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

White Paper - The Cult of the Customer

The customer experience has never been more important than it is in today’s service environment. Customer service is driven by the customer experience and the people inside a company provide that experience – whatever employees experience on the ‘inside’ is similar to what customers will experience ‘on the outside.’ This thought provoking white paper will compel you to ask the following:

• Is my company in alignment?
• Does every employee understand the vision?
• Do our employees love their jobs?

The Cult of the Customer explores concepts, lessons and strategies that will show you how to build a customer service culture that will make your customers and employees ‘amazing.’ Read this white paper to discover powerful customer service and experience concepts that can help increase:

• Customer loyalty
• Employee morale
• Employee loyalty
• Value to your customers
• Your bottom line
• The value of your brand Read more »

Watch this Webinar

In today’s environment, the customer has never been more important - customer satisfaction and retention are critical to any organization’s success, and customer service is essential to that end. The most efficient and successful customer support departments are versatile; providing their customers with a preferred method of support. Today’s customers are tech-savvy and require so much more than simple phone support. Integrated multi-channel service options, such as self-service via knowledgebases and downloads, live chat sessions, mobile applications, and easy issue escalation paths via the Web must be implemented to empower support teams to provide the level of service that customers expect. 

This webinar features John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research for the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA). His area of expertise is in creating strategies for improving the overall customer experience and services operation through technology.

If you missed the webinar, the recorded version is available here. Share your thoughts and continue the discussion here.

A copy of this presentation is available in our SlideShare profile.

How to Tell Anyone Anything - Discussing the Issue

If you have been following this blog series faithfully, you have seen the first steps in painlessly having difficult discussions with your staff: starting in a safe place, asking good questions, and acknowledging people. Now, in this final installment, we get to the fun part: getting the issue itself on the table, whether it is performance, attitude, or even personal issues like hygiene.

When you do these first three steps well, you will find that you can now be extraordinarily frank about whatever you want to discuss – IF you do the following two things:

Step 1: Boil the issue down into facts

I am a huge baseball fan. And do you know what my friends usually say when their favorite teams lose? Things like “they stunk” or “they choked.” Here’s the problem: these terms are not only threatening, they are completely useless. There is no such thing as an anti-stink drill or a non-choking procedure. What really happened is that their team dropped a critical pop-fly in the eighth inning, or the opposing team had a more accurate pitcher on the mound – and *that* is what you can actually change. Read more »

How to Tell Anyone Anything - The Power of Acknowledgement

When you coach someone, you are probably hoping it will go something like this: first, you ask someone to change something. Then the other person politely nods their head and says that forthwith they will start logging their cases better, being nicer to customers, coming in on time, showering more often, or whatever.

But it doesn’t ever seem to work that way, does it? Instead, you often hear excuses, defenses, and their side of the story. And I am here to tell you that these things are all *wonderful* to hear. Why? Because they give you the chance to use the most powerful coaching tool of all: acknowledgement.

You see, the only reason that people ever argue with you, push back against you, or “yes” you without buying in is that they feel you don’t see their view of the world. Think carefully about the last time your boss called you out about something – how did you feel inside? Ring-a-ding-ding. We all contain an almost magical ability to justify and defend ourselves, no matter how “right” the other person is. Which means that our usual approach of showing people how wrong they are is generally doomed to failure. Read more »

Watch the recorded version here

In this recession-driven environment, companies are clamoring to increase revenue and save costs; customer retention has never been more important.  Oddly enough, most organizations spend more on marketing to gain customers rather than to retain them.  A published study by the American Society of Quality Control asked the question “Why do customers leave companies?”  Sixty-eight percent of the respondents answered the question with the following “because of the company’s indifferent attitude to the customer.”  So how can organizations change this apathetic attitude and improve customer retention? The white paper “How to Improve Customer Retention by Building Emotionally Engaging Customer Experiences“explores building an emotional connection with your customers to not only retain them, but have them become customer advocates, recommending and staying loyal to the organization. Read more »