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

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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: Read more »

Download the White Paper

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, ticket systems, social networks, and easy issue escalation paths via the Web must be implemented to empower support teams to provide the level of service that customers expect. 

The white paper entitled “Multi-Channel Service: Enhancing the Customer Experience” is available for download now.

The 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 »

When You Can't Say "Yes"...There is Opportunity for Success

Customers are the backbone of every business. Yet, there are times when you simply cannot give them what they want, because a customer may not always be fully aware of a company’s financial status, product development ability, or the majority of a company’s feedback. So, what do you do when you have a demanding customer whose needs you cannot meet? Start by getting into the mindset of what the customer is really looking to accomplish:

• Does the customer, maybe love your service and could possibly want to be more involved, but his/her way of showing it is to offer suggestions?
• Is the customer possibly an influential person in your industry, and is maybe looking to do more business with you?
• Is the customer truly a big fan of your service, and just wants to show you that he/she cares?
• Are there alternatives you can explore with the customer? Read more »

How to Tell Anyone Anything - Be Curious, Not Furious

Once in a great while I have the ability to read people’s minds. Since you are reading this blog, I’ll bet that you are a good supervisor of customer contact professionals. I will also bet that you wake up every morning believing that you are a nice person.

And I will bet one other thing: when someone on your team does something you wish they wouldn’t, whether it is coming in late too often or snapping at a difficult customer, you get frustrated and it shows. And then when nothing changes, you wonder what to say to them.

That is where this blog comes in. I would like to change your perspective from what to *say* to what to *ask*. Because when you start asking good questions and taking a learning posture, even in really difficult employee situations, you suddenly gain the power to create real performance change. Compare these two situations and see what I mean: Read more »

In a thriving free enterprise system such as ours, which provides consumers with a wide range of goods and services from which to choose, the most successful businesses are those that display a strong commitment to customer satisfaction. Today foreign competition as well as consumer demands are requiring greater corporate efficiency and productivity. If the United States is to remain a leader in the changing global economy, highest quality customer service must be a personal goal of every employee in business and industry.

A business built on customer service understands and anticipates the customer’s needs. It designs goods and services to meet those needs and builds products that perform to customer expectations. It then packages them carefully, labels them correctly, sells them at a fair price, delivers them as scheduled, and follows up, as necessary, to satisfy the customer. This kind of commitment to service leads to customer loyalty and to genuine improvements at the bottom line. Read more »

How to Tell Anyone Anything - Start in a Safe Place

Do you manage customer contact professionals for a living? You probably dream about a workplace where everyone looks forward to coming to work in the morning, gives their very best effort, and creates consistently great customer experiences.

Well, guess what – I believe you can create such a workplace. Even in a world where it seems like your agents constantly say the wrong things to customers, act disengaged, fight with each other, or sometimes even forget to shower as often as they could. And best of all, you don’t need to surgically implant different personalities in everyone. You just need to change the way you coach them.

In this four-part blog series, we are going to look at a style of coaching that has little to do with what most managers do – namely, catching people doing things wrong and correcting them. This new strength-based approach to coaching has more to do with techniques from hostage negotiation, crisis counseling, and psychotherapy than it does with traditional management. And I have personally used this approach to create near-perfect customer satisfaction ratings, near-zero turnover, and high morale on my own support teams, as well as those of hundreds of training attendees. Read more »

The fun and unique Zappos office environment

Discover how customer phenom Zappos.com grew their gross merchandise sales from $1.6M in 2000 to over $1 billion in 2008 by focusing relentlessly on customer service.

Rob Siefker of the Zappos Customer Loyalty Team discusses the Zappos commitment to WOWing their customers through service, how they retain repeat customers, and what they do internally to inspire the Zappos culture & core values. Read more »