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What great customer service really looks like in the energy sector
In the increasingly competitive home energy market, customer service has become one of the most powerful differentiators. With energy prices broadly aligned across suppliers, the real battleground is trust, experience, and care - especially when things go wrong. And...
The WhatsApp Effect: Elevating Customer Service in the Digital Age?
WhatsApp has emerged as a new customer service channel for businesses. While micro businesses have used it extensively, increasingly enterprises are adopting WhatsApp. In this blog we explore the factors driving WhatsApp’s rise in customer service, compare it with...
Breaking Down Silos to Boost Customer Engagement and Drive Growth
In many organisations, silos—where departments like sales, marketing, and customer service operate independently—have become a major barrier to fostering meaningful customer engagement. While each department plays a crucial role in the customer journey, when they work...
Cybersecurity in 2025: How Big Companies Are Fighting Back Against Cybercrime
A game of cat and mouse For large organisations, cybersecurity is a constant battle against an evolving and increasingly sophisticated enemy. Fraudsters and hackers often seem one step ahead, exploiting vulnerabilities that companies are still trying to close. The...
Cybersecurity in 2025: What Consumers Really Think
For the past decade, we have been researching consumer attitudes towards cybersecurity. Through our research with BT, CISOs under the Spotlight, one thing has become clear; concerns are growing, and trust in companies handling personal data is fragile. From financial...
Transform Your Business into a Customer Engagement Powerhouse with the VEVE Framework
Customer engagement is more than just a transaction – it’s about building long-term relationships that foster trust and loyalty. Successful business do not just sell products or services; they create meaningful connections with their customers. But how can companies...
Unlocking mental availability: How to grow your brand in the online delivery market
Chris White and Marcus HickmanMarketing science – especially as identified by industry authorities Byron Sharp and Jenny Romaniuk – shows that to really grow, a brand needs to be easier to access in consumer memory, in more buying situations, and for more consumers....
Pay.UK explores the future of switching current accounts and personal financial services products
Celebrating 10 years of operation this month, Pay.UK’s Current Account Switch Service (CASS) has helped millions of individuals and SMEs derive more value from their current accounts. The recently published CASS report Exploring the future of switching identifies the...
How to make B2B marketing more interesting (and effective)
B2B marketing relies on good content to communicate the values of a brand and set out the business market vision. However, B2B marketing has been described lately as boring, unengaging and lacking creativity. Indeed Tyrona Heath, from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, says...
Consumer awareness of AI technologies
The growth of AI technologies is a hot topic and it’s feeding uncertainty as organisations like OpenAI and DeepMind are continuing to innovate their AI technologies. So what is AI technology? The ONS, whose data is used throughout this blog, currently defines AI...
What’s next for payments in the UK? Two trends for 2023 and beyond
Two trends for the future of payments
Why are larger organisations more likely to embrace home working?
There are multiple questions and uncertainty around the future of home working. Organisations are changing and updating their policies on home working with some insisting staff return to the office and then meeting with employee resistance. Recent data from the ONS...
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...
Video culture: 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? Impact of home working
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...