Customer Service

• Most Topular Stories

• How to Build a Better Mouse Trap

  The Squawk Point: Service Improvement

  James Lawther

  7 Feb 2012 | 3:36 pm

  Imagine the situation.  You run a pizza store and you are losing money.  Your raw material costs are far more than they should be.  You jump to the most obvious conclusion: Somebody must be stealing the cheese.  (Either that or you have king sized mice wondering about). After spending a lot of money on an expensive cheese alarm and CCTV system it becomes abundantly clear that nobody is smuggling cheese out of the back door.  And you didn’t spot any big mice either. There is an analytical solution to the problem.  It is called M.E.C.E. (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive).

• Why complicate life? - KISS!

  THE PROPERIST

  3 Feb 2012 | 8:46 am

  Permalink | Leave a comment  »

• Super Every Day

  The Think Zone

  5 Feb 2012 | 12:07 pm

  No matter who is the champion of whatever sport we happen to be following, we know that there are some important characteristics of teams (and individuals) that win:They are talentedThey are well trainedThey are unified in their objectivesThey are focused on achieving the goalCan we say that about the teams we work with? Do we have the right people in the right places?Is marketing getting the word out and presenting our products and services in the proper way? Does sales handle the "play" properly and, as Lou Imbriano would say, "Win the customer"? Is our service and support…

• Word for the day: Transmedia

  theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

  Susan Abbott

  30 Jan 2012 | 6:05 pm

  Transmedia is the new word people are using to reference the process of telling a story through multiple media.  It's a nice, short, evocative and useful word. Throw it out in a few meetings this week and see what kind of reaction you get. Dungeons and Dragons may be the original transmedia story, according to Lucas J.W. Johnson at Silverstring Media. Star Wars is also an excellent example. What D+D can tell us about Transmedia Transmedia is kind of the new convergence. Some of us will remember that convergence (of media) didn;t really work out the way people expected it to. A handful of…

• Customer Service, Reinvented!

  Help Scout Customer Service Blog

  6 Feb 2012 | 12:00 am

  Super Bowl commercials offer a rare form of infectious inspiration. The rational, the possible—tossed out the window in favor of the loftier “what ifs?” Nothing embodies these sentiments better than the 2012 Toyota Camry “It’s Reinvented” commercial. If Toyota can dream of pizza curtains—brilliant!—then customers can take the same giant leap. The creative mind dares to dream big, and asks: What would customer service reinvented look like? The reinvented help line: Every call to an 800-number is answered on the first ring—by Morgan Freeman.

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  Church of the Customer Blog

• Playbooks and visual explanations

  Ben McConnell

  6 Feb 2012 | 10:30 am

  By the time the New York Giants and the New England Patriots took the field Sunday for their Super Bowl matchup, the players on both teams had read, re-read and rehearsed their respective game playbooks dozens, if not hundreds of times. They'd studied each play via multiple diagrams and photographs, stats and descriptions of assignments for every player on the field.  A playbook is an apt metaphor for any business team that needs concise, how-to plans to deal with the complexity of systems, processes and moving variables, especially with social business. Whether it's for one of the world's…

• People trust people

  Jackie Huba

  1 Feb 2012 | 2:27 pm

  [Click on chart to see larger version.] The latest edition of the Edelman Trust Barometer study just came out showing CEO's in the dog house when it comes to being trusted. Who do people trust? Academic and tech experts, sure. But the biggest movers in the study are "a person just like me" and "regular employee."  Look at your 2012 marketing plan. Are you providing ways for your customers to get together in-person and online to encourage word of mouth?  Are you showcasing your best employees in social media, at conferences, and at private events with customers? Source: 2012 Edelman…

• FedEx's apology: expertly delivered

  Jackie Huba

  21 Dec 2011 | 10:29 pm

  We've seen this before: 1) company makes an egregious service mistake and is outed by a customer via a YouTube video, 2) video goes viral, 3) mainstream media picks up the story and amplifies it, 4) PR nightmare begins. This week's culprit is FedEx. A California FedEx driver is caught on a security-camera video flinging a package containing a computer monitor over the fence of a gated Southern California house. At no time does the driver attempt to ring the bell for delivery. Just a toss over the fence, and he jumps back into his truck. In two days, the video has over three million views. …

• The simplest definition of word of mouth marketing

  Jackie Huba

  28 Nov 2011 | 2:38 pm

  Nice video from WOMMA on the basics of word of mouth marketing. Tweet

• 14 new statistics about word of mouth marketing

  Jackie Huba

  17 Oct 2011 | 1:45 pm

  The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has a neat infographic detailing the latest stats about word or mouth marketing, online and offline.  Source: WOMMA Note: the WOMMA Summit is coming up November 16-18 in Las Vegas. It's a great conference to learn the latest WOM marketing techniques from leading brands and agencies.     Tweet

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  Kevin Eikenberry on Leadership & Learning

• A Workshop Alone Isn’t Enough

  Kevin Eikenberry

  7 Feb 2012 | 2:00 pm

  Even though most people would say we are in the training business, we don’t see it that way. Yes, we deliver training, and so we are intimately aware of both the benefits and the limitations of that method of transferring skills and knowledge. There are many benefits training can provide.  Here are just a few: [...]

• Seven Powerful Lessons I Learned from Zig Ziglar

  Kevin Eikenberry

  6 Feb 2012 | 5:00 am

  I first read See You at the Top (Zig Ziglar’s classic first book) over Christmas one year during college. I had heard of Zig, and checked out the book from the library. I took pages of notes since I couldn’t write in the book. I still have the notes. Soon after, I started listening to Zig’s [...]

• Born to Win

  Kevin Eikenberry

  6 Feb 2012 | 4:30 am

  This week’s Resource Recommendation is Born to Win by Zig Ziglar and Tom Ziglar. Let me start by saying I am a 100% Zig Ziglar fan, so by definition, this review will be biased. I’ve read much of Zig’s writing throughout my professional life, listened to him speak, both live and on tapes (yes, cassette tapes) [...]

• It’s Your Choice

  Kevin Eikenberry

  3 Feb 2012 | 7:17 am

  I didn’t remember who Harry Browne was, or that he ran for U.S. President as the Libertarian candidate in both 1996 and 2000.   When I read his quotation though, I knew I wanted to share it with you.  I hope you choose to read on . . .   “You don’t have to buy [...]

• Are We Becoming Leadership Wimps?

  Kevin Eikenberry

  31 Jan 2012 | 3:22 pm

  Last week, I wrote a short case for the bold leader.  Over the course of the days that followed, it received decent traffic, but certainly not as much as what I have come to expect from one of my posts, and certainly not as much as what I have been receiving in recent weeks. This [...]

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  Conversation Agent

• Collaboration? You Must be Joking!

  Valeria Maltoni

  8 Feb 2012 | 5:00 am

  I read this post by Chris Saad the other morning in response to Robert Scoble 's mention in a recent post and I keep thinking about the applicability of its concepts not just for Silicon Valley and the tech community. It applies to marketers and communicators as well. [Posted originally on Google+]<rant>1. lead not just cheerlead - how many times do we copy the same concept over and over, or look at short term payoffs when the opportunities are on the making better promises side of the conversation?2. add to the business DNA - nothing dies, not media companies, not blogging, not…

• What a Difference Five Years Make

  Valeria Maltoni

  7 Feb 2012 | 5:00 am

  Here I am. Writing from my heart more than my head where all the good ideas are and I get the zinger -- yeah, a personality would be great. Seriously? Kidding. I'm sure it would. And I have one. I can go from Zero to Italian in no time. When appropriate. Why do you care? Because that's just it -- online content should have a style and point of view, to get more personality it needs to have guts, and it needs to have time. Guts don't come from charts and stats, they come from people. Time as in face time, as in skin in the game, as in relationships. Or you're just making the seagull move --…

• How Would You Redesign the Sears Customer Experience?

  Valeria Maltoni

  6 Feb 2012 | 5:00 am

  As a regular at Brand Autopsy, I remember the "would you miss" series of posts about brands John Moore wrote a couple of years back. The brands discussed ranged from Denny's, Costco, Ace Hardware, Dairy Queen, Crate & Barrell, BusinessWeek, UPS, Pizza Hut, to Walgreens, Polaroid Instant Film, Advertising Age, The Cheesecake Factory, Chili's, Wells Fargo, and more. One of the brands was Sears -- if Sears went out of business tomorrow, would any of us care? Does Sears provide such a unique product and customer experience that we would be saddened if it didn’t exist? How did Sears do on…

• ... then I Discovered I am Actually Funny

  Valeria Maltoni

  5 Feb 2012 | 6:00 am

  So, I've been thinking. What I'm doing here with this blog is not working. It's not you, it's me. Somehow I manage to scare you off to some site with LOL cats whenever you open your feed. I'm not inspiring you. Or maybe I am, and you're not telling me. I've tried a couple of things to justify keeping up with producing researched and useful content. That only makes the scraping and copying and rewriting gremlins happy and me poor. They don't link anymore in the sphere, those bastards. This is a departure from my usual writing style, I know. I've been slaving on figuring out an angle for the…

• The Weeds and Trees Links Edition

  Valeria Maltoni

  4 Feb 2012 | 6:00 am

  Do you have poor information consumption habits? Here's how you can tell -- if you're constantly looking for the next thing or shiny object, you're addicted to the fast growth and short term life of weeds. Some of them are pretty. All the action is up top, yet they don't grow strong. Small roots. On the other end of the spectrum are trees. All the action is underground, so you don't really see it while it's happening -- and at least for a while. Yet, once they grow, trees could be there for decades, stretching upward and providing a welcome respite for generations. Weeds and trees Is a…

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  CRM Daily

• Unlocking Customer Satisfaction: Top 5 Key Indicators

  7 Feb 2012 | 10:44 am

  Tech issues, even small ones, can have an enormous impact on customer experience. Today's contact centers are extremely complex, featuring multiple communication channels, self-service applications, routing schemes, agent groups and vendor equipment. Often times, companies may not even know there is an issue until it is reported by a customer. Frustrated customers today have no problem taking their business elsewhere, and they're likely to tell others about their experience. A complaint that a few years ago would have been aired to a small circle of family and friends can now easily reach…

• Small Businesses Get Help Exporting to China

  7 Feb 2012 | 8:43 am

  New Orleans entrepreneur Kyle Berner is taking his all-natural rubber flip-flops to one of the world's fastest-growing markets: China. This year, Berner plans to list his eco-friendly flip-flops on Chinese e-commerce site Tmall.com, joining the ranks of large American companies such as Levi Strauss that already do so. It's a step that Berner hopes will help take the small company he founded, Feelgoodz, from a "bootstrap business" that generated about $330,000 in sales last year to one with as much as $50 million in sales in five years. While the U.S. remains Feelgoodz's main market, exporting…

• SaaS Enterprise Valuations Will Continue Fast Growth

  7 Feb 2012 | 7:37 am

  SAN RAMON, Calif., Feb 06, 2012 -- martinwolf, the world's leading middle market IT M&A advisory, today released its MW IT Index(R) for 2011. The Index is a proprietary analysis that serves as a benchmark and guide to better understand how key financial metrics affect the enterprise value of IT outsourcing and managed services companies. The Index continually tracks the enterprise value of 120 companies in IT Services and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO); IT Supply Chain Services; and Software including SaaS. According to Marty Wolf, Founder and President, "The MW IT Index is the only index…

• Dynamics CRM Going Fully Mobile with Update from Microsoft

  6 Feb 2012 | 9:15 am

  Days after Salesforce.com announced the release of a customer service desk for mobile devices, Microsoft has announced that the new service update for its Dynamics CRM will feature the ability to access full functionality on any device. The cloud-based, mobile client service is intended for Windows Phone 7.5, iPad, iPhone, and Android or BlackBerry devices. Dennis Michalis, general manager of Dynamics CRM, said that its customers, working in a "hyperconnected world," need to be able to "access their business-critical data on the device of their choice wherever they are." Syncing,…

• New Profit Pressures To Hit Facebook

  6 Feb 2012 | 7:55 am

  For all the huge numbers in Facebook's IPO papers, a surprisingly small figure stands out: $4.39, the amount the site generated per user last year. It's one of the company's major challenges because the total is paltry compared with competing Internet companies. Google makes more than $30 a year from each registered user. Even struggling Yahoo and AOL make $7 and $10, respectively. Once Facebook goes public, Wall Street will surely demand more. That means the social network will almost certainly have to attract a lot more users or be more aggressive with its advertising, perhaps by mining…

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  theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

• Launching a new look and a new name: theIdeaStudio

  Susan Abbott

  7 Feb 2012 | 6:33 pm

  It's been 6+ years, a gazillion posts, and lots of fun. It was time for renovations, so today is the start. We tore off the old wallpaper, stuck a dumpster out back and threw in a bunch of widgets, and got the sledgehammer out. So today is the launch of a new look, and a new name for this space: theIdeaStudio. Like any renovation, we haven't finished all the painting yet, and some of the appliances are on backorder. But I didn't think you'd mind too much. A lot has changed in the world of blogging, but it's always been about fresh content, and that's not changing. The focus is shifting only a…

• Word for the day: Transmedia

  Susan Abbott

  30 Jan 2012 | 6:05 pm

  Transmedia is the new word people are using to reference the process of telling a story through multiple media.  It's a nice, short, evocative and useful word. Throw it out in a few meetings this week and see what kind of reaction you get. Dungeons and Dragons may be the original transmedia story, according to Lucas J.W. Johnson at Silverstring Media. Star Wars is also an excellent example. What D+D can tell us about Transmedia Transmedia is kind of the new convergence. Some of us will remember that convergence (of media) didn;t really work out the way people expected it to. A handful of…

• When intellectual property is the product as well as the raw material, and we are all creators

  Susan Abbott

  17 Jan 2012 | 4:57 pm

  Wikipedia is going black for a day on January 18, 2012. They state their reasons here. The words that prompted this post follow: But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently, We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the…

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  Gartner Blog Network

• A tool for assessing technology’s amplification of your strategy

  Mark P. McDonald

  8 Feb 2012 | 12:36 am

  Amplifying the enterprise is the theme for this year’s CIO agenda reflecting the expanding role of technology in the enterprise and its role in raising the power of enterprise strategies and performance.  The notion of technology as an enterprise amplifier goes beyond traditional notions of IT and the administration/automation of back office processes.  Technologies such as mobile, cloud, analytics and social provide executives with ways to transform the customer experience, products, channels, services and operations. Having a theme is good, but putting that theme into action is much…

• Cloud Security Monitoring: IaaS Conundrum

  Anton Chuvakin

  7 Feb 2012 | 4:09 pm

  As you learned from my previous posts related to security monitoring of public cloud assets, there are challenges related to monitoring data availability as well as data interpretation. IaaS environments – such as the well-known ecommerce-retailer-turned-cloud-provider as well as other cloud service providers (CSPs) – offer an interesting challenge that I call “IaaS conundrum.” To remind, when procuring IaaS resources, the organization essentially buys an ability to deploy their own virtual machines on a public provider network. That means that the cloud customer controls…

• Email Overload Cannot be Solved by Changes to Just Email

  Craig Roth

  7 Feb 2012 | 10:19 am

  Have you gotten any emails with this Email charter attached that points to “10 Rules to Reverse the Email Spiral”?  I’ve seen a few examples, but the “email charter” is one of the better and more organized attempts I’ve seen.  Unfortunately, these email etiquette screeds suffer from the problem that they focus on email.  I’m convinced that you can’t solve email overload by just addressing email.  Email is just one part of the overall information workplace that consists of many communication and collaboration mechanisms (technical and non-technical). …

• Leveraging Business Rules for Revenue Generation: Success Snippet

  Jim Sinur

  6 Feb 2012 | 1:48 pm

  This situation is where a company employed policies/rules to identify and execute on cross-selling opportunities in a dynamic manner. This organization provides connected software applications to the financial services industry for lending, collection, recovery, and sales/service. Today, nearly 500 financial institutions in all 50 states and all provinces of Canada are using their technology. Leveraging Rules Agility for Cost Savings: The company has embedded business language and decision table rules into their software products for risk-based pricing and automated decisioning for tasks such…

• Mobile Technology: Endpoint Independence for Non-Routine Work?

  Craig Roth

  6 Feb 2012 | 12:01 pm

  Many clients are asking about how to develop mobile custom applications, create mobile front-ends to existing applications, secure their mobile content, select mobile devices, craft mobile policies, and manage the devices.  Those are all very good questions to ask and critical to supporting the needs of flexible, distributed organizations and workers.  But what about mobile access to general-purpose knowledge infrastructure and end-user development of collaborative apps?  Once you get past all the security issues, how will the end users actually be able to access content and…

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  Shep Hyken

• Six Strategies to Compete In Business

  shephyken

  1 Feb 2012 | 10:21 am

  This article started out to be about how the little guy company can compete with a big company.  Specifically, in a recent interview I was asked how a small local business can use customer service to compete when a large national competitor, known for aggressive low pricing, comes to town.  As I wrote out the answer, I realized that the business strategies used by a small company competing against a big one are actually sound strategies for a company of any size.  By the way, customer service is important, but in this situation, there is much more to consider. A “Big Box”…

• Being Off Duty Doesn’t Mean You Aren’t Responsible for Customer Service (and More)

  shephyken

  25 Jan 2012 | 7:52 am

  This may start out to sound like a rant, but it isn’t.  It’s simply the set up for the customer service lesson to be learned. I’m at an airport, working my way through the security line for about fifteen minutes.  During this time , a number of flight attendants and airline personnel went ahead of me and everyone else, cutting in front of paying passengers to get through the metal detectors and x-ray machines.  What I noticed is that most of these airline employees didn’t smile or talk to the passengers as they cut in front of them.  Some of the passengers were…

• Five Ways to Create a Customer Service Culture

  shephyken

  18 Jan 2012 | 9:21 am

  The reason an organization can deliver good or bad customer service comes down to one thing; what is happening on the inside of that organization.  To sum it up in one word: culture. The culture inside of the organization is impacting your customer service.  It’s more than just hiring the right people, and it’s more than customer service training.  At the same time, it’s simple.  It’s just setting an example of customer service behavior at the top, and pushing its way, through all employees, toward the customer. Starting at the top means that leadership and…

• Customer Service Recovery Can Show How Good You Are

  shephyken

  11 Jan 2012 | 8:09 am

  Recently I had the pleasure of having lunch with Julia Carcamo (VP of Brand Marketing) and Jim White (VP of Guest Satisfaction) of Isle of Capri Casinos.  We had a great discussion about customer service.  They shared a true story about a problem that happened at one of their casinos, and there’s a lesson to be learned about how the team managed the guest experience. The Lady Luck Casino, operated by Isle of Capri Casinos, is located in Caruthersville, MO.  They hired Vicki Lawrence to present her concert, and it was a sold out event.  The Lady Luck had just switched over to a new…

• Top Ten Customer Service Strategies for the New Year

  shephyken

  4 Jan 2012 | 7:06 am

  1. Be better than average. Amazing companies don’t always deliver “Wow!” type experiences. No, they are just a little better than average – all of the time. All of the time is the secret. Anyone can be good or great once in a while. It’s the consistency that makes them amazing. 2. Pay attention to details. Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest impact. Figure out the details that your customers enjoy and make them a routine part of doing business with you. 3. You may not be the owner, but you should care like you’re the owner. Not all…

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  Customers ROCK!

• Measuring the Impact of Social Media

  Becky Carroll

  24 Jan 2012 | 11:00 pm

  This post is part of the Social ROI Blog Carnival at Think Customers: the 1to1 Media blog. Visit the blog carnival post at the link above to check out the full list of posts from numerous well-known social media thought leaders. There are many ways to measure the success of social media at an organization. Some of these metrics are often focused only on tactical results (ex: number of followers or fans). Other metrics tie directly back to the bottom line (ex: value of sales coming directly from Twitter). On occasion, we see true ROI calculated from social media initiatives. Most companies,…

• Using Social Media to Build Relationships

  Becky Carroll

  10 Jan 2012 | 9:53 pm

  A lot of businesses love social media because they feel it helps them spread the word about their organization and what they do. And it does. However, I strongly feel one of the most effective uses of social media is to build and deepen relationships with customers – be they consumers, clients, donors, or constituents. I predict this will be a big focus for social media in 2012. How can this be effectively done? Let’s take a cue from local government. No, really. Tweet the Mayor One of the most interesting stories about local government and social media is that of Newark, NJ mayor…

• The Bathroom Experience

  Becky Carroll

  28 Oct 2011 | 3:28 pm

  Once again I am participating in the Bathroom Blogfest. As I have mentioned before, if you have a physical presence, whether you are B2C or B2B, your bathroom is an important part of the customer experience. What does it say about your brand? I have been on the road A LOT these past few months since my book launched, so I have had the opportunity to stay in many different hotels across the country (and at a variety of hotel brands). I thought it would be fun to post photos of some of the bathrooms I encountered during my travels (mostly in my hotel room). Which bathrooms do you think belong…

• Influencers vs Advocates

  Becky Carroll

  24 Oct 2011 | 10:00 am

  What is the difference between an influencer and an advocate for a brand? A lot of people recommend that a brand practice “influencer outreach”; others suggest a brand advocacy program is paramount for an organization. In his recent book, Smart Business, Social Business, Michael Brito discusses these two important points. Michael and I shared the stage recently at the Lithium Technologies “Likes to Loves” event in Orange County, CA, and I had the opportunity to interview him briefly on this very topic. What do you do at your organization? Do you reach out to…

• Customer Service Through Social Media: The game has changed

  Becky Carroll

  18 Oct 2011 | 8:53 pm

  Today’s post is written by a guest blogger, Harry Rollason. Harry is with Useful Social Media, and I will be presenting at their New York Conference on Social Media and Customer Service next week. Plus, Harry interviewed me about my book, The Hidden Power of Your Customers: Four Keys to Growing Your Business Through Existing Customers. Here is some food for thought from Harry. The rise of social media has changed customer service beyond recognition. In today’s competitive landscape, customer service is more important than ever. A company’s reputation for satisfying their customers…

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  Social Studies Blog

• Gradle Roadmap and Community Integration

  Jeff Nolan

  27 Jan 2012 | 7:13 am

  Gradle is an open source build system that can automate the building, testing, publishing, deployment and more of software packages or other types of projects such as generated static websites, generated documentation or anything else. The company behind Gradle is Gradleware and they are a Get Satisfaction customer.I recently discovered how they are presenting their product roadmap, which is directly linked to community topics that are relevant, and I love it. In a nutshell what they are doing is presenting their roadmap as a collection of headlines, a summary, and a status with each discrete…

• Community Manager Appreciation Day 2012 #cmad

  Andy Wibbels

  22 Jan 2012 | 9:06 pm

  On the fourth Monday of the new year, we take some time to celebrate and recognize the thousands of community managers on the front lines of customer service and social business.  Our ‘Inside the Mind of a Community Manager’ infographic (on the right, click to view) is still one of our most popular infographic ever.Monday’s big event: GetSat co-founder and Chief Community Officer Amy Muller, will be joining a cadre of community management experts on a Google Hangout sponsored by Dell. Click here for full details on Facebook or on Dell’s Google+ page.Track…

• Get Lucky: How to Prepare for the Unpreparable

  Thor Muller and Lane Becker

  18 Jan 2012 | 11:30 am

  Last month, we told you about the upcoming book from our co-founders Thor Muller and Lane Becker, Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business. We snagged an exclusive first-look at what is sure to be the hot business bestseller this spring: (available for pre-order now)The audience greeted the young entrepreneur with a hero’s welcome. He walked out onto the stage of the conference hall and looked out into the audience. The applause was deafening.It was the fall of 2005, the last day of the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Sergey Brin, the 32-year-old…

• Infographic: How Brands Listen in the Digital Age

  Andy Wibbels

  12 Jan 2012 | 12:41 pm

  In the age of Facebook and cloud computing, listening to customers is more important than ever. It sounds simple enough, but there are tweets, online comments, and various other channels of digital communication to pay attention to. A 2011 Dell-commissioned Forrester Consulting survey of 200 US-based companies explores how organizations have implemented listening and digital engagement to reap the benefits of web 2.0. (Click for big version:)

• The Problem With ‘No Problem’

  John Ryan

  27 Dec 2011 | 4:43 pm

  I don’t know who started using this response for customer service. I would like to find the person who said it first and ask what they were thinking? How did “no problem” enter the conversation?Let’s say you go into a department store and ask, “could you ring up my purchases?” The response is often, “no problem”. Well of course, it’s not a problem, you are being paid to be here and the customer is spending money that they labored for in order to achieve the goal of purchasing your merchandise. Why would customer service ever be a problem?

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  Steve Curtin

• Pouring profits

  Steve

  7 Feb 2012 | 11:12 am

  Last month, a colleague and I had dinner at a Maine microbrewery. Being unfamiliar with its selection of microbrew beers, I ordered a beer flight from our server in order to sample the variety of ales available on tap. For the uninitiated, a beer flight is a selection of beers (often arranged from lighter to darker) that offers samples of a variety of beers. Specifications vary but, generally, a beer flight consists of six 3 oz. pours and costs around $5. To my surprise, our server had no idea what a beer flight was. I then turned to the bartender and inquired about a flight. He said that…

• Learning names is worth the effort

  Steve

  30 Jan 2012 | 2:06 pm

  A restaurateur recently approached me and asked, “How can I fake that I know a customer’s name? I have a thousand regulars in my restaurant each week and can’t possibly remember all of their names.” She was asking the wrong question. Any objective that involves faking out customers (or any form of deception) is destined to fail. Why not make a sincere effort to learn customers’ names instead? I recognize that remembering names is not always easy. I’ll be the first to admit that I often forget a name just seconds after hearing it—especially if I’m being introduced to a group of…

• Opportunity is knocking

  Steve

  20 Jan 2012 | 12:54 pm

  It is widely acknowledged that the number one reason customers quit doing business with a company is due to perceived indifference towards them as customers. When I ask audiences to describe what it feels like to be treated indifferently, I receive responses such as, “I feel unimportant” and “I feel as if I don’t matter.” Customers are important andcustomers do matter. If indifferent treatment is the number one problem, then it reasons that it’s also the number one opportunity. Years ago, I read The Pursuit of Wow!, an influential book by Tom Peters. In it, he makes the…

• Marriott is in good hands

  Steve

  9 Jan 2012 | 5:28 pm

  When I received my first management position with Marriott in 1992, I worked for a general manager named Mark Conklin. Although Mark (as he preferred to be called) oversaw more than two hundred employees, each employee received a hand-written card from him in the mail to honor the anniversary of their birth. And he didn’t merely scrawl his signature beneath a pre-printed generic “Happy Birthday!” message. He took the time to write a full paragraph that highlighted a recent contribution the employee had made to the hotel, thanked them for their commitment to excellence, and wished them a…

• The Energy Bus

  Steve

  30 Dec 2011 | 12:00 pm

  I recently received a review copy of The Energy Bus by Jon Gordon. It was a quick read consisting of 34 short chapters—some of which were only two pages long. The book relates a fictional story about George, a mid-level manager whose work and family life was in disarray before meeting a wise bus driver named Joy who, with the help of a busload of loyal passengers on Bus #11, shares 10 Rules For The Ride of Your Life. There are many business books out there that read like textbooks—filled with jargon, research, references, charts and graphs. These are the books that are often started but…

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  Service Quality Central

• 10 Ways Being a Theatre Major Prepared me for Success

  Tom Vander Well

  17 Jan 2012 | 2:00 am

  Yesterday I posted Ten Ways Being a Theatre Major Prepared Me for Success on my personal blog. Thought I’d link to it in the event that any SQC subscribers would be interested!

• The Check-Out Line and Hold Button Have Glaring Similarities

  Tom Vander Well

  8 Dec 2011 | 10:05 am

  Image by Getty Images via @daylife The Wall Street Journal had a great article this morning about the science of finding the best check-out line. Within the article, it talked about what happens when you are in queue for a period of time: Envirosell, a retail consultancy, has timed shoppers in line with a stopwatch to determine how real wait times compared with how long shoppers felt they had waited. Up to about two to three minutes, the perception of the wait “was very accurate,” says Paco Underhill, Envirosell’s founding president and author of the retail-behavior bible…

• Year-End QA Considerations

  Tom Vander Well

  31 Oct 2011 | 4:06 pm

  Image by studiocurve via Flickr For many companies, the months of November, December and January signal the end of a fiscal year. With the end of the year comes annual performance management reviews which often include a service quality component. It is quite typical for this service quality component to be a score from the call monitoring and coaching QA program (e.g. “your call may be monitored to ensure quality service”). After almost two decades of doing QA as a third party provider as well as helping companies set up and improve their QA programs, I can tell you that year end…

• Podcast: Discipline Issues That Effect Your QA Program

  Tom Vander Well

  16 Sep 2011 | 12:00 am

  Image via Wikipedia The data and reports coming out of many QA teams is both inaccurate and invalid because of discipline problems underlying the process. In this short audio Service Quality Central podcast, Tom Vander Well explores three common discipline problems and provides simply solutions for spot checking your own program.

• Getting Started with QA: Getting Your Feet Wet

  Tom Vander Well

  14 Sep 2011 | 11:44 am

  On the workbench in my garage is a router and router table. I bought it several years ago. It’s a nice one. I even bought a bunch of jigs for creating different kinds of edges. In all the time I’ve had it, I’ve turned it on less than five times. The problem is, I am not very proficient with the whole carpentry thing and I don’t have a lot of time on my hands to dedicate to learning the craft. I have the desire and I have the tool, but I don’t have the time, energy or expertise. Am I alone? I imagine you have a tool, gizmo, or gadget you purchased that is…

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  Return Customer

• Shipping Happiness is Achieved with Great Customer Service

  Joe Rawlinson

  6 Feb 2012 | 10:00 am

  The proliferation of fax machines in the 1980s and email in the 1990s raised consumer expectation for quick turnaround more than any previous technology change. Today, on demand viewing, text messaging and mobile applications are taking those expectation levels up another very significant notch. These days, social media even plays a large role in terms of receiving and viewing customer service reviews. When you provide a product or a service, consumers have come to expect you to know something about them and their interests. They expect customized messages designed just for them. They expect…

• Why Too Many Choices Scare Away Your Customers

  Joe Rawlinson

  1 Feb 2012 | 9:01 am

  Imagine you are pushing the shopping cart down the aisle at your local supermarket. As you round the corner you see the free sample table. Unbeknownst to you, this is a classic research experiment by researchers at Columbia and Stanford (read original research here (PDF)) to determine how the number and complexity of choices we give to customers affects their purchasing behavior. At a grocery store they set up a free sample table. On the table they had a display of 24 jars of jam. They tracked how many people visited the table. They gave those folks a coupon for a discount off the purchase of…

• Improve Your Presentation Skills to Increase Your Sales

  Joe Rawlinson

  30 Jan 2012 | 10:00 am

  Many people struggle when giving presentations. They feel nervous and they do not like being in front of others. This can have an impact on business sales if presentations do not come across effectively and in a convincing manner. Even those who do not feel nervous can make crucial mistakes. Read through the following tips on how to improve your presentation skills. Put them into practice, and you’ll start to feel more comfortable, leading to increased success in selling. Make Eye Contact Eye contact is crucial. Do not look at any one person for too long, or you may cause them to feel…

• Reward the Customer Behavior You Want

  Joe Rawlinson

  25 Jan 2012 | 9:01 am

  Customers respond to different types of incentives. Businesses around the world try to move customers in a certain direction through both positive, rewarding incentives and the negative threat of hefty fines or penalties. Both have their time and place. Take the example of a grocery store. They are a business and want to be profitable. Our local grocery store doesn’t want to pay for plastic bags. Sure, this is couched in an Earth-friendly message. However, in addition to saving the planet, the grocery store saves money when you bring your own bags. So how can they get customers to bring…

• Managing Negative Feedback in Social Media

  Joe Rawlinson

  23 Jan 2012 | 10:00 am

  Social media marketing has introduced a wonderful way to connect with millions of consumers through one easy platform. Just as radio and television were revolutionary to the world of advertisement and marketing, so are Twitter and Facebook. What sets these social media platforms apart from other marketing methods is that they provide a space for a two way conversation between customer and product. Print and broadcast are completely one directional, permitting the conversation to only be from the product to the consumer. With social media, consumers can reach out to the product marketers and…

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  Service Untitled

• Interview with Rob Siefker of Zappos – Part 3 of 4

  Douglas

  7 Feb 2012 | 8:31 am

  This is the third of a four part interview with Rob Siefker, the Director of the Customer Loyatly Team at Zappos. In this part of the interview, Rob talks more about the service metrics that Zappos tracks, how the company empowers its Customer Loyalty Team Members (and has avoided bureaucracy), how escalations to managers work at the company, how the Zappos compensates its employees, and the extensive continuing education programs employees have access to at Zappos and how they work. You can read part one of the interview here and part two here. To read this part, click “read…

• Are mobile devices serving customers properly?

  Cheryl

  31 Jan 2012 | 12:04 pm

  Before I leave my house in the morning, I grab my car keys, purse and of course, my smartphone. AT&T sold 9.4 million of these in the fourth quarter of 2011. Is it any wonder that the 2X4 inch tidy packages of computer chips have revolutionized everyday behaviors including the way we shop? We read on them, play Words With Friends, make dinner reservations, buy concert tickets, and frequently text. Now smartphone application users have even surpassed the amount of people texting and talking. Online sales from mobile devices continue to increase as applications scan, share favorites, share…

• Interview with Rob Siefker of Zappos – Part 2 of 4

  Douglas

  27 Jan 2012 | 8:08 am

  This is the second of a four part interview with Rob Siefker, the Director of the Customer Loyatly Team at Zappos. In this part of the interview, Rob discusses how Zappos motivates members of their customer loyalty team, what programs they have in place to recognize good service, and what service metrics the company tracks and how. You can read part one of the interview here. To read this part, click “read more.” Service Untitled: So how do you motivate Customer Loyalty team members? And then how do you keep that motivation up over time? A lot of companies institute programs and…

• The silent exit of poor customer service

  Cheryl

  25 Jan 2012 | 12:07 pm

  Most customers who feel they have been the recipients of poor customer service will never vocalize their feelings to a particular organization. According to First Financial Training Services and the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, only four percent of dissatisfied customers ever complain making the other 96 percent essentially ripe for the picking when another company offering similar services or products appear in the horizon. Typically an unhappy customer who perceives that attitude of indifference will tell eight to ten of their friends, coworkers or family members about their bad…

• Interview with Rob Siefker of Zappos – Part 1 of 4

  Douglas

  23 Jan 2012 | 8:36 am

  After interviewing Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh  and seeing the company’s HQ outside of Las Vegas, I knew I wanted to learn more about the nuts and bolts and day-to-day operations of Zappos. To get this information, I spoke to Rob Siefker, Director of the Zappos Customer Loyalty Team. In part one of this four part interview, Rob talks about what he does at Zappos, how the company handles operating 24/7, what the training process is like for Zappos employees, and how the company makes the most out of cross-training its employees. Click “Continue Reading” to see the questions and…

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  The Chief Happiness Officer

• Kom til Arbejdsglæde Live! konference 24. maj (in Danish)

  Alexander

  1 Feb 2012 | 8:31 am

  We just announced our annual conference about happiness at work in Copenhagen. Here’s the announcement – in Danish. Vi er super glade for igen at kunne invitere til Arbejdsglæde Live! konference, hvor du og 300 andre deltagere blandt andet kan høre: Will McInnes – Måske Englands gladeste direktør. Hans Erik Brønserud – Direktør for en af Danmarks absolut gladeste arbejdspladser. Wikke & Rasmussen – Fra Voldsom Volvo til Flyvende Farmor. Med glæde. Lise Egholm – Årets leder i Danmark 2011 fortæller hvordan hun skaber arbejdsglæde. Rowan Manahan – En ekspert…

• #h5yr and #h5is – find out how these two cryptic twitter tags promote happiness at work.

  Alexander

  23 Jan 2012 | 6:31 am

  Take a moment to check out these two websites with some slightly cryptic links: h5yr.com h5is.com They were created by Douglas Robar, a member of the Umbraco Community, that develops and uses the open source Umbraco CMS. They wanted a good way to share both success and mistakes and since there are hundreds of people working with Umbraco spread out all over the world they do this through twitter. If you want to praise a fellow member of the community for doing good work you can mention them on twitter and add the twitter tag #h5yr for High Five, You Rock (based on one of the exercises from our…

• Friday Spoing

  Alexander

  20 Jan 2012 | 7:46 am

  This is the very definition of Spoing: Have a very happy weekend :o)

• Happiness at work in Bangkok

  Alexander

  17 Jan 2012 | 2:09 am

  I always say that happiness at work can be found anywhere, in almost any job. Here’s more evidence to support that hypothesis from a man who makes ice tea on the streets of Bangkok: Do you enjoy your job this much – or do it with half as much flair? If not… why not?

• Give it your best shot

  Alexander

  9 Jan 2012 | 4:13 am

  Arbejdsglæde How do you think this word above is pronounced? Make a recording of your best guess (video or audio) and post it here… We need this for a little surprise project we’re working on. And yes, Danish is a weeeeeeird language. UPDATE: Here’s an attempt from the US: And another great one from Poland: Nice tries both… but not quite there. What’s your best shot?

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  The Engaging Brand

• How to Optimize Your Resume with Social Media

  Anna Farmery

  7 Feb 2012 | 11:35 am

  There are two things we know for certain about today’s economy. 1) Finding jobs is getting more and more difficult, for both college educated and non-college educated people. 2) Social media has made job hunting and job candidate hunting trickier. Social media brings a degree of transparency - for better or worse - to the application and interview process that wasn’t there before.In the old world, before the heavy use of LinkedIn and Facebook, employers relied on personal networks to find great candidates. Now, they combine that with these impressive social networks, not just for fact…

• Why Social Media Can Work For Your Brand

  Anna Farmery

  6 Feb 2012 | 9:01 am

  It is often said that art externalises and fixes beliefs. When we express our ideas in whatever format, we bring our ideas to life. Social media is an art form. It allows us to share experiences, expectations, fears and hopes in a format that personalises what you stand for.... The social part of this kind of media means that it can be shared. Just like art, the 'can be shared' can be transformed into 'will be shared' if it reflects real life, real problems, real facts or real opportunities which people can relate to... And just like art, there is nothing new to share...there is just your…

• Show 371 - Little Black Book of Innovation

  Anna Farmery

  3 Feb 2012 | 5:04 am

  I hope you enjoyed last weeks show on Steve Jobs and here is show 371 of The Engaging Brand business and marketing podcast talking about social media, leadership and marketing and sponsored today by MozyPro Online Backup: Simple, Automatic & Secure Backup - for special offer try today! Today Scott Anthony of Innosight joins Anna Farmery to discuss The Little Black Book of Innovation and we discuss The paradox of innovation - the optimism of the word and yet the stress it causes How to look at innovation The idea of "thunk' value How we all have to find our inner salesperson Is…

• Martin Luther King on Consensus

  Anna Farmery

  1 Feb 2012 | 1:15 pm

  Consensus is a word you hear alot in businesses. And yet I always struggle with the idea...although it seems a good one....I think it can be a dangerous one. Consensus is a compromise.....or in another sense, no one is happy! Consensus tends to take you to mainstream rather than the edges were the premium lies Consensus is settling rather than inspiring Consensus is a lack of leadership...why? Think of what Martin Luther King said "Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus" I see consensus can be a sign that people have not bought into the vision,…

• 3 Steps in Creating a Social Bond

  Anna Farmery

  31 Jan 2012 | 7:32 am

  People often ask me during coaching sessions "but how do we get people to like us?" For me a social bond in any kind of society or part of society is created through interaction. Think of a simple question and answer between 2 people...a social bond is created. Today with social media, the communication element within society is increasing in importance. Language is a critical factor. I always use Lyotards model of how to increase the competence of sharing knowledge within the social media world, just like the "real world" Know How - Understand what you are, what to use and what you want to…

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  The Social Customer Manifesto

• Good Attention vs. Bad Attention

  Christopher Carfi

  5 Feb 2012 | 4:44 pm

  The confluence of the Super Bowl and its focus on immense ad spend, coupled with speaking at last week’s NetPromoter conference triggered a thought. Are there two kinds of attention (let’s call them “Good Attention” and “Bad Attention”), in the same way that there are two kinds of profits? We know that there are two kinds of profits. Good profits are profits that fuel growth, and come from serving customers in such a way that they are willing to recommend your organization to others. Bad profits, conversely, are the types of profits where the customer feels…

• Social Engagement Journey Video

  Christopher Carfi

  15 Jan 2012 | 1:39 pm

  Check out this fun little video on the Social Engagement Journey that our team in Seattle just put together.

• Social Business 2012 Presentation

  Christopher Carfi

  29 Nov 2011 | 4:08 pm

  I’ll be speaking about social business strategy at the ASAE Technology Conference and Expo CIO Summit next week in Washington, DC. There are three key components to the conversation. 1) The Social Engagement Journey The Journey is the recognizable progression of social engagement capabilities that a large enterprise goes through on its way to becoming a social businesses.   2) The Relationship Progression While the “purchase funnel” has been well understood for years, there is a comparative dearth of conversation around how business relationships progress over time. A…

• This Week’s Social Business Jam

  Christopher Carfi

  11 Nov 2011 | 12:48 pm

  A number of luminaries participated on this week’s W3C Social Business Jam, including Doc Searls (pictured), Alex “Sandy” Pentland and the inventor of the web itself, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. A jam is “an online conversation among leaders in business, government and technology about the current state of social business, the future role that social technologies can play in improving the bottom line, and how social technology should evolve in order to support business objectives.” There were a number of deep conversations, which generated over 1,100 posts on the…

• Google+ Launches Brand Pages

  Christopher Carfi

  7 Nov 2011 | 5:58 am

  The big news today is that Google+ has finally announced their long-awaited brand pages with a blog post here. The top line, from Google: For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you'll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello. A number of pages are already available (see below), but any organization…

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  Think customers: The 1to1 Blog

• Why Your Business Should be on Pinterest

  Mila D&apos;Antonio

  7 Feb 2012 | 11:07 pm

  Now that your company is just getting the hang of navigating the social world of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, along comes another site that you should start leveraging...Pinterest. There’s more… To read the rest of this blog posting click here or visit www.1to1Media.com/weblog

• The Rise of the Data-Driven CMO

  Tom Hoffman

  7 Feb 2012 | 8:08 am

  The dawn of a new year often marks a spate of leadership changes within many companies and 2012 is no exception. This includes new marketing leaders that have popped up at Facebook (former Levi's CMO Rebecca Van Dyck), Kenneth Cole (former Anthropologie marketing chief Amy Choyne), Macy's (Martine Reardon has been promoted), and Gilt Groupe (Elizabeth Francis jumps from Intelligent Beauty). And while there are multiple factors that can drive changes in leadership changes (e.g. newly-appointed CEO brings in their own team; CXOs in search of new opportunities), it's safe to say that today's CMO…

• Improve, Transform, or Sustain: What's Your Path to a Better Customer Experience?

  Guest Blogger

  6 Feb 2012 | 1:00 pm

  If you're reading this post, there's probably at least one person in your company (you) who's already working to improve your customer experience in some way. That means your company's CX efforts fall somewhere on the curve below. There’s more… To read the rest of this blog posting click here or visit www.1to1Media.com/weblog

• NPS Is a Journey in Customer Experience

  Mila D&apos;Antonio

  3 Feb 2012 | 12:03 pm

  Satmetrix's Net Promoter Score has always brought about some interesting debates: Should organizations tie compensation to their? What is the ideal score to strive for? And should it be the single predictor of a company's growth? At the company's Net Promoter 2.0 conference held today and tomorrow in San Francisco, it seems like pundits may have a new discussion in which to participate. There’s more… To read the rest of this blog posting click here or visit www.1to1Media.com/weblog

• "Expectation Matching" Builds Long-Term Customer Loyalty

  Guest Blogger

  3 Feb 2012 | 9:00 am

  I had the privilege to attend the recent 2012 NRF convention and was impressed with the buzz around loyalty marketing and customer centricity. In one session Macy's CMO Peter Sachse stated, "We don't need new customers. We need to keep the ones we have and get more out of them." Simple yet powerful; all marketers should take this approach--and will create more valuable brands as a result. Yet, why do so many companies continue to miss the mark here? There’s more… To read the rest of this blog posting click here or visit www.1to1Media.com/weblog

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  A blog about time tracking, task management project management, and other useful tales and tips, from the minds at Intervals

• Tracking the Untracked with Online Time Tracking Software

  John Reeve

  24 Jan 2012 | 3:41 pm

  Most of us using online time tracking software are already tracking the important stuff, like client work and internal projects. But there are plenty of other miscellaneous tasks we perform day-to-day that we don’t think to track, because they aren’t billable or directly related to any current projects. When we take the time to track [...]

• We’ve Improved the Intervals Search for Time, Tasks, Projects and More…

  John Reeve

  19 Jan 2012 | 3:09 pm

  We are quite happy about the fact that Intervals has been increasing in size and popularity since we first launched it six years ago. One of the “growing pains” we encountered was the challenge of providing a fast and relevant search for our customers as the amount of data in their accounts increased. Intervals’ customers [...]

• How Web Designers and Developers can Contribute to Open Source Projects

  John Reeve

  18 Jan 2012 | 3:02 pm

  Most Web designers and developers I’ve met use Open Source projects in some way. We design using free icons and develop on a LAMP stack. Popular MVC frameworks are widely used and supported. It’s rather difficult for a Web designer or developer to get very far without Open Source software. Most of the Open Source [...]

• Three Time Tracking Myths Debunked

  John Reeve

  15 Dec 2011 | 2:18 pm

  When it comes to time tracking, small businesses and freelancers alike either love it or hate it. On the love side are those who’ve embraced time tracking in a way that benefits their business, clients, and empowers individual team members. On the hate side, some track their time because they are required to, while others [...]

• UPDATE: The 2011 Secret Santa Name Picker Script

  Cameron

  22 Nov 2011 | 7:05 pm

  Last year, we published the source code we used to draw names out of our virtual hat to decide who would be giving a gift to whom as part of our annual t-shirt exchange tradition. However, a quick glance at that old code reveals its problems: 1. It’s inefficient. It uses brute force to match a [...]

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  Leadership Consultant - Bill Hogg » Blog

• What Values Are You Communicating?

  Bill Hogg

  30 Jan 2012 | 8:20 am

  Recently I executed an employee engagement survey across a client organization. When I compared the senior executive team with the blended front-line results I discovered a very troubling outcome. The senior executives were almost unanimous in the belief that they had done an excellent job of communicating the core values of the organization — yet results from the front-line indicated exactly the opposite. Even worse, some of the comments indicated that the values the front-line were observing were inconsistent with the “advertised” values. Too many organizations believe…

• Is Your Leadership Limiting Your Organizations Ability to Grow?

  Bill Hogg

  12 Jan 2012 | 10:43 am

  This is the first in our series of articles that looks at leadership capacity and its impact on organizational growth and transformation. The full series will be available for download as a white paper once it is completed. Leadership capacity is more than simply skill development; it’s about performance, growth, transformation and change. For the purpose of our discussion in this series of articles, let’s define it as; “Leadership Capacity is the skilful use of leadership attributes for the growth and development of ourselves, our colleagues and our organization”.

• Are You Really Incubating Fresh Ideas and Thinking?

  Bill Hogg

  3 Jan 2012 | 1:46 pm

  Are you finding that you are not hearing the fresh ideas and new thinking in your organization that you would like. Are you often faced with sitting through presentations that sound like the same ideas rehashed again and again. Well maybe you are burying good ideas under a bad process. Before you hear their ideas — are your teams spending time getting them “right”? Are they vetted, reviewed, revised and debated around in circles until all the edginess and excitement has been “fine-tuned” right out of existence. Imagine if ideas for the iPhone had been fine-tuned…

• Start, Stop, Do Different

  Bill Hogg

  1 Dec 2011 | 8:41 am

  Many people are familiar with the expression, Start, Stop, Do Different from personal evaluation processes — those regularly scheduled reviews by our supervisor. They will often use this outline to give us feedback of our performance. But I also think it should be used more regularly, both personally and with colleagues. No leader improves without feedback and personal introspection. So rather than waiting for a formal review by a supervisors, consider asking your colleagues these questions. What should I start doing? What activities or behaviours should I add into my daily activities…

• Best Practices Are Not Always Best Practice

  Bill Hogg

  17 Nov 2011 | 11:31 am

  Best Practices. Another great business term we all know and love. We love to throw out in meetings because it sounds good and rarely will anyone disagree. It’s safe. But is it wise. Who said that adopting best practices is right for your business? Maybe it’s the wrong thing to do in your case. Sacrilege? Maybe, but here are few thoughts to consider before deciding whether to adopt best practices or develop your own best practices. Are They Transferable? If the best practices are to work effectively in your business, then the businesses have to have similarities. Do you share…

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  X-Squared On Demand LLC Blog

• Workflow ISCHANGED() translated to Apex trigger

  David Schach

  2 Feb 2012 | 10:02 am

  Workflow is great. I can simply and declaratively make changes, and can easily update things like email templates, criteria, tasks, etc. without using Eclipse and writing/running unit tests. Sometimes, however, workflow isn’t enough; we need to use a trigger. Today, I had a use-case that when a DateTime field is filled, a contact (identified via a lookup on a parent object – so a grandparent record) should receive a notification. That’s easy enough to do with a ISCHANGED(DateTimeField__c) workflow criteron, but the Email Alert can’t “find” the contact. A…

• Best Practice: Multiple Chatter Posts of the Same File

  David Schach

  11 Aug 2011 | 11:27 am

  Salesforce Administrators learn to remind users: “Search before you create a new lead.” Pretty simple, right? Duplicated records are a pain. Then why do I see some very accomplished Salesforce users in the Dreamforce app posting duplicate Content/Files in Chatter? Here are some examples from the Files tab: I've learned my lesson in the past 8 months... I promise! The better thing to do – assuming that you need to post the same file multiple times (this should be rare, as it might be considered Chatter Spamming, but when referring multiple users or groups to a document,…

• Next Birthday Formula

  David Schach

  6 Jul 2011 | 11:45 am

  How would you display your Contacts with upcoming birthdays? I’ve seen people use “Birthdays This Week,” “Birthdays This and Next Week,” and other reports to display the list. I’ve also seen requirements for showing a person’s next birthday, to trigger an automatic email to each Contact on his/her birthday. Let’s see how it’s done: if( Month (Birthdate) < = Month(Datevalue( NOW() ) ), if ( Month (Birthdate) < Month(Datevalue( NOW() ) ), DATE( YEAR( DATEVALUE( NOW() ) ) + 1 , MONTH( Birthdate ) , DAY( Birthdate ) ), if ( Day…

• PageReference Best Practice

  David Schach

  5 May 2011 | 11:30 am

  I've seen a lot of coders put the following into their custom Visualforce controllers: public PageReference customsave() { try{ insert acct; } catch (DMLException e) { /*do stuff here*/ } PageReference acctPage = new PageReference ('/' + acct.id}; acctPage.setRedirect(true); return acctPage; } I've decided that I don't like this approach. It feels too much like a URL hack, and though I'm sure that it will always work (meaning that salesforce.com will never change its way of referring to a record by /<recordID>), I'd like to suggest a different method that may use more resources, but…

• Content Latest Version Flag

  David Schach

  4 May 2011 | 3:29 pm

  Yesterday, I used Content Delivery to send a pdf to a client. Simple, right? Upload the Word document to Content, associate it with a record, and deliver the content. Surely if I upload a new version, the delivery will refer to the latest version, right? There’s no place to select that option, so I can assume, right? Wrong. This is the screen I see when I choose to deliver a given file. Note that I can choose whether to allow access to the original file or only to a pdf… but nothing about which version to deliver. (There are 4 versions right now.) Content Delivery OptionsThe…

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  AmazingServiceGuy.com

• Customer service book and blog update

  Kevin Stirtz

  8 Feb 2012 | 7:29 am

  Here’s a quick update on two resources to help improve customer service and retention. First, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss were kind enough to send me a copy of their latest book: UNCOMMON SERVICE. In it they discuss a new model organizations can use to improve customer service and improve loyalty. I will be reading [...]

• Customer Service Conference to Focus on Loyalty and Retention

  Kevin Stirtz

  7 Feb 2012 | 7:32 am

  In March, the Multi-Channel Virtual Contact Center Conference will be held. As a virtual conference it will enable people from all over the world to participate without incurring travel costs or time. The conference, presented by CRMXchange, Yankee Group and Vanguard Communications, will focus largely on best practices in improving customer loyalty as well as [...]

• The Importance of Incorporating Customer Service Strategies in a Business Plan

  Kevin Stirtz

  2 Feb 2012 | 7:04 am

  By Sara Mackey Having a well thought out customer service strategy is essential when developing a business plan. Large organizations and small businesses alike must incorporate well planned customer service strategies into their business goals to build a profitable return customer base. The ultimate success of a business will depend on how well the customers [...]

• Three Ways to Keep Your Customers Coming Back

  Kevin Stirtz

  10 Jan 2012 | 6:52 am

  Last week I was interviewed by Daniel Bortz, a writer for Entrepreneur.com. He asked my opinion on some things small businesses can do to keep their customers coming back. The ideas in his article focused on tactics that most small businesses can do and can be made easier using technology tools.  The suggestions centered on [...]

• Customer Service articles, books, blogs and more.

  Kevin Stirtz

  28 Nov 2011 | 8:49 am

  Welcome to the world of Amazing Service! I am Kevin Stirtz and this blog is my creation.  It’s here to help you improve customer service for yourself, your team and your entire organization. I have written over 600 customer service blog posts, articles, ebooks and other resources and published them here, for you to use. [...]

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  Can I have that with!

• Kicking the can down the road

  5 Feb 2012 | 11:55 am

  Joshua Brown  explains the last six years pretty succinctly. This has not been your average Great Recession. Individuals and businesses that are still drawing breath have had to adjust in major ways. We've all been through the ringer.  Some of us have gained a little extra weight and sprouted some premature white hairs.  Some of us have had to give up things and activities we loved.  Some of us have downsized our lifestyles substantially.  This economy has cost us all something - vacations, cars, jobs and even marriages.And when you're living in a state of lowered…

• National Pizza Day

  5 Feb 2012 | 11:43 am

  More pizza will be consumed today than on any other day of the year.Raise a slice to nature's most perfect food.Enjoy a pizza today!

• a little perspective on the day to day problems

  24 Jan 2012 | 9:33 am

  Just in case you have forgotten, you are a puff air living on a living mass orbiting a ball of fire.The largest solar storm in seven years is about to pummel the earth. A Coronal Mass Ejection to be precise. John Matson reportsLast night the sun unleashed a flash of radiation called a solar flare, along with a generous belch of ionized matter that is now racing toward Earth at thousands of kilometers a second. The solar storm front from the ionized blast, called a coronal mass ejection (CME), should arrive tomorrow morning, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric…

• the secret is not the sauce

  20 Jan 2012 | 9:41 am

  Jennifer Overstreet explains Danny Meyer's restaurant wisdom.“You can’t teach hospitality,” Danny said. “It means they’re someone who’s at their happiest when they’re making someone else feel good.”Retailers today are all about the customer experience, but all the technologies and tools on the EXPO floor won’t help you win if you don’t have the right people and culture.“For those who are looking for the most powerful differentiator in terms of creating an experience…you have to stock your store not just with the best stuff, but the people who live for making other…

• It is the experience.

  18 Jan 2012 | 10:37 am

  Pete Seebach has a great idea for a restaurant.There was some research a while back which found a possibly-surprising result. As most people probably suspect, the difference in perceived quality between wines does not really follow price very closely. But! It does follow stated price; if you serve the same wine to a lot of people, and tell some of them it’s $12 for a box and others it’s $400 for a bottle, the latter like it better. Better yet, they’re right — they really do enjoy it more. Thank you, MRI scans and the like.Well.This leads to a concept: A restaurant called Placebo. What…

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  Customer Service Voodoo

• The First Ever Customer Service Ad in the Super Bowl?

  customerservicevoodoo

  5 Feb 2012 | 4:25 pm

  I think this only airs in Colorado…thanks to digital wizardry, we can all see it. Cool.  On a few levels. Thanks for watching, Brandon  

• 

  spark new thinking!

• Confessing My 10 Year Love Affair

  Mark Henson

  7 Feb 2012 | 12:31 pm

  I have had a love affair for ten years.  My love affair has given me countless hours of pleasure. Sometimes late at night. Sometimes early in the morning. I've even snuck away in the middle of the day for a steamy rendezvous. There have been many, many days I've experienced it twice in one day.  My love affair makes me lose all track of time. I'm obsessed by it. I think about it when I can't be there. It's one of the first things I think about every morning and sometimes I just can't go to sleep without it. It's the source of much of my creativity. My greatest fear in life is the…

• Stop Wasting Your Time Off

  Mark Henson

  31 Jan 2012 | 9:10 am

  Somewhere, somehow, somebody decided that vacations & weekends are the reward for all of our hard work. The result? We slave 50 weeks a year so we can sun tan for 2. We stare at our computer all week so we can stare at our TV all weekend. Then the alarm buzzes on Monday morning and we hit the snooze button once, twice, thrice, or more, squeezing out every last drop of our "free time" before heading back to the grindstone.  That's a sucky way to live.  And it's completely backwards to the way it's supposed to work. Vacations and weekends are supposed to be refreshment, not…

• How To Give Everybody What They Need

  Mark Henson

  25 Jan 2012 | 6:39 am

  Ever see a sound board in a recording studio or at a concert? You know, the kind with hundreds of knobs, buttons, and sliders, and banks of blinking lights that rival the bridge of the Starship Enterprise? We've got one of those at our church that allows us to control the sound of the  microphones, instruments, etc. that we use during our worship services. There's a section on the board (which I captured part of in the picture above) that controls which sounds get sent to the the individual monitors throughout the auditorium. There are several different monitors besides the main speakers…

• Lose Your But

  Mark Henson

  17 Jan 2012 | 8:45 am

  "But, but, but..." My least favorite response in the whole wide world. I don't care what comes after the buts. Doesn't matter. Whatever it is, it's an excuse, or an escape hatch devised to get you out of something you'd rather not live up to. But, but, but... I'm too busy That's not my job. That's HER job (same as previous response, by the way) I don't have enough money. That's not fair. It's too hard. I don't have the resources. I don't know how. I have kids. It's too cold. It's too hot. I'm too old. I'm too young. I'm a man. I'm a woman. They'll never let me. Is any of this sounding…

• FREE COFFEE FRIDAY THIS WEEK!

  Mark Henson

  10 Jan 2012 | 9:53 pm

  Every so often, we find ourselves with a completely empty day at sparkspace. We're thankful it doesn't happen very often, but in a weird way we kinda like it, too. That's because we can open our doors for... FREE COFFEE FRIDAY!Friday, 1/13/128am-5pmsparkspace will be open (and free) all day this Friday to anybody who wants to escape the office for an hour or the whole day. We've got great wifi, free Crimson Cup coffee (or soft drinks if you prefer), and loads of comfy furniture.You can even bring other people with you! Keep in mind, though, that the entire space will be open to the public, so…

• 

  Justin Flitter

• If you’re not integrating you’re missing out

  Justin Flitter

  7 Feb 2012 | 2:14 pm

  This is my challenge for 2012, with each and every project we work on. I’m sure it’s the same with most digital marketers. The word is Integration. And it’s about raising profile, awareness and generating traffic to your social profiles from traditional advertising. Some people use QR codes on adverts, some simply add Twitter and Facebook logos. I think the best option is to add the Twitter, Facebook or YouTube URL’s to everything you do. Every billboard without social links is a failed opportunity to drive traffic and build awareness of their social profile.

• 5 things I learnt producing our social media guide

  Justin Flitter

  5 Feb 2012 | 3:17 pm

  2012 Beginners Guide to Social Media for Businesses Over the last two weeks more than 20 people have been compelled to email me their feedback, comments and suggestions about the Social Media Guide for businesses. That’s in addition to the countless DMs, tweets and LinkedIn messages I’ve received. The experience has taught me a lot. And I’m humbled by the response. I spent the best part of 150 hours over three months producing the SM Guide. It’s aimed at beginners researching or planning social media for their company. It’s not a bible, it’s intended to be…

• How Facebook rules can actually help improve your competitions

  Justin Flitter

  3 Feb 2012 | 7:12 pm

  This week we spotted The Warehouse promoting a Facebook competition on their website. There are three main problems with this competition. Can you pick them?  1. Facebook’s Competition rules specifically states you cannot use the upload a photo to the wall function as a mechanism of entry Promotions on Facebook must be administered within Apps on Facebook.com, either on a Canvas Page or an app on a Page Tab. You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or…

• NZ and USA Clients

  Justin Flitter

  1 Feb 2012 | 11:52 pm

  Link to this post!

• Jobs.co.nz

  Justin Flitter

  1 Feb 2012 | 11:47 pm

  Link to this post!

• 

  Your Source for Providing a Better Customer Service and Customer Support Experience

• 5 Ways Government is Cutting through Customer Service Red Tape

  Tricia Morris

  8 Feb 2012 | 5:00 am

  Since the 16th century, government has been bound by a struggling service reputation frequently summed up in two words: “red tape.” Government agencies are working to cut ties with this persistent persona, however.  In 2011, President Obama issued Executive Order 13571, “Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service,” which directed all federal agencies to develop a customer service plan that improves the overall customer experience, reduces costs and accelerates delivery. Initial improvements appear to be working, as the 2012 American Customer Satisfaction Index…

• 14 Quotes that Get to the Heart of Customer Service

  Tricia Morris

  6 Feb 2012 | 10:52 am

  At the heart of every strong relationship is a combination of care, giving, trust, passion, listening and loyalty – and yes, we’re talking about customer service here. Here are 14 quintessential quotes for everyone who is passionate about providing an exceptional customer experience. 1. “It is when we forget ourselves that we do things which will be remembered.” – Anonymous 2. “Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet.” – Kevin Stirtz 3. “People don’t care how much you know, but they know how much you…

• Don’t Make Your Customers Feel Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day

  Tricia Morris

  1 Feb 2012 | 9:04 pm

  In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays dreary weatherman Phil Connors, doomed to repeat his conversations and interactions again and again until spurred by the revelation that he can change everything simply by improving his interactions with other people. Having to repeat yourself again and again is no holiday, especially when it comes to customer service. Forrester research analyst Kate Leggett in a recent blog, says, “Customers dream about personalized, contextual, proactive customer service experiences…. They want each interaction to add value and build upon prior ones so that…

• 10 Tips to Save Your Knowledgebase Content from Sheer Boredom

  Tricia Morris

  1 Feb 2012 | 8:21 am

  If the Mayan calendar is right, we could all probably benefit from spending a whole lot less time pouring over encyclopedic knowledgebase content to find the answers to life’s burning customer service questions. And even if the Mayans were just a bunch of elaborate practical jokers, it still wouldn’t hurt to provide quick and easy answers to your customer base. So how do you make technical product and service information more palatable, easier to read and simpler to find? In the interest of time, here are 10 super-fast tips that apply not just to your knowledgebase, but to practically all…

• Technologies That Will Change the Future of CRM

  Tricia Morris

  31 Jan 2012 | 9:10 am

  In her recent blog, CRM’s Next 5 in 5, Software Advice CRM Analyst Lauren Carlson polled six industry thought leaders on the technologies they thought would change customer relationship management over the next five years. Take a glance into the CRM crystal ball… Constellation Research CEO, Ray Wang, predicts tremendous growth in context services and the information it provides about customers. CRM thought leader and well-known author, Paul Greenberg, along with Esteban Kolsky, predict that emerging technologies will effectively harness the vast amounts of customer data, allowing…

• 

  The Think Zone

• Super Every Day

  5 Feb 2012 | 12:07 pm

  No matter who is the champion of whatever sport we happen to be following, we know that there are some important characteristics of teams (and individuals) that win:They are talentedThey are well trainedThey are unified in their objectivesThey are focused on achieving the goalCan we say that about the teams we work with? Do we have the right people in the right places?Is marketing getting the word out and presenting our products and services in the proper way? Does sales handle the "play" properly and, as Lou Imbriano would say, "Win the customer"? Is our service and support…

• Do. Improve. Repeat.

  15 Jan 2012 | 11:27 am

  If you've been following me on Twitter for any length of time, you've read these three words before: Do. Improve. Repeat. I call it my "mantra." I've used it in just about every aspect of my life. Of course, it's my personalized version of "Practice makes perfect" or "La práctica hace al maestro" or "Kaizen," but with emphasis on a central step: Reflection and the conscious intention to make the next golf swing, guitar riff, kata routine, blog post or paragraph better than the last.Every day presents a new opportunity to get better at something, whether it's being a better follower, leader,…

• Customer Empowerment: Lessons Learned

  2 Jan 2012 | 9:39 pm

  Some very large companies learned lessons this year about the power of customers. There was the Bank of America fee story and the Verizon fee story. Now, those fees hit customers in the pocketbook, and it's easy to see why people rebelled against them. But things get very interesting when we look at what happened to GoDaddy, which lost upwards of 72,000 domains when customers decided there were better alternatives.GoDaddy didn't increase its fees, or do anything directly draconian to its customers; the company did, however, indicate that it was supporting SOPA, the very controversial…

• Was It Customer Service?

  27 Nov 2011 | 8:17 pm

  A couple of years ago, my (then) employer moved me into a windowless office. I decided to buy a full spectrum desk lamp.  There were two home improvement "big box" stores on my way home from work, practically across the street from each other. I'll call them Orange and Blue. The Blue one was fairly new and I'd never been there, so that's where I went.After a couple of minutes of looking at the choices, I picked out a nice, inexpensive lamp that I felt would look good on my desk and get the job done. As is usual, there was a display unit and a shelf full of corresponding boxes. The only…

• I Learned Customer Service from a CEO

  17 Oct 2011 | 7:24 am

  There are some people around the web who seem determined to shoot down the customer service community that has taken root here, and one of the things they say is that the people who take part in the discussions and chats don't understand business. Well, I don't understand the kind of business that thinks it's ok to refer to "dumb customers" but that's another story.I began my customer service education when I was in high school, working part time at a business a few miles from where I grew up. After about a year, I was promoted into the customer service desk, which was seen as a desirable…

• 

  Scott McKain Viewpoint

• Why are “experts” such lousy speakers?

  Scott McKain

  7 Feb 2012 | 9:30 am

  It was the question asked on a LinkedIn group board: Why are experts such lousy speakers? As the professional speaking side of my business is booming, one of the points Shelley in our office is hearing constantly from our clients and prospects is: “We have tried booking less expensive ‘industry experts’ to address our conferences, and we are now returning to invest in a speaking professional, because our meetings have become so dull and uninspiring.” (Don’t get me wrong — there are drab professional speeches and exciting industry experts. It just…

• Beware of bias…

  Scott McKain

  3 Feb 2012 | 2:30 pm

  Back when I was involved a bit in local television news — I was a free-lance anchor and entertainment commentator for the CBS affiliate in Indianapolis in the late ’80′s and early ’90′s — a broadcast veteran and I were talking about the media’s role in reporting Presidential politics. “Watch the next campaign,” he wisely told me. “It’s in the media’s interest to get the number of candidates in either party down to two as quickly as possible. The audience can’t follow closely when it’s six or seven running for…

• An ultimate experience from a reliable source

  Scott McKain

  27 Jan 2012 | 7:44 am

  I’m flying from Baltimore to Vegas on an airline I don’t normally take…usually I would go Delta for the SkyMiles, but this airline has a non-stop, arriving two hours earlier, and I need the sleep. In the middle of the 5½ hour trip, a flight attendant makes an announcement, naming two passengers, and asking them to walk to the front of the plane. Confused, and not knowing one another, an older man and younger woman from separate parts of the aircraft approach the forward galley. Flight attendant now announces these two have something in common. It’s their birthday! She leads us in…

• Distinction may involve what is absent from your business

  Scott McKain

  24 Jan 2012 | 7:30 pm

  At a recent meeting I was addressing near Boston, I learned the fascinating story of the Berry family, and their restaurant on Cape Cod, Moby Dick’s. It’s a true story of distinction. You can read on their website how the restaurant came to be — and how the oldest son, Todd, discovered how much he enjoyed the business. When I met Todd, he gave me a very important insight on how and why their restaurant is so distinctive — to the extent it has received rave reviews everywhere from TripAdvisor.com to the New York Times’ Style Magazine. “We don’t have a…

• The difference between profit and growth

  Scott McKain

  11 Jan 2012 | 10:43 pm

  There is profitability…and then, there is growth. Many businesses – and their leaders – do not understand the difference. If I want to be more profitable, I can do either one — or a combination — of three steps: 1) Cut expenses 2) Get my current customers to spend more money with me 3) Get new customers (Thanks to my friend, Ford Saeks, for discussing this with me last week at a meeting in Las Vegas!) However, it is very difficult – perhaps impossible – to cut my way to growth. (It just sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?) Gary Hamel wrote, “You can only grow by…

• 

  the customer experience for profit blog

• Exceeding expectations or solving customer problems: What’s more important?

  Linda

  3 Feb 2012 | 1:34 pm

  Let’s say you set out to improve your company’s customer experience to drive better organization performance (kudos to you). What will be more important in attaining that goal: exceeding customer expectations, or solving customers’ problems? Photo: Jason-Morrison That’s the question that came to my mind after reading Robert Passikoff’s recent article on Forbes.com, “The Final Frontier: Customer Expectations.” Passikoff points to a shift in the past 15 years: customer expectations have increased significantly, rising 24 percent in all categories. That number has increased even…

• A customer experience lesson in honor of Andy Rooney

  Linda

  10 Nov 2011 | 2:37 pm

  On a Delta flight from Chicago to Minneapolis, I caught myself thinking about customer experience - Andy Rooney style. I confess I was not a consistent follower of Andy Rooney, the rumpled but sage commentator from the CBS news show 60 Minutes. Yet when I did catch Andy, he never failed to provoke a chuckle or a question or a smile. I like that. Hoping to work until he died, Andy very nearly did, passing away on November 4. In honor of Andy, here is my simple story: My .42 ounce bag of peanuts I was handed a package of lightly salted peanuts. It’s small. I note it contains .42…

• Q & A with Crowe Horwath’s Aimee Lucas

  Linda Ireland

  14 Oct 2011 | 8:06 am

  One afternoon in the spring of 2010, a colleague and I ducked into a fruit smoothie place in Manhattan. We had just finished a meeting and were halfway back to our hotel, put off by record breaking 95 degree heat and humidity on an afternoon in April. I settled in, opened my email and found a note from Aimee Lucas. I’ve devoured Domino and am a follower on Twitter and am reaching out to begin a conversation…. …and I’ve been honored to say “I know Aimee Lucas” since that day. Aimee has been a force of nature at Crowe Horwath, one of the largest  public accounting…

• Why does B2B customer experience get the short shrift?

  Linda

  20 Sep 2011 | 1:31 pm

   Photo: Aveus LLC I recently sent out a tweet about B2B customer experience asking people to brag about their company or the work they’re doing. The silence was deafening. I even sent the tweet out again a few days later and still came back with nothing. It’s not often that you can’t find at least one person willing to brag about the good work they’re doing. Frankly, I’m not all that surprised. When it comes to customer experience it’s almost as though B2B doesn’t exist. Just take a look at Bruce Temkin’s recent loyalty ranking report where retail dominates the top 20…

• 10 tips to strengthen your customer experience using four social media platforms

  Linda

  19 Aug 2011 | 3:11 pm

  I recently had the outstanding opportunity to lead a Webinar for MarketingProfs (transparency alert: I blog for the MarketingProfs Daily Fix regularly) members on how to strengthen customer experience using four key social media platforms. For an hour-and-a-half we discussed where customers are in their experience online, what customers expect from brands on social platforms and 10 tips you can use to strengthen your customer’s experience using four social media platforms (blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube). Here’s the full deck—it’s full of examples, case studies and, of course,…

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  Write The Company

• Nothing Flaky about Head & Shoulders

  Write The Company

  7 Feb 2012 | 7:30 am

  People love being told they’ve got a good head on their shoulders. However, millions of others are considered flaky because their heads and shoulders are covered in dandruff. Since Head & Shoulders anti-dandruff shampoo is a Procter & Gamble brand, I contacted them to see what they know that allows them to stay a head [...]

• Evening Primrose Oil Time

  Write The Company

  2 Feb 2012 | 7:30 am

  Why people take Evening Primrose Oil is their business. What interests me is when to take it. That’s why I consulted NOW Foods — a health food and nutritional supplements supplier since 1968 — for guidance… Dear Award-Winning Manufacturer, Respected Advocate of the Natural Product Industry and Leader in the Fields of Nutritional Science and Methods Development [...]

• U by Kotex, not by Nose

  Write The Company

  31 Jan 2012 | 7:30 am

  There were some issues concerning U by Kotex Click Tampons that needed clarification. So to learn more about U, I consulted them… Dear Kotexers, You sent an auto response when I emailed last November. It said, “Due to an increased interest in our products, your personalized response may not be delivered as quickly as we [...]

• Power to the Squirrels

  Write The Company

  26 Jan 2012 | 7:30 am

  “Power to the Squirrels” is not a movement led by a pack of raucous rebel rodents. Although when it comes to power, squirrels may be walking a fine line. What are the risks for our bushy-tailed friends on power lines in Florida? I asked Florida Power & Light… Dear Power Suppliers: In addition to providing [...]

• Jealous Fruits Breaks the Cherry Mold

  Write The Company

  24 Jan 2012 | 7:30 am

  After cherry picking at my local market, I had some questions for Jealous Fruits about the Canadian cherries I picked… Dear Cherry Fruit Folks: It’s been about 6 weeks and you still haven’t answered my email. I’m not sure when the height of cherry season is, but if it’s not right now, I can’t see [...]

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  The UP! Your Service Blog | Uplifting Service Cultures for Sustainable Competitive Advantage

• Five Types of Leaders in a Customer Centricity Initiative

  Richard Whiteley (Advisor)

  5 Feb 2012 | 9:00 pm

  In my last blog post, I described the six most common reasons why customer centricity initiatives often fail. One of these is the lack of commitment demonstrated by senior leaders in the organization. Here at five types of leaders you see most often, and their level of involvement: 1. THE PACIFIST This leader delegates the business of creating the customer-centered culture to others and reviews occasional reports. He is not really fired up about customers and focuses on other perceived success factors like operational excellence or technological superiority. 2. THE BANKER This leader hears…

• A Customer-Focused Structure Leads to Success

  Todd Lapidus, Advisor

  30 Jan 2012 | 8:24 pm

  A great service culture is always a product of a whole architecture that includes education, service processes and structures that support customer-focused behavior. Most customer-service improvement efforts fail to provide this type of architecture because their design misses, in particular, the strong impact of structure on behavior. Structure may include reporting relationships or physical structures that best facilitate service process. The designers are wary of changing structures to support service outcomes because such change is emotionally charged, takes a significant amount of effort…

• Why is Leadership Support so Elusive?

  Jeff Eilertsen, VP Client Services

  23 Jan 2012 | 9:41 pm

  I have been in the field of training, leadership, and organizational development for over 20 years. Through all these years, I have heard one message (and complaint) from practitioners, consultants, authors and gurus: for cultural change to succeed, top leadership must support it. It’s amazing. This message is so consistent. And there is so much evidence to prove it! Yet the issue persists as a key barrier to successful culture change. As a previous blog post stated, leaders who want to create a cultural revolution—and make it stick—must get everyone involved. They must engage and…

• In Service Revolutions, Size Does Matter. Go Big and Go Fast.

  Shyam Kumar (Senior Consultant)

  17 Jan 2012 | 9:37 am

  2011 was an extraordinary year. There were more revolutions around the world, violent and otherwise, than we’ve seen in many years. These dominated local and global news channels, political and business conversations, and the attention of people everywhere. Even Time magazine acknowledged the Protester as the Person of the Year. Some of these revolutions were due to growing frustration at their countries’ dysfunctional systems, some were more forward looking. Most began as independent affairs, not creations of specific political parties. Many were enabled by easy access to—and the…

• Seven Steps for Actionable Service Resolutions

  Andrea Ihara (SVP Business Development)

  9 Jan 2012 | 7:51 pm

  Each year we move forward into a wonderful space of creation for the upcoming year. We also have an opportunity to look back at the past year, and then to look forward, to make adjustments to improve the quality of service for our customers, vendors, employees, and community. Each of us can become a change agent to make a difference. Not only can one person create dramatic change, but one action can. Think about just one thing that would surprise and delight your customers (internal or external customer). Just one thing. Something as small as writing “thank you for coming” with your…

• 

  Zengage - a Zendesk Blog

• Tip of the Week: Hiding Parts of the Web Portal from Logged-out Users

  Dave Mongan

  7 Feb 2012 | 12:47 pm

  There are some portions of your support portal you want everyone to see, and others that need to remain exclusive to certain types of users. For example, the average users might want to read your frequently asked questions (FAQs), but you only want registered users to submit and view tickets. In this week’s tip, Dave shows us how to hide certain tabs from logged-out users with a bit of simple CSS, so that only registered users get the velvet-rope treatment. Take a look here.

• How to Conquer Your Fear of Phone Support

  Dave Mongan

  3 Feb 2012 | 1:07 pm

  Everyone has a phone support horror story, and it’s easy to think that phone support is an ineffective, cumbersome channel. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Research shows that customers prefer phone conversations over any other support channel. And that’s not all. Phone systems are now cheaper and easier to implement than ever before. To find out how phone support can help your organization implement a phone system in minutes, download our latest white paper.

• The Music We Hold To

  Tiffany Maleshefski

  2 Feb 2012 | 11:00 am

  Whether its a long-forgotten Christopher Cross melody, a sweet smooth jazz sax solo, or a rollicking version of Beethoven’s 5th, there’s something about customer support hold music that stays with us long after we’ve hung up the phone. And in some instances, that means literally having Peter Cetera and Amy Grant’s “The Next Time I Fall” in our heads for an entire week. While the thought of hold music usually provokes record-breaking eye rolls, the tuneful tool actually keeps folks on the phone longer than silence. In fact, 90% of consumers prefer music over…

• Zendesk Launches New Tools for Google Chrome

  Dave Mongan

  30 Jan 2012 | 12:47 pm

  Google Chrome users are a bunch of forward-thinking, extension-trying, app-happy users that deserve the latest and greatest tools. So we’re adding one of each to your productivity arsenal with our new Google Chrome extension, Zendesk Activity Stream, and app, Zendesk Launch Pad. For those who don’t know, Google Chrome is the world’s second-most popular Internet browser (behind Internet Explorer), after it surpassed Mozilla Firefox in late 2011. It has many fantastic features, including an all-in-one navigation and search bar, and a host of applications, games and extensions…

• Donate $20 to UCSF, Get Zendesk Starter Free!

  Dave Mongan

  30 Jan 2012 | 11:00 am

  After we recently hit 15,000 customers, we thought about the best way to thank both new and existing customers, while paying it forward to others as well. As a result, we’re giving away free Zendesk Starter plans to anyone who donates $20 to the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. Now everyone wins! Last year, we pledged $1 million to help the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital deliver the above-and-beyond services that brighten their child and teen patients’ days, including pet visits, in-room entertainment centers, educational activities and more. With the Starter plan,…

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  Global Institute For Inspiration

• 31 Jan 2012 | 1:28 pm

  admin

  31 Jan 2012 | 1:28 pm

  google-site-verification: google561c9935f8f71622.html

• 65% of Workers Rate Their Boss As Less Than Inspiring

  admin

  6 Dec 2011 | 12:36 pm

  Atlanta, Georgia, December 6, 2011, The Global Institute for Inspiration (GII) commissioned a survey in the U.S. and the UK to determine how workers perceive bosses when it comes to inspiration. The survey was conducted by global digital market research specialist DigitalMR. A vast majority of 4,590 respondents in the U.S. and 4261 in the UK seem to share the same general impression of their bosses… NOT INSPIRING. 33% across the board thought of their boss as being neither inspiring nor uninspiring and worst, another 32% perceived their boss as being uninspiring to very uninspiring. In…

• Building Inspiring Employees, Teams & Leaders Builds Business

  admin

  18 Nov 2011 | 5:00 pm

  Tapping into Inspiration to Engage & Empower     According to Gallup, 60% of American workers are actively disengaged. 40% of workers intend to leave their job this year and loyalty factor of customers is at an all time low of just 25%, down from 28% from just one year ago. In an effort to address this growing trend, U.S. businesses spent over $40 Billion in workplace training and another $14 Billion in various employee engagement initiatives. Factor in that traditional learning activities seem to be having little affect since research has now made it clear, 85% of workplace…

• Engage, Inspire, Act! Unilever’s Prescription For Success

  admin

  12 Oct 2011 | 5:02 pm

  Contributed by Nicos Rossides, MASMI Last month, I attended the annual ESOMAR Congress in Amsterdam. Whilst the need to create a deep connection with consumers was a theme that ran through several of the presentations, there was one that clearly identified inspiration as a key plank for a global leader’s brand strategy: that of Unilever. The speakers talked about Unilever’s recipe for brand success which involves three key steps: Engage, Inspire, Act. First comes engagement, which ideally happens on three levels: ‘Hearts’ of employees: establishing a culture of consumer centricity…

• It’s Here! 2011 Most Inspiring Companies List

  admin

  27 Sep 2011 | 12:01 pm

  Find out what consumers from the U.S. and U.K. determine are the most inspiring companies and why! It was not long ago that the Balanced Scorecard changed the way businesses strategically focused on objectives and measures that drove short and long-term performance. That was a major step in management theory and practice. And now we have a case for adding ‘inspiration’ as a new metric. From a business perspective this might sound like a lot of fluff but when respondents in our survey were asked if they could name an inspiring company or brand, 58% answered in the affirmative. But, the…

• 

  very best service

• Customer watch

  verygoodservice

  31 Jan 2012 | 10:22 am

  At all times, it is crucial that your customer watch is in place. If your customers are in need of simple advice or find themselves in serious difficulty, you should be at hand, ready to provide immediate assistance. This will prevent a situation from deteriorating and causing irreparable damage. If successful, a rapid intervention will contribute to the establishment of a real bond which could last a lifetime. So, who is watching over your customers right now?

• Customer service innovation

  verygoodservice

  16 Jan 2012 | 11:28 am

  Customer service innovation has become increasingly valuable as a way to differentiate from the competition and avoid an all-out price war. The challenge for companies is to determine to what extent the service innovations should be radical and if they are not a re-hatched copy of what someone has done before, are they achievable? To succeed management needs to be daring yet make sure that every element has been perfectly assessed and calculated so that the newly built process stays in place for many years to come. Are you brave enough to have a go?

• Customer service: take the helicopter view

  verygoodservice

  3 Jan 2012 | 11:55 am

  Your understanding of the environment where your company offers its business services will be crucial in determining the success of your operation. What are the constraints? Where do the customers come from and what will be their state of mind when they finally reach you? Taking an helicopter view can often be useful to understand these factors and help you define the broad parameters before focusing on the details of your service deliveryPicture courtesy of Claire Boyles with our thanks - http://www.success-matters.com/

• Bread and butter customer service

  verygoodservice

  8 Dec 2011 | 10:19 am

  Is it the end of bread and butter service? The increasing sophistication of marketing tools and techniques mean that many businesses have upped their game to improve the shopping experience they offer to their customers. These activities can lead to the creation of extra layers of costs and inefficiencies which are not always fully valued by the customers. As a result they develop a bargain hunting instinct whereby they wait for heavy promotional periods and sales during which they are prepared to buy at what they believe is a fair price. In turn, such behaviour leads retailers to invest in…

• Preparation for customer service

  verygoodservice

  28 Nov 2011 | 4:59 am

  Preparation for customer service: for many companies, the next client is only a number, a customer record who happened to place an order for product xyz at a given time during the day. But it is not at all the same thing when you look at it from the clients' point of view. In many instances, the purchasing decision is an important act in the eyes of the customer who has spend hours if not days and weeks to compare products, to chose the colour, to check if he or she could afford the spend. After such a build up, when the big moment arrives, the client wants everything to be perfect and…

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  Return on Behavior Magazine

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  TeleFaction A/S

  29 Jan 2012 | 2:15 pm

  o n

• Customer Experience Exchange 2011

  Fredrik Abildtrup

  28 Dec 2011 | 7:34 am

  We were recently invited along to the recent Customer Experience Exchange down in Berlin as one of the Media partners, and could not turn down the chance to meet and talk with some of the biggest and brightest names working with Customer Experience. The venue was kept at nhow Hotel located on the banks of [...]

• Where Measurement Begins

  David Slavick

  15 Dec 2011 | 12:08 pm

  Proof that you are changing customer behavior has to start somewhere. How do you measure a relationship? It sounds awfully complicated to quantify. But you don’t have to measure everything at once. If you choose your measuring sticks thoughtfully, you’ll have results that not only keep the gears greased in the short term but propel [...]

• Fathoming Amazon: 9 Things to Know (Infographic)

  TeleFaction A/S

  21 Nov 2011 | 9:51 am

  The guys over at Frugaldad have been thinking about Amazon recently, and with good reason. The story of its growth in the last 17 years can only be compared to the thunderous rise of Walmart.  And in some ways, the curve is steeper: the million-title-bookseller turned world’s-largest-retailer hit the $50 billion sales mark in half [...]

• Experiensumer : The new consumer profile

  David Camps

  21 Nov 2011 | 9:25 am

  Many brands, and an entirely market are increasingly pointing out to a new consumer profile, the experiensumer. Characteristics of this profile are: - Sees consumption far beyond a transaction or a process, with a more experiential view. - Seeks through this experience, to fulfill a vivential need, with a specific emotional factor. Experiensumers, are looking [...]

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  ILS Customer Service Blog

• The Role of Consistency in Professional Support — Part 1: Employee Coaching

  7 Feb 2012 | 10:00 am

  Consistent support is fundamental to maintaining high customer satisfaction scores, customer loyalty, and customer longevity. It is a key element in world class service. Customers generally do not care if you have one call center in Georgia or multiple centers around the globe. They want timely, professional, and consistent service regardless of its point of origin. Consistency is perhaps the most elusive of these customer demands to fulfill. Why is Consistency Important? Consistent support gives customers a sense of control over their technology infrastructure. For the vast majority of…

• When to Use Customer Service Games in Training

  3 Feb 2012 | 10:09 am

  Customer service games can add spice to a training program. I ought to know, I wrote the book! Unfortunately, I've seen too many games used just because–well, I'm not sure why. The game was fun, but didn't increase learning or help participants perform better on the job. Customer service games are fun, motivational activities. The key is to use them in conjunction with skill learning and skill use. When relevant to participants and their jobs, the games build confidence, lift morale, spark enthusiasm, stimulate creativity, and ultimately achieve results. Games can be quick, fun energizers…

• A Little Rapport Goes a Long Way

  31 Jan 2012 | 10:30 am

  No matter what product or service you offer, selling to a customer you have truly connected with is much more fulfilling than a sale to just some random customer whom you’ll never think of again. Not only will you come away feeling excited and optimistic, but your customer will too, and that can prove very valuable. Developing a connection with your customers can do wonders for your company and give you a competitive edge by increasing customer loyalty, the potential for outside referrals, and of course the chance to sell more. So, how do you build this connection? Following are a few tips…

• 7 Tips for Coaching Difficult Employees

  27 Jan 2012 | 10:30 am

  Whether you’re a manager, supervisor, or trainer, one of the inevitable aspects of your job is the need to deal firmly and fairly with problem employees. Just as there are any number of reasons why an employee can become a problem—bad attitude, inability to do what’s required, unresponsiveness to feedback on performance, and so on—there are various ways to handle the issues and the employees who create them. Following are seven tips to keep in mind. Deal with the issue right away. If you delay your response or ignore the issue altogether, you may look weak and ineffective. You’ll…

• Creative Employee Incentives

  24 Jan 2012 | 10:30 am

  Providing incentives for employees is a great way to boost morale, productivity, and promote a harmonious work environment. Even more importantly, offering incentives to your employees in a non-traditional and creative way allows you to keep track of improvement and reward staff for a job well done. Another great characteristic of incentives is their flexibility. Incentives don’t have to be used solely to honor an employee. Traditionally, employee incentives come in the form of a pay increase or bonus money. While this monetary compensation can undoubtedly motivate your employees in the…

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  Riverstar.com

• Importance of Integrating Systems to Make Interactions More Efficient

  Bob Fike

  24 Jan 2012 | 2:44 pm

  Whether they know it or not, customers generally have four key attributes that they associate with outstanding service: Recognition: Recognize me and know my services and preferences Resolution: Address my issue during our first interaction Efficiency: Make the interaction as efficient and effective as possible, i.e., don’t waste my time and don’t make me provide information you should already have available Personalization: Gently offer suggestions that are consistent with my known preferences The issue of systems and process integration becomes critical in addressing each of the four…

• How the Three Elements of Process Save You Time and Money

  Jason Ziolo

  29 Nov 2011 | 2:25 pm

  As discussed in this previous entry, at RiverStar, we believe that every customer interaction is fundamentally a process, having a beginning, middle and end that all aim to meet a specific objective. Incorporating three key elements into your processes will save your customers and agents time and, ultimately, your company money.   The three key elements of a process are: Efficiency – Making the most of time and resources during the process Effectiveness – Ensuring the result of the process matches the objective Scalability – Developing a process that can handle anticipated volume…

• Studio 11 Update: Panels in Depth

  Jason Ziolo

  8 Nov 2011 | 12:07 pm

  Users of RiverStar Studio will be familiar with its workflows and process flows as a series of pages. As mentioned in our previous entry about the Studio 11 update, we’ve enhanced the functionality of pages with a new object: panels.    What Is a Panel?   A panel is a sub-page – a building block – that can be used over and over again. You can add text, fields and actions, and it can be shown or hidden. It can be displayed as a pop-up dialog for data input, and it can include HTML containers, such as tabs and accordions.      Why Do I Need Panels? Panels…

• Making Customer Interactions Efficient, Consistent Through Process

  Jason Ziolo

  25 Oct 2011 | 2:14 pm

  At RiverStar, we believe that every customer interaction is fundamentally a process with a very specific objective. Objectives may stem from customer requests — such as billing inquiries or troubleshooting — or company outreach — such as customer satisfaction surveys or upselling. By creating processes around these tasks, you are ensuring consistency and efficiency in your customer service operations, thereby increasing customer satisfaction.   A process is nothing more than a sequence of logical steps that help you achieve an objective. It can be very simple or very complex, but…

• Studio 11: Enabling You to Quickly, Easily Provide Richer Content

  RiverStar Software

  24 Aug 2011 | 2:01 pm

  The only constant is change, and that is especially true with technology. While RiverStar Studio makes it easy for you to create customer service scripts, self-service web pages, workflow applications and complex business applications, there are always new features and functions that come along to improve efficiency and ease of use. Over the past few months, we’ve been developing Release 11 of RiverStar Studio to offer more functionality and save you time. Currently in beta, the production release is slated for August 15.   Browsers have come a long way recently, and we knew Studio…

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  conversational.ly

• If you meet a loner.. #tweegram

  5 Feb 2012 | 3:48 pm

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• If you meet a loner.. #tweegram

  5 Feb 2012 | 3:48 pm

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• Happy New Year everyone! See you in 2012 :-)

  31 Dec 2011 | 8:35 am

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• Reluctant Leaders

  14 Oct 2011 | 12:05 pm

  I've had the pleasure of working with some great people over the years, and there's none better than David Tomkinson, a Director with the andpartnership.  David has over 25 years experience in the retail sector, working with blue-chip organisations including British Home Stores and Boots the Chemist. He has held senior roles in store management, training, development, HR and organisation development.  Using his approach based on minimising resistance, he's introduced culture change programmes into large organisations, involving initiatives such as coaching, self-managed teams and…

• The recession-performance vicious cycle

  13 Oct 2011 | 1:21 pm

  I've been thinking about this recession. Some organisations are stuck in a vicious cycle. Businesses in all sectors are struggling and many are being forced to restructure/downsize/whatever you want to call it.  As a result, the employees left are concerned about their future. They aren't even certain they'll have a job in 6 months time. As Maslow eluded to, if you're not getting your most basic needs of job security met, the chances of achieving any higher level needs are slim. And what does that mean for how people behave? Well, it means people are understandably cautious; they…

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  THE PROPERIST

• Newness keeps you up to date and marketable.

  7 Feb 2012 | 11:17 am

  When many organizations have a job opening, they will look for someone who is preferably a clone of the person who is being replaced. The only exception is when you are laid off because there was a total misfit. So, they look for the same education, age, gender, and experience. They really want someone who did almost exactly the same job in a similar organization. Their thinking is that they will limit the risk of failure in this way. This practice is completely outdated now. What you need as an organization is newness, someone who looks at the issues with a new and fresh perspective. Only…

• Wisdom

  3 Feb 2012 | 8:47 am

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• Why complicate life? - KISS!

  3 Feb 2012 | 8:46 am

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• Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch | Fast Company

  31 Jan 2012 | 4:21 am

  Long-term success is dependent on a culture that is nurtured and alive. Culture is the environment in which your strategy and your brand thrives or dies a slow death. -------- http://bit.ly/xcIBhf Permalink | Leave a comment  »

• Infographic: How Napping Can Help Your Business : Under30CEO

  30 Jan 2012 | 10:37 am

  via under30ceo.com Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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  Mojo Helpdesk

• How to Make Sure Employees Use a New Helpdesk

  April

  7 Feb 2012 | 1:25 pm

  To get the best possible return on investment with a new helpdesk, it’s important to be proactive in encouraging employees to use it. A little effort in the early days of implementation can make all the difference in whether employees reap the benefits of the helpdesk or fail to embrace it. It’s human nature to resist change. People develop their own methods of doing things and often prefer sticking with what’s comfortable. If a new helpdesk goes unused, it can result in wasted money, squandered good intentions, and most importantly, a lack of progress. To encourage use and avoid wasted…

• Tip of the Week: Creating Custom Fields for Your Ticket Form

  April

  1 Feb 2012 | 2:43 pm

  If you haven’t done so already, creating custom fields for your ticket form in Mojo Helpdesk is a simple and effective way to improve efficiency by requesting exactly the information needed when a customer contacts you about an issue. It can also be used to make your help desk work for your specific needs if you are using your helpdesk for less traditional uses, like tracking internal projects and project requirements. To edit your ticket form, go to manage and select Ticket Form from the drop-down menu.When you reach the Ticket Form page, you will see a list of fields already created.

• Help Desks: Not Just for IT Anymore

  April

  30 Jan 2012 | 12:56 pm

  New businesses are emerging all the time and struggling to stay ahead in competitive industries. It will come as no surprise to regular readers that it’s our conviction that one of the primary components in determining which of those businesses will succeed is the quality of customer service they provide. Regardless of the industry, organized and personal customer service is the key to getting and keeping customers.Imagine a young professional, straight out of school, starting a new graphic design business. Employing the winning combination of talent, hard work and attention to friendly,…

• In Written Communication, Tone Is Everything

  April

  26 Jan 2012 | 1:04 pm

  One of the greatest skills in life, as well as in customer service, is the ability to communicate effectively. For most businesses, the majority of correspondence is now in the form of written communication. The many conveniences of written communication are at times offset by the loss of clarity in tone and intention. Sometimes an e-mail meant to be helpful can be critically misconstrued by the recipient. This makes it imperative that customer service representatives weigh the language and tone used in each correspondence carefully to avoid unnecessary discord with customers.There are…

• Tip of the Week: The Mojo Number

  April

  24 Jan 2012 | 1:23 pm

  Mojo Helpdesk makes it easy to keep track of customer satisfaction by collecting satisfaction ratings based on a 5-star system called the Mojo Number.  When a user closes a ticket, they have the opportunity to provide feedback on the service they received. The feedback options range from "unsatisfied" to "great job." Mojo assigns a rating of 1 to 5 stars based upon the feedback.  Each star counts for 20 points, meaning feedback of "great job" would result in 100 points, whereas feedback of "unsatisfied" would equal 20 points. The Mojo Number takes an average of your last 30…

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  The Squawk Point: Service Improvement

• How to Build a Better Mouse Trap

  James Lawther

  7 Feb 2012 | 3:36 pm

  Imagine the situation.  You run a pizza store and you are losing money.  Your raw material costs are far more than they should be.  You jump to the most obvious conclusion: Somebody must be stealing the cheese.  (Either that or you have king sized mice wondering about). After spending a lot of money on an expensive cheese alarm and CCTV system it becomes abundantly clear that nobody is smuggling cheese out of the back door.  And you didn’t spot any big mice either. There is an analytical solution to the problem.  It is called M.E.C.E. (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive).

• Circles of Influence: Do You Want Your Team Flexing Their’s?

  James Lawther

  4 Feb 2012 | 5:01 am

  Three very important circles: The smallest is our circle of control, the things we can directly influence, the time we get out of bed in the morning, how we spend our money. All of it within our gift. The largest is our circle of concern, world poverty, global warming, the economy. All the things we hear about on the news. Not much we can do there. The middle is our circle of influence. These are things we could influence, maybe one way or another, if we put our mind to it, what our bosses ask us to do next, how our local politicians behave. This is the interesting circle. We have a choice:…

• Ten Ways to Improve Customer Service without Investing in IT

  James Lawther

  31 Jan 2012 | 12:31 pm

  1.  Agree with your customers what they want from you and when they want it. Clarify all the issues as you work through the discussion, ironing out any misunderstandings and highlighting things that are easy to resolve. Then write down a specification. It is amazing what you will find out. 2.  Define what your “purpose” is, your “raison d’etre”, and discuss it with your team. Use it as a mechanism to work out what the best performance measures are. Instead of using internally focused measures, e.g. “QA score”, “service level adherence” or…

• Information Technology: Are you Just Hiding the Problem?

  James Lawther

  28 Jan 2012 | 6:07 am

  A tale of two officesThe first  is a shambles, clearly the owner has no idea what is going on, he should be taken outside, sacked, hung, shot and generally persecuted for good measure. The second is a model of organisation, it is paper free, the work has been, productionised, computerised, systematised and digitised.  It is highly productive, the future. Or is it? Excuse me for being a Luddite, but I am not so sure. In the first office I know I have a problem, there is a disaster in there somewhere, just waiting to happen. But in the second office?  It all looks great,  have I been lulled…

• Customer Complaints: Does Your Bank Act Like a 3 Year Old?

  James Lawther

  23 Jan 2012 | 11:24 pm

  Part 1:  How children behave There was a little girl Who had a little curl Right in the middle of her forehead When she was good she was very very good And when she was bad she was horrid    I didn’t really understand that nursery rhyme until I had daughters.  Now I have a couple of them and it is frighteningly clear.  The youngest is three years old, she has a mass of curly blonde hair and a cute smile. She is beautiful, most of the time. But when she is bad, she is horrid. She refuses to say “Sorry”, even when she has just tried to maim her sister with a Barbie doll.  The…

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  Customer Service Buzz

• Customer Service in the News | Week of February 6

  Research Staff

  7 Feb 2012 | 11:29 am

  Customer Service News More than 60% of consumers around the world switched brands due to poor customer service, indicates Accenture’s 2011 Global Consumer Research Study [Warc] Will 2012 see the rise of the “Social Customer” who expects to engage online and not sit in a call center queue? [Marketwatch] A survey indicates that 62% of consumers have used social media to make a customer complaint; and retail, telephone and air travel industries are the most contacted by consumers who use customer service [Social times] Empower your agents to drive customer experience, says Tammy Weinbaum…

• The Present and Future of Mobile Commerce

  Research Staff

  3 Feb 2012 | 2:16 pm

  This is a guest post by Corey Mull of the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for heads of Marketing and their teams. It’s officially 2012, and, again this year, we’re hearing “2012 is the year of mobile commerce“. We heard it in 2011 too. Did we hear it in 2010? Yep. In fact, as far back as 2007, pundits and observers have been prophesizing that the days of whipping out our phones to pay for all sorts of retail sundries are just around the corner. First, I think it’s probably important to get some definitions right. As the Forbes link above says, I think it’s fair to…

• Don’t Talk to Siri Like That! (Or in Public, Please)

  Lauren Pragoff

  1 Feb 2012 | 7:48 am

  Back in November, we blogged about the advent of Siri—and what she might mean for the future customer acceptance of natural language IVR systems.  And while that connection has yet to be revealed, Siri is continuing to pop up in other contexts. For example, a recent New York Times article positioned Siri as the latest public nuisance in the cell phone revolution.  It outlined several scenarios of people using Siri in less than desirable situations (e.g., public transportation) for things as mundane as sending an SMS message wishing a friend a happy birthday.  One of the particular…

• Finding Your Next Customer Experience Improvement Idea

  Judy Wang

  31 Jan 2012 | 4:47 pm

  When looking for ideas to improve your service organization, where do you look to first? Is it the latest research from Harvard Business Review, a new directive from your senior leadership, or a recent blog post from Customer Service Buzz? (Pardon the shameless plug). What if we told you that there’s a source of ideas personalized specifically for you. Would you be surprised to hear that no one understands your service organization and your customer needs better than those in the frontlines: the reps. Australia New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) realized this untapped resource and created a…

• How Utilities Customer Service Can Help Customers Be Green

  Anastasia Milgramm

  31 Jan 2012 | 9:47 am

  Customer interest in reducing energy consumption is higher than ever. In fact, “80% of US households recently [invested] in some form of energy-related improvements for their home,” according to Stuart Sikes, President at international research firm Parks Associates. Many are also interested in the potential cost savings of energy efficiency. Parks Associates research found that while “80% of customers don’t know the price they are paying for electricity, 62% strongly believe that saving energy and lowering their utility bills are desirable.” So with national attention focused on…

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  Adrian Swinscoe

• Is social customer care a good form of the ‘tail wagging the dog’?

  Adrian

  4 Feb 2012 | 10:37 am

  photo credit: lotje Below is a twitter exchange that I had in the last couple of days with the folks across at Frog Solutions. I really like their way of describing customer service on social media or social customer care as ‘ a new type of customer service that can actually lead to change within [...]

• The No Complaining Rule

  Adrian

  1 Feb 2012 | 3:34 am

  photo credit: colinwhite Just under a couple of weeks ago, I posted a guest piece from Jon Gordon: The Greatest Customer Service Strategy The following post is the second of a series of two guest posts that I agreed with Jon. What I really like about his style and thinking is that it is very [...]

• Executives are customers too. So, why the perception gap on what influences brand, reputation and trust?

  Adrian

  28 Jan 2012 | 9:50 am

  photo credit: hunter.gatherer A few days ago across at Marketing Pilgrim, Cynthia Boris wrote 70 Percent of Consumers Won’t Buy from a Company They Don’t Like. The source of the statement was from a new report from Weber Shandwick, a global PR agency, called “The Company behind the Brand: In Reputation We Trust.” According to [...]

• Skepticism is rife and trust is not easily won but your people can help

  Adrian

  24 Jan 2012 | 12:04 pm

  photo credit: opensourceway Earlier today Edelman, the global PR form, launched the results of it’s 2012 Trust Barometer. According to Edelman: “This year’s survey is bigger than ever before, with 30,000 people questioned in 25 countries. The Barometer reveals the state of Trust in business and institutions.” I’ve written about this survey before in Your [...]

• The Greatest Customer Service Strategy

  Adrian

  20 Jan 2012 | 8:51 am

  photo credit: elyse patten Following on from my last post and the theme that it started to explore, I would like to present to you a guest post from Jon Gordon. I’m very excited and this is a bit of coup for me as Jon is a Wall Street Journal and international bestselling author of [...]

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  Help Scout Customer Service Blog

• Customer Service, Reinvented!

  6 Feb 2012 | 12:00 am

  Super Bowl commercials offer a rare form of infectious inspiration. The rational, the possible—tossed out the window in favor of the loftier “what ifs?” Nothing embodies these sentiments better than the 2012 Toyota Camry “It’s Reinvented” commercial. If Toyota can dream of pizza curtains—brilliant!—then customers can take the same giant leap. The creative mind dares to dream big, and asks: What would customer service reinvented look like? The reinvented help line: Every call to an 800-number is answered on the first ring—by Morgan Freeman.

• Customers We Love: Meet Oceans HQ

  3 Feb 2012 | 10:00 am

  Scuba diving is big business, as Oceans HQ knows well. Over the last decade, almost a million people each year have taken courses to become certified scuba divers. This adventure is the highlight of many tourists’ vacations, with dives and trainings booked months in advance. The organization and customer management these bookings necessitate can be a pain point for the thousands of small, locally run dive shops. This is where Oceans HQ comes to the rescue. André Tanguy, dive instructor and co-founder of Oceans HQ, used his familiarity with these issues to create the SaaS…

• Huzzah! Our First eBook!

  30 Jan 2012 | 8:00 am

  This is one of those exciting and celebratory moments that calls for using one of our favorite words—huzzah! We’ve just finished our first ebook, “75 Customer Service Facts, Quotes & Statistics,” and are bursting to share it with you.The ebook is chock full of data-driven customer service insights as well as nuggets of wisdom from industry thought leaders. We even included a section of quotes that continually inspire our team, such as General George S. Patton’s sage advice: “Always do more than is required of you.” And without further ado ...

• New Webinar: Introduction to Help Scout

  25 Jan 2012 | 9:00 am

  If you've recently signed up for Help Scout or have been thinking about trying, boy do we have something cool for you! Next Thursday, February 2, at 3pm EST we will be holding our first "Intro to Help Scout" webinar.Anyone is welcome to join. We'll be giving a brief overview of the product for about 30 minutes, then open up for questions. We hope to see you on Thursday!Signup to Attend

• The Chick-fil-A Difference: Why Customer Lingo Matters

  24 Jan 2012 | 10:00 am

  The conversation around how you talk to customers could be a lecture entitled “The Chick-fil-A Difference.” In the drive-thru, when you say “thank you,” the Chick-fil-A employee always replies “my pleasure.” The “my pleasure” policy instituted by the company’s founder, Truett Cathy, was inspired by a visit to the Ritz Carlton. When Cathy said “thank you” to the man behind the counter, he responded, “My pleasure.” Out of this exchange, Chick-fil-A’s novel idea was born: treat customers as if they’re at a…

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  TheMana.gr, LLC.

• Are you hiring the right customer service people?

  Flavio @ TheMana.gr

  7 Feb 2012 | 6:00 am

  I often am asked and see the question, “How do we begin offering great customer service“. You can have the greatest plan, all of the right materials, structure, and systems in place, but you can’t get great customer service if you don’t have the right people.  How do you hire the right customer service people? What are the qualities, skills, background, and abilities should you look for? What type of resume are you looking for? Well, honestly, resumes will matter little when it comes to hiring great customer service people. People are not your most important…

• The CRM Crystal Ball. What CRM Will Be Like in 5 Years

  Flavio @ TheMana.gr

  2 Feb 2012 | 6:00 am

  Recently I came across a great article by Lauren Carlson, at the CRM reviews site Software Advice, discussing 5 key technologies that will change traditional CRM in the next 5 years.. It’s truly looking into a crystal ball to see the future of CRM. A key to great success today is having the tools and ability to manage, unify, and organize customer data and properly implement that data into the customer experience, before your competitors do. (Photo credit: “How the world really is” by Drew Herron) CRM systems in organizations today are being used to help predict what…

• How do you lose 82% of your customers? Bad customer service.

  Flavio @ TheMana.gr

  30 Jan 2012 | 6:00 am

  Want to lose 82% of your customers? You do if you have bad customer service. A recent survey published in the Customer Experience Impact report found that 82% of consumers said that they stopped doing business with a company because of a bad customer service experience. No business wants to lose customers right? So why do so many lose business because of bad customers service? You don’t ever set out to treat customers bad, right? Bad customer service happens when we lose sight of what’s important for great customer service and awesome customer experiences. It just happens. We…

• 86 percent of U.S. adults will pay more for a better customer experience

  Flavio @ TheMana.gr

  27 Jan 2012 | 9:11 am

  SURVEY RESULT: 86 percent of U.S. adults will pay more for a better customer experience. So why do companies continue to cut customer service costs and increase spending on marketing? Customer service is a hard job. I’ve previously discussed how customer service is harder than programming, but there’s something even harder than the work customer service people do day-to-day. Helping individuals and professionals see the value in their customer service people is even harder. Stop Undervaluing Customer Service RightNow Technologies conducts an annual Customer Experience Impact…

• Measure Quality, Not Call Time

  Flavio @ TheMana.gr

  24 Jan 2012 | 6:00 am

  If there’s one call center metric report that I abhor, it’s the call time report. I can’t think of another report, outside of accounting reports (sorry accounting folks, it’s not for me), that I find less useful for me as a manager. The reason why I can’t stand the call time report is because call time reports offer no indication on the quality of service. Too much time in call center and customer service management is wasted on the call time report. Let’s face it. Long calls, don’t necessarily mean bad service, I’ve seen superstar customer…