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

Determining the 'chatters' on your support team

If you use chat as a support channel, should everyone on the customer support team engage in chats with customers, or just a designated set of agents? That was one of the questions raised at last month’s ParaFest, with varying opinions. While there’s little doubt that live chat can add both an additional level of service and credibility to the overall customer experience, is it best handled by a designated set of agents most skilled in live online conversation? Should it be used for both sales and service? Forrester’s most recent research indicates that live chat is the most preferred communications method when a visitor is having trouble finding an item or experiencing an error on your Web site, for example. Tammy Woodruff from Coremetrics says their specialized best practice team handles chat exclusively. What about your organization? How do you make the call?

Measuring 'Customer Happiness Index' One Step at a Time

Jon Landau is Director of Customer Engagement for huddle.net, a highly popular online SaaS collaboration platform growing by leaps and bounds.  (BusinessWeek has even said huddle.net ‘may be the next Google’!) When Jon spoke at this month’s ParaFest, he’s not shy about the ambitious plans he has for huddle.net. Simply, Jon is out to make huddle.net the first in the biz to deliver what he calls ‘enterprise level delight’.  In a nutshell, Jon wants to take the highly successful, customer-centric Zappos model to B2B. In fact, huddle.net folks talk about customer satisfaction in terms of ‘chi’ – ‘customer happiness index.’

To measure ‘chi’, they’re doing a lot of the right things right: with just one support agent, they’ve got an impressive 95% self service rate today. And they’re looking to deliver 98% self service from the support portal. So naturally the quality of the knowledgebase is a top priority. For Jon, providing “outstanding self-service material” means not only is the content up to date; it goes beyond text to include screen shots, video, tutorials to appeal to varying customer preferences. Regular ongoing surveys help ensure the knowledgebase is doing its job. Read more »

Watch: How Southwest Airlines Built a Culture of Customer Loyalty

The webinar “How Southwest Airlines Built a Culture of Customer Loyalty” was attended by hundreds of customer service and support professionals who submitted numerous questions during the webinar. Due to the time constraints of the event, Lorraine was unable to answer all of the great questions submitted; however he has been gracious enough with her time to answer each one within our blog.

Whether you attended the webinar or not, you may find that the answers to these questions may also help you build a culture of customer loyalty.

If you did not attend the webinar, we invite you to watch it now. Share your thoughts and continue the discussion here.

How did you communicate ideas to your employees?

We had an extensive communication network at Southwest Airlines.  Here are some of the processes we put into place: Read more »

White Paper: Lessons in Loyalty: How Southwest Airlines Does It - An Insider's Point of View

Southwest Airlines recognized long ago that they were in the Customer service industry, they just happened to fly airplanes. Subsequently, they built and maintain one of the most faithful Customer bases in existence today.

Parature is pleased to offer you this free white paper entitled Lessons in Loyalty: How Southwest Airlines Does It – An Insider’s Point of View

Phenomenally successful Southwest Airlines is renowned for its stellar Customer service. Their continual dedication to achieving the highest level of Customer service led them to:

• Always capitalize the “C” in Customers to emphasize their importance
• Imbed each employee paycheck with a reminder message that their “Customers were responsible for providing this paycheck”
• Design a hiring system to attract and retain “Warrior Spirits” with innate Customer service skills
• Implement a recognition system and invite the external Customer to help recognize employees
• Utilize fun as a strategy to find the kid in everyone Read more »

Quick Tips from Organizations that Have Brought Customers to the Forefront

Earlier this month at ParaFest, the panel was asked to give one parting tip. Both Tammy and Jon focused on the knowledgebase. Tammy advised using the knowledgebase to create a valuable internal resource for your own team. Jon said don’t underestimate the power of integrating video, screen shots, and tutorials into the knowledgebase to account for different preferences. Doug stressed the importance of continually evaluating your system: touch base with your CRSs regularly to get a reality check on your configurations. Along those lines, Scott stressed the importance of planning and talking to your team before implementing anything new. Hugh also stressed the importance of planning – for instance, looking at keywords for Facebook carefully when deciding what to monitor.

Please share your quick tips on what your organization does or that you think organizations should do to differentiate their customer support.

Watch: Why the Customer Experience Matters Most - Rosetta Stone's Customer Success Strategy

The webinar “Why the Customer Experience Matters Most – Rosetta Stone’s Customer Success Strategy” was attended by hundreds of customer service and support professionals who submitted numerous questions during the webinar. Due to the time constraints of the event, Jay was unable to answer all of the great questions submitted; however he has been gracious enough with his time to answer each one within our blog.

Whether you attended the webinar or not, you may find that the answers to these questions may also help you with your customer success strategy.

If you did not attend the webinar, we invite you to watch it now. Share your thoughts and continue the discussion here. Read more »

How to Build a Culture of Loyalty - How Southwest Airlines Does It

Phenomenally successful Southwest Airlines is renowned for its stellar Customer service. Learn from former Southwest Executive and author of Lessons in Loyalty, Lorraine Grubbs, how Southwest built and maintains one of the most faithful Customer bases.

Southwest Airlines recognized long ago that they were in the Customer service industry, they just happened to fly airplanes. They were one of the few companies who realized the existence of dual Customers – the internal one (employees) and the external one (passengers, vendors, partners, etc). This Customer service mindset was established from the onset in the creation of their mission statement, which in two separate parts, vows to deliver care and service to both employees and Customers. Their continual dedication to achieving the highest level of Customer service led them to: Read more »

John Moore - HP using social support communities to co-create value

John Moore spends a lot of time studying how companies implement ’social CRM’. Currently CTO of consulting firm Swimfish, and an avid blogger (johnfmoore.wordpress.com), John has spent a lot of years as a senior engineer for SaaS apps. Last week John spoke at ParaFest and shared some of his observations about how some ‘name brand’ companies are approaching social support communities.  Take HP. With 2.5 million customers visiting the site every month and 150,000 registered users in the community, John says Hewlett Packard realized early on they needed to treat social support communities in a truly strategic fashion.  They made a solid business case as to how the community would work, the ROI expected, and got very detailed with their plan to bring people into the community. They defined internal experts and trained them on how to interact within the community, even bringing in Microsoft experts as well. Essentially, they use the community to “co-create value”, encouraging a steady stream of feedback from customers – feature requests, bugs noted, you name it.  The head of the support community reviews feature requests weekly, feeding them directly into the product development pipeline.  Read more »

Customer Experience - Getting Your Best Customers to Love You More

I just read a previous blog entry about ‘getting your worst customers to love you.’

I recently had two personal experiences that could just as easily be titled ‘getting your best customers to love you more.’

During a week-long trip across the country, I dined at two of my favorite restaurants (favorite as far as national chains) each with particularly bad service issues during my visit. Like so many, rather than address the issues on the spot, I just fumed about them afterwards. When I returned to my office the next week I shared my displeasure with both via their website “Contact Us” section. Honestly I never expected to hear from either of them, but it made me feel better to blow off some steam. Read more »

Webinar - In the Customers' Shoes: How Coffee Republic Built its Brand through Great Customer Experiences

An outstanding customer experience is the key to building and maintaining a successful brand and is a competitive differentiator that facilitates customer loyalty. A great motto and one endorsed by Coffee Republic; a company that transformed a nation of tea drinkers into one obsessed with ‘triple decaf half-caf lattes’ by focusing solely on the customer experience.

This insightful webinar provides you with a real-life entrepreneurial story of customer success. Hear Sahar Hashemi, Co-founder - Coffee Republic, present ‘In the Customers’ Shoes: How Coffee Republic Built its Brand through Great Customer Experiences’; she will discuss her customer experience philosophy and how it influences building and maintaining a successful brand.  Read more »