Welcome to the Parature Blog – Your Source for Providing a Better All Around Customer Service Experience
Miscellaneous 21 Comments
One thing I know for sure about folks in the customer service and support community. They love to connect, share ideas, help each other out wherever and whenever they can. That’s really not surprising, since customer service professionals are in the business of maintaining and growing valuable, sustainable customer relationships every day.
That’s the idea behind our new blog site. We’ll share best practices. Talk about what’s working and what’s not. We’ll take on hot button topics like techniques for dealing with difficult customers, how to improve customer service and cut costs in a downturn, how to ramp up your customer satisfaction numbers.
This is the place for you to share opinions, stories, questions, what’s going on in your part of the world of online customer service. Learn what your peers are up to, and join in on some of the latest talk and trends for running a terrific online customer support machine.
There’s a lot to talk about. You’ll hear from customer service professionals and industry experts, as well as some of us working inside Parature. But most importantly, we want to know what you have to say.
Looking forward to seeing you here soon and don’t forget to check out our first blog topic Providing great customer service is a full-time job.
Duke
Great to see this blog. I’ll add it to my list and look forward to checking it out often.
This should be interesting. A new approach for support, that is for sure.
I am very interested to see what information and experience will be shared on this blog.
Great idea! I am looking forward to sharing thoughts and ideas.
Great use of technology. This will be another great forum to share ideas and support.
I have been looking for this type of Blog for awhile as I am an Analyst in a Customer Service Department responsible for training and analyzing Customer Service Data and practices. I look forward to sharing and learning from this resource =)
In this type of economy customer service is the one thing that separates us from the competition. The blog is a great idea in support of that effort.
Great service includes building and nurturing your community – what a great tool for facilitating the Parature community! See everyone at Parafest!
I’ll throw out the first question to Parature. I see that the blog is powered by WordPress. Good choice. I have a lot of experience creating websites with WordPress and WordPress MU. Which WordPress plugins do you plan on implementing during phase one of your blog?
Wow, I actually have a lot of questions. I’ll just ask two more for now.
*Will this blog have a plugin to update the Parature Forums? Much like the WordPress plugins for FaceBook and Twitter?
*Will this blog and the FaceBook Parature group interact?
I am glad to see someone giving us a venue to share customer service stories. I am very interested in following this blog. Thank you for thinking of us!
I’m looking forward to sharing and receiving new ideas.
Hi Perry,
Thanks for your questions. Here are the answers we have so far:
1. Which WordPress plugins do you plan on implementing during phase one of your blog?
Besides the ones we are using right now (All in One SEO Pack, Google Analytics for WordPress, WordPress URL Rewrite Plugin for blogs running on IIS by Binary Fortress Software, WP Mail SMTP, Subscribe to Comments by Mark Jaquith, Sociable – Social Bookmarking for WordPress, WordPress.com Stats, and Akismet), we are planning to add a Twitter plugin that allows us to update our Twitter page with our blog topics. We are still checking other recognized blogs to see what other plugins make sense for us but we don’t want to install too many that will only make our blog slower.
2. Will this blog have a plugin to update the Parature Forums? Much like the WordPress plugins for FaceBook and Twitter?
Since this blog is open to anyone, not only our customers, we will not use a plugin to synchronize with Parature Forum.
3. Will this blog and the FaceBook Parature group interact?
To tell you the truth, we just thought about showing our blog updates on our Facebook page through the “Notes” application, but we are not sure how to make these 2 websites more interactive than that. If you know of a good example, we’d appreciate the information. We are new to social media and are learning every day. Any recommendations or suggestions for using social networks are always welcome.
Our idea is to cover the main social media websites, so our audience can choose the sites they feel more comfortable with and communicate with us through them. We want to keep all channels (Facebook, Twitter, Blog, LinkedIn-coming soon) synchronized, so wherever it is possible, we’ll use plugins to keep the different websites updated with our Blog topics.
I too will mark this BLOG as hearing different approaches to customer service is always valuable.
Looking forward to seeing all the great ideas!
I can answer one of my own questions. To date Parature is only using the Sociable Wordpress plugin. Another WordPress plugin that I suggest is bm-custom-login.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bm-custom-login/
You can use it to customize your WordPress login screen. The default login has the WordPress logo.
http://blog.parature.com/wp-admin
bm-custom-login will allow you to put Parature’s logo on the login screen. Here’s an example.
http://yourteamsticker.com/index/wp-admin
Some other WordPress plugins I use on a regular basis are:
*buddypress <<<Seriously slick way to create your own facebook like social network. So easy my daughter can do it
*wp-sticky
*tantan-flickr
*my-page-order
*my-link-order
*cforms
*wp-e-commerce <<Seriously easy way to get an online store up and running in minutes and except payment via PayPal, Google checkout, ect. Not sure what you are using to accept CC payments for Parafest but this plugin is worth a look.
*events-calendar
I’m also a huge fan of WordPress mu and Artisteer.
If you anyone has ANY questions regarding WordPress or Joomla feel free to ask. (How’s that for shameless self promotion
Wordpress is an awesome and easy Content Management System (CMS). Kudo’s to Parature for utilizing it for their blog!
–Perry
Nice !! This is the best info.Thank you for you info.
This is my customer servicewebsite.
wow good info. thanks
Just a comment to say what a great experience it was to attentd Parafest 2009 and interact and learn from all attendees. To all, thank you.
Nice work guys!
this is just Amazing!
Thanks
Leaving a customer satisfied is the best thing we could do when offering services. So, customer service must be good, fast and reliable.
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