True Questions from the Front Lines of Customer Support and the Answers from Rich Gallagher

The webinar “Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You: True Tales from the Front Lines of Customer Support” was attended by hundreds of customer service and support professionals who submitted numerous questions for Rich G. during and prior to the webinar. Due to the time constraints of the event, Rich was unable to answer all of those great questions; however he has been gracious enough with his time to answer each and every one which we are posting in a two part series here. Read first part here.

Whether you attended the webinar or not, you may find that Rich’s answers to these questions may also help you turn your challenging customer situations into positive customer experiences.

Congratulations to Rick Bruce, Jason Lorenz and L. Graves who submitted the winning stories for a copy of Rich Gallagher’s latest book “How to Tell Anyone Anything: Breakthrough Techniques for Handling Difficult Conversations at Work.”

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

Q&A Part 2

We provide technical support via the phone. I would love to hear about handling difficult customers on the phone as customers on the phone seem more hostile than in person.

Our members often use quite derogatory language about us personally. Please discuss best practices for lower level staff to help deal with these situations.

How do you handle customers who are having a bad day that just need someone to yell at?

How do I handle customers who are just mean and nasty?

I am going to answer all of these very common scenarios as a group. First, use the best acknowledgements you possibly can, including paraphrasing their concerns. When customers get meaner and nastier over the life cycle of a transaction, you usually aren’t acknowledging them effectively, which triggers more pressure. That said, I have no problem whatsoever with setting boundaries when customers cross the line from upset to abusive – consider phrases such as “I would like to help you, but you will need to stop screaming at me.”
-Rich

As a non-profit organization that signs up people for monthly donations, we occasionally receive calls from donors that were not aware they were donating more than one-time.  How do you recommend handling such situations i.e. refunds, retention, etc.?

Very good question. No communications skills can absolve people from acting on the moral high ground. When someone felt they were making a one-time donation, the only proper response is to apologize and, if needed, return the unexpected donation. And if this happens often, review your procedures to examine why people misunderstand your process.
-Rich

What about the frustrated customer who wants to “jump” to a supervisor?

I am generally in favor of escalation on demand – particularly when you use your systems (like Parature) to analyze why calls need to escalate, and respond strategically. Incidentally, I am also in favor of talented peers serving as a path of escalation where appropriate, particularly where the issue is expertise rather than managerial authority.
-Rich

We offer a free service that we actually pay them money for at the end.  People say they have to think about it.  How do you break through that barrier?

Think like your customer – or better yet, ask them. What is making them skeptical? Is there a trust issue? Is the reward worth their effort? Do they need what you are offering? Then keep workshopping your pitch until it addresses these issues.
-Rich

In higher Ed we deal with PHD’s who feel they are entitled to service from only someone they consider their equal, but they are basically computer knowledge low.  They talk down to you – how do we respond getting them to buy into the fact we can help them?

I know exactly the dynamic you are talking about, Dennis -  I grew up in an academic family and began my career on a campus help desk. (My late father, a university president, often cited Henry Kissinger’s quote that “academic politics are the nastiest, because the stakes are so low.”)

You need to establish credibility with these people, and you can do this by (a) doing a good job of articulately paraphrasing (*not* parroting) their concerns, (b) giving very detailed responses, and (c) summarizing the action items at the end of the transaction. Each of these techniques make you pro-active rather than reactive, and help you establish an equal business posture. And finally, bite your lip and acknowledge Dr. Wonderful’s expertise wherever appropriate.
-Rich

How do you suggest that we educate customers who “just want someone to answer the phone and solve their problem in real time” when we really don’t have the bandwidth for that model?

Here is a phrase I’ve often used: “We want you to have a good experience using our software – and in particular, we want you to have a better experience than we can give you pushing information at you one word at a time over the telephone. So we have some great training (or resources, or consulting, etc.) options for you.”
-Rich

What about handling “internal” customers, working for the same company; same rules?

Yes, but with one big difference. You work with internal customers every day, so your focus must shift from managing a transaction to building a relationship. For example, instead of just defusing a conflict, you want to go further and explore what will make this person happy in the future. Good question on an important topic, I actually devoted a whole chapter to this in my book Great Customer Connections.
-Rich

How do I effectively deal with members who resent a change in our program? Basically, we promised a service forever and now have changed it so it is only guaranteed for one-year at a time.

How can I satisfy those members who wish for the member benefits to always remain the same (but staff, board members, and membership majority) decided to change the benefits?

I’ll answer both of these common issues together. First, lean into their complaints and acknowledge them – “Yes, that was a good benefit package. And I appreciate your taking the step of letting us know how important that was for you.” Second, frame the change in a way that benefits the customer – “We made this change in hopes of holding prices constant for people, while keeping our most popular benefits.” Third, take a learning posture – “I am glad you called, because if enough people still want to keep the benefits they had, that is important feedback for us.”
-Rich

How do you tell a customer that the EFT/WIRE was not submitted on time and that there will be a delay in processing funds transfer?

Lean into the customer’s frustration – openly acknowledge how this is affecting the customer, every time they open their mouth – and then focus on the solution.
-Rich

“Continue as needed to control the conversation”???? Wow–that feels like the opposite of a great customer experience. How do you build a relationship when you see customers are something that need to be controlled? Do you want the talker to “feel” like you are paying attention….or do you pay attention? Big difference…

Good point Molly. In my experience, customers come away much *happier* when you use the “acknowledging close” technique to move the conversation along, because you are engaging them – versus what most people do, which is sit there going “uh-huh” endlessly when overly-talkative customers ramble on and on. This is actually one of the more consistently successful techniques I use in making customers feel good.

Finally, to answer what I sense is the question behind your question – I agree with you, no communications techniques will compensate for a genuine lack of empathy for the customer. In this case, of course you want to both pay attention AND make it clear to the customer that you are doing so – that was the point of that bullet item.
-Rich

I think that the most important thing is have empathy with all the customers.

Yes!! And the second most important thing is to use the right language so that customers feel that empathy.
-Rich

My favorite bit of advice is to ALWAYS remember the customer is complaining TO you, not ABOUT you.

Absolutely Mellissa. You are using a powerful technique from psychology here called “reframing.” When I was a young support rep, I used to think of myself as a psychologist studying the tribal behavior of early computer users, not just someone who was being yelled at.
-Rich

What was that third acknowledgement? Observation, validation and ?

Identification. Observation is where you observe the other person’s response (“I can tell you are pretty upset about this”), validation means letting someone know their feelings are valid (“No one likes to wait for a service call”), and identification means sharing your own feelings (“I wouldn’t like that either.”)
-Rich

Finally, to give credit where credit is due, many of the original issues we discussed in the webinar are documented in SupportIndustry.com and Parature’s 2009 Service & Support Metrics Survey.

Thanks everyone for a great webinar!
Rich

True Questions from the Front Lines of Customer Support and the Answers from Rich Gallagher

The webinar “Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You: True Tales from the Front Lines of Customer Support” was attended by hundreds of customer service and support professionals who submitted numerous questions for Rich G. during and prior to the webinar. Due to the time constraints of the event, Rich was unable to answer all of those great questions; however he has been gracious enough with his time to answer each and every one which we are posting in a two part series here.

Whether you attended the webinar or not, you may find that Rich’s answers to these questions may also help you turn your challenging customer situations into positive customer experiences.

Congratulations to Rick Bruce, Jason Lorenz and L. Graves who submitted the winning stories for a copy of Rich Gallagher’s latest book “How to Tell Anyone Anything: Breakthrough Techniques for Handling Difficult Conversations at Work.”

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

Winning Stories

One of my favorite “angry customer” stories took place in the early 1980’s when I was a phone support rep for Kaypro Corporation. As it happens, one of my fellow support reps was taking a call from a guy who was just yelling. Tom was a very mellow (seriously mellow) fellow. Eschewing the earpieces that most of us wore, he used the phone at work the way he used his phone at home. So he simply held the receiver away from his ear as this fellow kept yelling for at least ten to fifteen minutes. At the end of the tirade, after a few moments of silence, Tom put the phone to his ear and said “I’m sorry Bob, someone came up to my desk. Can you please repeat that?” Bob did, indeed repeat the salient details of his case, but he had burnt out whatever fueled his anger and was able to let Tom help him. I don’t think I’d ever use Tom’s technique, but I did learn that sometimes people want to be helped, and sometimes they just want to vent their anger.

I just had to choose this one, because my first computer was a Kaypro! You would need to have the right personality to pull off what this agent “Tom” did, acting like an interruption was more important than the customer. But he used some very sound psychology in asking good questions that got the user to respond factually and not emotionally. Anyone can learn and practice asking good questions in a tense situation – just like police officers and hostage negotiators do – without the need for subterfuge. Questions ground people and get them to calm down.
-Rich

On our Help Desk we recently had a customer alternate between screaming and crying because he could not remember the fourteen passwords he needed to log into all of his different applications. He would scream, apologize because he knew we had no control over it, and then start to cry before screaming again when the next error message happened. It was an extremely difficult call for the Technician attempting to assist the customer because of the customer’s emotional state. At the time we pulled the voiceprint of the call and asked our client’s home office to address this issue, but I wonder now if there would have been a better way to handle that call with the customer and prevented incident or even won the customer over?

When most people are confronted with an inappropriately emotional customer, we tend to “shut down” and respond procedurally and robotically – which makes these people even angrier! (Reversing roles for a minute, this is also why you shouldn’t lose your cool at an airline ticket counter when your flight gets cancelled – see my recent blog http://point-of-contact.blogspot.com/2010/02/theory-of-relativity.html) This situation calls for lots of validation, acknowledgment, and assessment questions on how this impacts the upset customers.
  -Rich

I work at a university and the professors can be very high maintenance. One in particular has been a real problem. The professor has a university owned computer and allows their children to install games and play online. This usually ends in a severely infected computer even with all the virus and spyware applications in place. The professor has brought the computer to the Help Desk for help and denied that their children used the computer and they had no idea how the software games were installed. The laptop keyboard was dirty and sticky to touch and it appeared that the computer was only used by children. We tried to gracefully talk to the professor about the condition of the computer and their responsibility for its condition and they burst into tears in front of several Help Desk staff members and started to yell at all of us about their life and how bad it is and that they were going through a divorce and we should not be talking to them like this.
As the professor got louder I got quieter to try and defuse the situation. I empathized with them and tried to be compassionate and understanding. This seemed to work and the professors calmed down and responded a little more reasonably. My staff now cringes when this professor’s name is displayed on the help desk phones.

My late father was a professor and later a university president, so I can relate to this one! Never ever accuse a customer of wrongdoing directly. Boil the situation down into facts and work from the facts – “this keyboard is sticky and there are lots of games loaded on here” is OK, “I don’t believe you, you must have children using this computer” is not. I will discuss tomorrow that even when customers lie, you shouldn’t “catch” them at it – here’s another blog I wrote on that: http://point-of-contact.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html.
 -Rich

Q&A Part 1

How would you respond to a customer who consistently and “aggressively” questions your ability and problem solving tactics?

Build their confidence by using a technique I call “playback” – take their agenda and proactively chain it to your response. “Because you need this resolved quickly, here is why I am choosing this diagnostic approach.”
-Rich

How to turn around to the positive, dealing with customers reluctant to change to new technology/software?

Resist all temptation to tell these people how much better the new technology is, at first – acknowledge their complaints that change is frustrating. (I am an alpha geek, for example, but still get frustrated when Facebook seemingly changes its interface every two weeks.) Then ask good questions about how they use the product. *Then*, and only then, sell the benefits of the new approach.
-Rich

How do you get them to use the help desk services instead of phoning or emailing you directly and copying upper management?

Give them a benefit for doing this, and communicate this benefit to the customer. (“Our help desk responds to most open cases within 24 hours, and is more responsive than contacting specific individuals who may or may not be available to work on your issue.”) And if you *can’t* say something like this with a straight face, examine why customers get better service by jumping the line, and address this strategically.
-Rich

Please address the cost of doing bad business and how to position this with Sales organizations.

Great question – my answers could easily fill an entire book! Here is my two cents: in my own management career, “turning around” the service performance of call centers has led to dramatic results – in one case, growing from a startup to a NASDAQ firm, in another, growing sales 25% in a recession. That’s why I’m so passionate about this topic.
-Rich

I have a customer from Australia who complains every time on conference calls about the same topic. Doesn’t matter that we already tried our best to respond numerous times – the customer just can’t let go of the issue, and keeps bringing it back every time.

How do you deal with a customer who is being completely uncooperative and illogical even when you provide various other options to them?

I will answer these both together. When you feel you are quote-unquote “trying your best” and the other person keeps getting angrier, It is highly likely that you are not acknowledging the customer, just providing “solutions” – just like when your mother wouldn’t let you do something and asked if you could just play with your sister instead. Try using phrases like, “I can see why you want to do X. I agree, that would be a lot easier for you. I wish your service plan allowed X. Here are some alternatives …”
-Rich

If two different persons in your customer’s organization have different perceptions of an issue affecting your product and both are correct in their own way. How do you direct both persons to a conclusion that will benefit all parties without having a fight?

This is actually the classic problem of marriage and family therapy, and MFTs use an approach called “multidirected partiality”: speak from the voice of each person, and frame their concerns in a way that puts them both in a reasonable light. (“Arnie, you are trying to preserve your department’s budget, which makes perfect sense – and Sally, of course you are trying to limit defections of our paying customers as much as you can. Let’s break down both of these arguments and see where we can go with them.”) I’ve seen this approach work wonders in both workplace and clinical situations.
-Rich

How do you deal with customers who completely disagree with the service of the website, yet still pay to use it, and do their best to change it based on what they think is best, and takes their aggression into social media?

Welcome to the world of freedom of speech! I’ve actually studied social media responses to corporations as part of a client project, and discovered an interesting fact: when most people like your company, people who complain in social media tend to get tuned out. (And, of course, if people hate your company, these complaints can turn into a feeding frenzy.) From a communications standpoint, acknowledge the complainant’s concerns, and frame your response in terms of how it benefits all your customers.
-Rich

One of our biggest challenges is customers who don’t understand our product, don’t actively engage in the many training opportunities that we offer, and yet become frustrated and sometimes angry when the system doesn’t behave as they expect. 

Been there, done that. Resist the temptation to frame these discussions as “you should have gotten training” – frame them as “here is how we can help you be more productive with our product.” And keep learning from your customers about how to make your products even more intuitive in the future.
-Rich

Is responding via email a better way to respond to a “problem” customer, in order to have a paper trail?

Only if you are in a situation requiring legal documentation. The personal touch is always better. As an aside, I’ve analyzed “paper trails” that training clients give me about their worst customers, and the same communications skills still apply – acknowledgement and benefits calm people down, while limits and “policy” agitate them.
-Rich

I meet with clients who are required by the county to meet with me, have ongoing appts, go to required classes and if they don’t I can sanction (take away) a portion of county assistance until they comply-any thoughts?

Great scenario, similar to what psychotherapists refer to as “mandated clients” who are in court-ordered therapy and don’t want to be there. There is a growing literature base on handling mandated clients, and much of it corroborates my own advice to speak from the client’s perspective rather than yours: “I realize you may not like this process. What can we do to make this easier for you? Since you are here anyway, are there things we could work together on that might benefit you?” And be sure to acknowledge every complaint from the client, which is not the same as agreeing with them.
-Rich

Customers who have preconceived notions about calling and getting someone with an Indian accent on the phone.

I have trained call centers in India before. Often the problem is less one of accent and more one of culture – offshore call centers often use less acknowledgment, and more formal scripted responses, than North Americans are used to. When agents learn to communicate well, they often sound indistinguishable from their domestic counterparts, accent or no.
-Rich

How to satisfy a customer and adhere to company policies and procedures at the same time?

Always focus on what you can do, not what you can’t do. (Compare “you’ll have to fill out a form for this” to “let me walk you through how we can get this fixed for you” and see what I mean – examine and workshop the language you use with customers and ruthlessly cut out “can’t,” “you’ll have to,” “we don’t”, etc. out of the dialogue). Acknowledge legitimate frustrations and use transitional phrases like “I wish” and “even though” to shift the focus back to solutions. Finally, if too many policies upset too many customers, leverage your support team as the voice of the customer.
-Rich

What’s the best way to calm down an upset customer?

Check out my Parature blog series from last year on “What to Say to a Porcupine”: I’m all over this situation. Short form answer: acknowledgement (using “identification” where at all possible), good questions to drain the heat from the transaction, and negotiating solutions from a stance of what you *can* do.
-Rich

If you’re on a call and the customer makes racist comment not knowing your race, how do you respond to that?

Racism (or sexism, or xenophobia) is behavior that crosses acceptable boundaries. I have no problem whatsoever with setting boundaries and/or terminating the call in situations like this.
-Rich

What is your recommended best practice for delivering bad news?

I have a technique called “staging” designed just for that situation. Check earlier Parature blog entries from my “What to say to a Porcupine” webinar – or my books – for more details.
-Rich

Tweets of the Week - February 8-12, 2010

Every week it is our goal to share interesting articles that we feel can help our followers learn best practices and discover new trends to continually improve their organization’s customer service delivery and ensure a great customer experience.

To keep up to date with all these valuable links, simply follow us @Parature.

Take Stock In Customer Experience Leaders
http://bit.ly/a17dLU
by Bruce Temkin at Customer Experience Matters

How Comcast Approaches Social CRM
http://bit.ly/c1PGcd
by Jacob Morgan

On measuring the return on Customer Experience…
http://bit.ly/a0LCHl
by John Oswald Buzz-Tank.com

Webinar Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You: True Tales from the Front Lines of Customer Support
by Parature
http://bit.ly/d1R0sQ

Survey of Customer Support preferences & usage patterns
by Parature (Original post by @JohnFMoore)
http://bit.ly/ccOEkT

If you are interested in sharing links to valuable customer service or customer experience articles that we missed, please do so by posting a comment here or send us a tweet @Parature

Parature European Users' Group - February 16-17, 2010

Parature traveled to London to host two events this week; a prospect event, Parature Customer Experience Seminar, on Wednesday, February 17th, and a customer event, Parature European Users’ Group, February 16th – 17th.

We will be hosting a Welcome Reception & Dinner on Tuesday night for prospects, customers, and partners. Check out the agendas by clicking on the event links.

The Parature Customer Experience Seminar will entail a keynote by Sahar Hashemi, Co-founder of Coffee Republic, a demonstration of Parature Customer Service^TM software, a presentation from one of our new partners, Get Satisfaction, and will be emceed by Parature Account Executive, Rick Niles.

The Parature European Users’ Group will include (3) hours of Parature hands-on training by Parature Training Manager, Lisa Flynn, keynote by Sahar Hashemi, Executive Address by Tim Davenport, Product Roadmap session by Cindy Cruzado, Get Satisfaction presentation, three customer presentations from Seatwave, Huddle, and Serco, and will be emceed by Parature Director of Account Management, Bob Rosenau.

We are very excited about the great interest and registrations for this event!

Tweets of the Week - February 1-5, 2010

Every week it is our goal to share interesting articles that we feel can help our followers learn best practices and discover new trends to continually improve their organization’s customer service delivery and ensure a great customer experience.

To keep up to date with all these valuable links, simply follow us @Parature.

CRM & Customer Satisfaction: CRM implementations that improve your customer knowledge increase your customer satisfaction scores
http://bit.ly/9Feqk8
by Jim Henning at Vovici

The Perils of Treating Different Customers Differently
http://bit.ly/cV0UhB
by DonPeppers at Peppers & Rogers Group

10 Rules of Customer Centricity
http://bit.ly/9ETjfx
by Gerardo Dada at 1to1media.com

Customer Service = Human, Heartwarming
by Paul Greenberg – SocialCRM: The Conversation at ZDNet
http://bit.ly/a1IehY

The Future of CustomerService is Here (Webcast recording)
by Brent Leary at TheSocialCustomer
http://bit.ly/czgQ

Webinar Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You: True Tales from the Front Lines of Customer Support
by Parature
http://bit.ly/d1R0sQ

The Future of Online Customer Experience
by Moira Dorsey at The Forrester Blog
http://bit.ly/dmT3f6

Survey of Customer Support preferences & usage patterns
by Parature (Original post by @JohnFMoore)
http://bit.ly/ccOEkT

If you are interested in sharing links to valuable customer service or customer experience articles that we missed, please do so by posting a comment here or send us a tweet @Parature.

Support Channel Survey by John Moore

We invite you to help our friend John Moore with his survey of customer support preferences and usage patterns. John will be running this survey – hosted on his blog Random Thoughts of a Boston-Based CTO: John Moore’s Weblog – through the end of March and will share his results once all the survey data is complete.

Please take the survey and invite your communities to do the same.

Take Survey

Webinar: Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You

Most customer support teams are good at handling routine transactions. But what about a customer who is threatening to sue you? Or asks to have you fired? Or an employee who got so fed up with IT support that he smashed his laptop and then ran over it?

All of these are real situations that support professionals reported in a recent survey sponsored by Supportindustry.com and Parature. This interactive webinar, teaming communications skills expert and bestselling author Rich Gallagher with Parature’s VP of Marketing Gary McNeil, looks at how to handle situations like these and more. The open panel discussion format will examine the best practices, tools and technology behind handling your worst-case scenarios.

Congratulations to Rick Bruce, Jason Lorenz, and L Graves, winners of Rich Gallagher’s latest book “How to Tell Anyone Anything: Breakthrough Techniques for Handling Difficult Conversations at Work”.

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. 

Sahar Hashemi, Co-Founder of Coffee Republic - Keynote Speaker for European Users' Group

Sahar Hashemi, co-founder of Coffee Republic, founder of Skinny Candy and lecturer on innovation & entrepreneurship will be the keynote speaker at Parature’s European Users’ Group to be held February 16 - 17, 2010 at The Cumberland in London. This customer centric event will allow Parature users in Europe to gain invaluable knowledge from industry experts and thought leaders, while networking with colleagues and peers.

Sahar Hashemi, together with her brother Bobby, founded Coffee Republic and built it into one of the United Kingdom’s most recognized high street brands. Giving up her professional job as a lawyer in London, she and her brother staked everything on a dream and made Coffee Republic one of the main players in the ‘coffee revolution’ that transformed a nation of tea drinkers into one obsessed with ‘triple decaf half-caf lattes’ by focusing solely on the customer experience. Sahar left the day-to-day management of Coffee Republic in 2001 to write ‘Anyone Can Do It – Building Coffee Republic from our Kitchen Table,’ which reached number one on the Amazon business chart. Sahar has received numerous recognitions including, 100 Most Influential Women in Britain by the Daily Mail and is a frequent keynote speaker at various high profile events.

The topic for this event “In the Customers’ Shoes: How Coffee Republic Built its Brand through Great Customer Experiences” will focus on the importance of the customer experience when building and maintaining a corporate brand.

“We are excited to have such a respected entrepreneur as Ms. Hashemi to be the keynote speaker at Parature’s European Users’ Group,” said Parature Vice President of Marketing, Gary McNeil. “Her entrepreneurial spirit and total commitment to the customer experience will be an inspiration to the customers, partners and other industry experts who will attend this insightful event.”

The Parature European Users’ Group is a complimentary customer event that will feature an opening night welcome reception, complimentary Parature Customer Service™ software training led by Parature Professional Services, a diverse mix of customer service and support best practices presentations, and the opportunity to meet with several key members of the Parature team.

Please visit the Parature European Users’ Group website for complimentary conference registration and additional information.

Parature Receives 2009 Product of the Year Award Presented by Customer Interaction Solutions® Magazine

Parature Customer Service software received a 2009 Product of the Year Award from Technology Marketing Corporation’s (TMC®) Customer Interaction Solutions magazine, the leading publication covering CRM, call centers and teleservices since 1982.

“Parature is honored to be a recipient of this prestigious Product of the Year Award, stated Parature CEO, Tim Davenport. “Parature is committed to setting the standard for support teams worldwide by continuing to bring innovative products to market and by providing the smartest, most efficient way for organizations to support their customers.”

“I am pleased to honor Parature for its hard work and success. Parature has demonstrated excellence in contact center technologies as well as providing ROI for the companies that use them,” said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. “For 12 years, Customer Interaction Solutions magazine has been honoring innovative companies for their contributions in advancing technologies and application refinements,” he added.

The 12th Annual Product of the Year Award winners will be featured in the January 2010 issue of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.

For more information about the Customer Interaction Solutions’ 2009 Product of the Year Awards or any of the TMC media properties, please visit www.tmcnet.com.

Tweets of the Week - January 18-22, 2010

Every week it is our goal to share interesting articles that we feel can help our followers learn best practices and discover new trends to continually improve their organization’s customer service delivery and ensure a great customer experience.

To keep up to date with all these valuable links, simply follow us @Parature.

Customer Experience is More Important Than Ever
http://bit.ly/6WhtoJ
by Valeria Maltoni at Conversation Agent

Inside Story: Customer Relations through Social Networks; opportunity or threat (part II)
http://bit.ly/5JxI9I
by Passion 4 Customers

The Future of Customer Service is Here – Are You Ready For It? (webinar requires registration)
http://bit.ly/aM7Dru
by Brent Leary at Brent’s Social CRM Blog

Dear CEOs, please Tweet!
http://bit.ly/cjXOsW
by Harish Kotadia, Ph.D. at Thoughts on Social CRM and Analytics

The four challenges to achieving customer engagement
http://bit.ly/d9Sbmp
by MyCustomer.com

Three Simple Steps to Help You Win the Customer Service Race
http://bit.ly/axCF2D
by Bill Hogg

If you are interested in sharing links to valuable customer service or customer experience articles that we missed, please do so by posting a comment here or send us a tweet @Parature.