s will allow our employees to check inventory availability, access how-to videos and use Lowes.com in the aisles …
Several retailers are arming store associates with mobile devices, including Lowe’s competitor Home Depot, which started giving employees handheld Motorola devices last year.

Google has invested heavily in building an organization that can address calls from 60 countries around the world. The company has more than 1,000 Google-employed customer service people divided between email and phone support. The phone reps are now handling “more than 10,000 calls a week,” … roughly 20% of calls are from new advertisers

On a normal day, AT&T has 10,000 mentions on social networks, but during stressful moments they rise precipitously. The marketer is out to calm those twit storms by staffing up its social-media customer-care corps…. The team began with five people dedicated to responding to customer dissatisfaction on Twitter and YouTube and has since moved on to Facebook and grown to 19 people. To date, 47% of people reached on social media respond to the social team, which results in 32,000 service tickets per month.