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

Challenged by managing & motivating a culturally diverse customer service team a continent away?

I am a customer service manager at Voice123.com, and a challenge I face is managing the staff we employ in Bogota, Colombia from the offices we have in New York City, NY. When I took this job as Customer Service/Quality Assurance/Blogger/Public Relations manager at Voice123, I understood ahead of time what challenges were ahead of me. I was not told what the challenges were, but my past experience in traveling to other countries filled me with the knowledge of how businesses in the United States were viewed internationally. I also understood that there are countries that view the United States as ‘1st World’, as if to say that their own country must be ‘3rd World’ by comparison. Luckily, traveling has also taught me that many times people who believe their country is inferior to the United States, may simply need to be reminded as to how the world is pretty much the same no matter where you go. Back in 1992, I read a book called ‘Think and Grow Rich’ by Napoleon Hill. In this book, he describes very basic needs shared by all human beings, or at least, that is my interpretation of his writing behind his Philosophy of Success: Read more »

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Those who manage people know that it is often challenging to provide ‘constructive criticism’ or feedback without causing their employees to become defensive. All too often human nature and an instinctive need to defend ourselves takes over, resulting in resentment or resistance to suggestions for change.

This webinar features Rich Gallagher - Author of What to Say to a Porcupine & How to Tell Anyone Anything: Breakthrough Techniques for Handling Difficult Conversations a Work – exploring a fresh new approach to coaching customer service professionals. An approach based on recent developments in the psychology of how we communicate with each other focusing on strength-based coaching versus deficit-based coaching. Read more »

Can customer feedback help?

Customer satisfaction, an important factor in increasing customer loyalty; essential to success in today’s challenging economy. What can organizations do to increase customer satisfaction and in turn their loyalty? Feedback may be instrumental to the cause.

Companies of all types have long been requesting feedback on their products or services. Companies like Amazon.com, Best Buy and Wal-Mart ask you top rate their products by brand, Netflix asks you to rate their movies, restaurants ask you to rate their food and service, and hotels ask you to rate the quality of your stay all in an effort to determine what their customers like and don’t like, what makes them happy and unhappy, and what they can do to improve their product or service. So then, why shouldn’t organizations ask for this same type of customer feedback within their customer service and support channels? A customer’s support experience can often determine their loyalty to your brand or service. Read more »

Mobile Applications for Customer Service

Mobile devices, such as the iPhone and iTouch, are very popular among tech-savvy consumers, thus mobile applications are in high demand. So, with this trend among the mainstream does it make sense to have mobile customer service/support applications for those always on-the-go and attached daily to their mobile devices?

Mobile applications can provide an easy-to-use, efficient mechanism to report incidents when and where they occur or a convenient method to search a knowledgebase for on-demand information. Nationwide, for example, has developed a mobile application that will guide drivers through the steps to take after an accident. Their mobile app capabilities include calling emergency services, helping drivers collect and exchange accident info, locating Nationwide agents, taking and storing accident photos, and helping their insured’s begin the claims process to name a few. “The Nationwide Mobile app for iPhone is a great example of our commitment to developing innovative solutions that help simplify our customers’ lives.” Read more »

Is Twitter Part of Your Customer Service Strategy?

Popular social media channel – Twitter – provides an open forum for customers to air their grievances, give praise or simply inquire about an organization’s products, services or support.  These customer sentiments and inquiries are valuable sources of information and smart companies will take the opportunity to collect, measure and act upon this knowledge.  

Insight into the perception of your brand, products, or services provides the ideal opportunity for customer service teams to step up their service techniques.  In a Mashable’s article “HOW TO:  Use Twitter for Customer Service” they nicely articulate the major tenants of customer service and how they relate to Twitter:  problem resolution – it’s the main goal of customer service and Twitter provides a platform for a fast, easy response possibly in a single tweet; Read more »

What can chat do for an organization?

Today’s tech-savvy, IM generation of consumers requires multi-channel support offerings and increasingly their preferred support channel is live chat. But other than ensuring that customers receive an immediate response to their inquiry what can chat do for an organization?

Organizations can leverage chat in both sales and support to increase customer satisfaction and generate revenue. Chat can enable support teams to deliver service and support where and when customers need it – whether it be in-game, in-application, a Web form, a shopping cart, or as an escalation channel for self-service – as well as providing an opportunity to generate sales leads, increase Web sales conversion rates and increase revenue by proactively inviting prospects or customers to chat with available sales or support representatives. Read more »

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iWin, leading online developer, publisher and distributor of casual games for the mass market, enabled on-demand customer service software to empower their players with self-service support, 24/7 from anywhere in the world; providing efficient and effective support through targeted knowledgebase articles and the use of video.

In the webinar David Schroeder, Director of Customer Care discussed:

• How to persuade users to try self-help options before contacting your support staff
• How to use video to increase support portal adoption rates and reduce operating costs
• How to make your support portal easy to understand through the use of video Read more »

There’s little doubt that video technology helps engage customers and is one of the most powerful communication tools today. Particularly with the growing popularity of YouTube, more and more users gravitate to online videos for customer support. Naturally some companies are more sophisticated than others at implementing videos into their customer support operation.

David Schroeder from iWin offers a few tips, starting with the customer service portal. iWin is an award-winning developer, publisher and distributor of casual games for the mass market, (including the popular series Jewel Quest®) with more than 5.6M unique visitors every month. Read more »

Customer Support

Ask James Watson, Director of Customer Relations for Webs.com about support tickets and he’ll tell you they’re the absolute best form of two-way communication between you and your customers.

Webs.com is a social publishing platform and is one of the top 80 most trafficked sites on the Web today. His nine-member support team gets on average 13,000 service requests a month.

James and his team went about changing their customer support mindset from a “numbers” game focused solely on deflecting inquiries to reduce costs … to using the tickets to really listen to users. So rather than judging success just on how many tickets were resolved and how fast, James challenges his team to do more than simply resolve the issue and move on to the next ticket. Read more »

Young gaming customers are a special group, and their customer support needs are in a class by themselves.

Perhaps few understand this better than Steve Wilson, Customer Service Manager at Cartoon Network’s MMOG – FusionFall, whose customers are primarily boys age 8-13.

To determine what kind of customer support would best serve this audience, Steve’s team turned to focus groups. (To get the most participation, the focus group asked a lot of questions about the game itself, then Steve’s group ‘snuck in’ some questions about their support needs.) Not surprisingly, the findings showed that traditional support vehicles – phone, knowledgebase – didn’t work for this group. Instead, they discovered several recurrent themes. Read more »