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

There are two types of links for Ticket Attachments that can appear in ticket email notifications: Secure or Unsecure. The unsecure link allows anyone to download the file. The secure link will restrict who can download the file based on whether they have visibility of the ticket from the Service Desk or Portal.

To select which type of link to include in ticket email notifications, just add/replace the existing link with the corresponding variable into the Customer or CSR email template. Read more »

Webinar: Why Customer Service is NOT Enough

Today’s customers want an experience that engages them and gives them a reason to remain connected to you. Their mindset is one that is fickle, demanding, vocal and not very loyal.

In this webinar, customer service expert, Lisa Ford outlines her strategies for improving the customer experience.

• Go beyond average service to a relationship
• Ask tough questions to examine the quality of your experience
• Learn the customer connection rules
• Focus the culture on everyday service excellence
• Create a team that is inspired to keep customers loyal

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

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

Knowledge for Your Knowledgebase

Often times, companies fall short of having the appropriate resources for managing their Knowledgebase, such as a Technical Writer or Administrator. Sometimes knowledgebases are even managed by more than one individual. With this mix of resources, it can frequently be difficult to collaborate and maintain a clean and informational knowledgebase. These obstacles shouldn’t deter you from striving for a robust knowledgebase though. Implementing specific practices and procedures can help improve your knowledgebase and maintain its prime condition.

Let’s start with the basics-what are the best steps in reviewing a knowledgebase article and its location? Begin by considering folder structure and layout. What questions do your users ask the most? What items are they most likely to look for when navigating to the knowledgebase? Organize your folders based on the needs of your end user, whether this is structuring them for beginners to experts or starter information to advanced techniques. Start with analyzing how your customers will read the knowledgebase; this will be your most helpful tool in folder layout. Read more »

Ticket email notifications act as alerts to Customers or CSRs that an update has been made to the ticket. Extend the usefulness of email notifications by including information the recipient is interested in.

• Ticket Fields
  Do your customers reply to tickets by email? Do your customers have multiple open tickets at the same time? If your answer is YES to both questions, you may want to include some ticket fields to remind them about the issue they submitted.

Ticket Fields

Moving the Needle on Customer Satisfaction Ratings

More than once during my management career, I have been involved in successfully “turning around” customer satisfaction levels in customer contact centers. It isn’t an accident, nor is it just the result of hard work – it is a reproducible process that has more science behind it than you might think. Here are what I feel are the four keys to changing customer satisfaction levels.

1. Move from smile training to skills training
   The phrase “customer service training” has nearly half a million hits on Google. But many of these involve attitude-based “smile training.” In my experience – and more important, according to research – you need customer skills training targeted to specific contact center scenarios. So instead of hiring a motivational speaker to teach courtesy, teach people skills like active listening, defusing anger, delivering bad news, and managing customer expectations. More important, follow service leaders like FedEx and Southwest Airlines  and use role-playing for the most common scenarios in your organization. Read more »

Parature Day with "I Wear Your Shirt"

This blog was originally posted by “I Wear Your Shirt” Thanks to our friends Jason and Evan! Great videos guys!

Good customer service is the best marketing you can do. Parature offers software for customer service including customer support help desk software, knowledge base, case management, and trouble ticket helpdesk software. So what does that mean?

Parature gives your company the ability to reduce the cost of supporting your customers through software and support. Their on-demand software is custom tailored to your website and your customers will never know the difference. Join companies and organizations like Citrix, Rosetta Stone, IGN.com, Colorado State and many more that use Parature’s software. Read more »

How IGN is Optimizing Self-Service for First Contact Resolution

Chris Henderson, Senior Manager, Customer Service at video gaming giant IGN Entertainment (a division of Fox), spoke at ParaFest last month and shared some great tips.

She’s been with IGN since 1997 and, as a video gamer herself, really knows her customers. And she’s proven time and time again that you can achieve high rates of first contact resolution even with tight staffing restraints.

Here are just a few tips:

1. When it comes to designing your portal, design for success. Design your support center with the same care your company uses presenting their product. Read more »

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 »