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

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?

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.

Metrics that Wow! How Coremetrics Became the Customer Service Model of Success

A customer-centric culture has never been more important to organizations than it is today, and the most successful customer service organizations have realized the criticality of the customer experience, as well as the need to make organizational changes to improve it.

But how do you facilitate an organizational shift? How do you recognize the need for change, develop a plan, determine customer & business impact, and get results? How do you achieve key support metrics such as?

• Customer satisfaction improved to 90%
• Agent responsiveness is up to 92%
• Agent product knowledge grew to 91%
• Customer loyalty jumped to 93%

Read more »

Download the Coremetrics success story

Every day, more than 2,000 online business sites globally – with transactions representing over $20 billion per year – rely on Coremetrics to optimize their online marketing.

Most significantly, the company’s clients are happy. Yet not that long ago, Coremetrics recognized it was time to take support to the next level to drive client satisfaction.

“We recognized the need to provide our clients the 24×7 help needed, but in a scalable way,” said Paige Newcombe, senior director, Global Client Services. “The metrics spoke to the need to offer new support solutions to our clients.”

Download this customer success story and discover how leading marketing optimization software provider Coremetrics increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and revenue with Web self-service.