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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 »

ParaFest Panel: Support as a Differentiator - Bringing Customers to the Forefront

This morning ParaFest ‘10 started off with a strong line-up of customer panelists weighing in on everything from how to best integrate Chat into your support mix to establishing a “customer happiness index.”

Panelists Tammy Woodruff (Coremetrics, and one of this year’s Legend Maker award winners), Scott Montgomery (e-MDs), Doug Young, (finalsite), Hugh Ujhazy (Hitachi Data System) and Jon Landau (Huddle.net) offered plenty of practical advice and predictions.

As far as making customer support a competitive differentiator, Doug Young probably said it best: “In our business there are lots of lower-priced options, but our support is a big selling point and justifies our price point. For us, customer support is not a cost, but a real part of the product.”

The session wrapped up with each panelist asked to give just one parting piece of advice for fellow Paraturians. Some good stuff we’ll share in a future post.

Keynoter Doug Lipp at ParaFest Says Customer Service is no Magic Act

Doug Lipp, author and internationally-acclaimed expert  on leadership, customer service and change management, just completed his keynote at ParaFest ’10 this evening.

Formerly the Head of Training at Disney’s Corporate Headquarters, Doug provided the famous Disney University “Traditions” program and developed leadership courses for Disney executives. Read more »

Parature CEO Opens ParaFest '10 with General Session Welcome Address

Parature CEO, Tim Davenport delivered the conference welcome address during general session of ParaFest ‘10, the company’s sixth and largest annual users’ conference. ParaFest ‘10 began Tuesday, May 4 and will continue through Thursday, May 6, 2010 at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Las Vegas. This customer focused conference is enabling Parature users from around the world to gain invaluable knowledge from industry experts and thought leaders, while networking with colleagues and peers.

Mr. Davenport’s dynamic and compelling welcome address began with highlights of Parature success in 2009, then continued to set the stage for 2010 and what to expect from this year’s conference. Specifically, he spoke to the value of social media channels as they relate to the customer experience and with it, the unveiling of Parature for Facebook™. Read more »

Parature for Facebook

The 6^th Annual ParaFest kicked off at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas this afternoon with a record-setting 170-plus in attendance. CEO Tim Davenport set the stage for the event and a big announcement, describing Parature’s commitment to “extending the customer support perimeter” in this era of social media.  It came through loud and clear.  The new mantra for Parature is “be where your customers are.” And clearly social media is redefining where our customers are.

Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Duke Chung then introduced the new offering that “will revolutionize the way you’ll provide support in Facebook.”  Parature for Facebook enables customers to be where their customers are (400 million of them), engage in conversation and deliver quality support right from your company’s Facebook fan page. Parature is first in the industry to bring this functionality to the market. Watch video of the announcement.

Parature customers can monitor Facebook wall conversations, posts and comments in real time and create a new ticket for any post in just one click. 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 »