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

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 »

Webinar - In the Customers' Shoes: How Coffee Republic Built its Brand through Great Customer Experiences

An outstanding customer experience is the key to building and maintaining a successful brand and is a competitive differentiator that facilitates customer loyalty. A great motto and one endorsed by Coffee Republic; a company that transformed a nation of tea drinkers into one obsessed with ‘triple decaf half-caf lattes’ by focusing solely on the customer experience.

This insightful webinar provides you with a real-life entrepreneurial story of customer success. Hear Sahar Hashemi, Co-founder - Coffee Republic, present ‘In the Customers’ Shoes: How Coffee Republic Built its Brand through Great Customer Experiences’; she will discuss her customer experience philosophy and how it influences building and maintaining a successful brand.  Read more »

Webinar: Why the Customer Experience Matters Most - Rosetta Stone's Customer Success Strategy

Customers have never been more important than they are today, and the most successful organizations have realized the power of the customer experience and the need to create a customer-centric culture. One such successful organization is Rosetta Stone. They have not only implemented a complete customer-centric culture, but have fully embraced it; focusing on their customers’ success. In fact, their customer support is called ‘customer success’ and their support agents are ’success agents.’ This customer-focused environment, including multi-channel customer service, enables them to further promote their philosophy of listening to their customers and becoming better.

In this webinar, join Senior Vice President, Customer Success at Rosetta Stone, Jay Topper and featured guest, customer service and customer experience expert, William Band of Forrester Research to discover how a better customer experience can improve customer loyalty and your bottom line. Read more »

Watch the webinar "The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence"

“The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence” webinar offers organizations insight into the inner workings of the Nordstrom customer service culture.

Outstanding customer service – the key to successful organizations, a competitive differentiator and a facilitator of customer loyalty – is synonymous with one of the nation’s leading fashion specialty retailers. Nordstrom, known for providing the ultimate customer service experience, has become the national standard for customer service. How did they earn this reputation? What is their philosophy? The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence will feature Robert Spector, bestselling author of The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence. Mr. Spector will break down the elements of the Nordstrom philosophy and explain how they can be adapted for virtually every kind of organization by detailing the nine management principles that have made them the gold standard for customer service. Read more »

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The customer experience has never been more important than it is in today’s service environment. Customer service is driven by the customer experience and the people inside a company provide that experience – whatever employees experience on the ‘inside’ is similar to what customers will experience ‘on the outside.’ This thought provoking white paper will compel you to ask the following:

• Is my company in alignment?
• Does every employee understand the vision?
• Do our employees love their jobs?

The Cult of the Customer explores concepts, lessons and strategies that will show you how to build a customer service culture that will make your customers and employees ‘amazing.’ Read this white paper to discover powerful customer service and experience concepts that can help increase: Read more »

How to Tell Anyone Anything - Discussing the Issue

If you have been following this blog series faithfully, you have seen the first steps in painlessly having difficult discussions with your staff: starting in a safe place, asking good questions, and acknowledging people. Now, in this final installment, we get to the fun part: getting the issue itself on the table, whether it is performance, attitude, or even personal issues like hygiene.

When you do these first three steps well, you will find that you can now be extraordinarily frank about whatever you want to discuss – IF you do the following two things:

Step 1: Boil the issue down into facts

I am a huge baseball fan. And do you know what my friends usually say when their favorite teams lose? Things like “they stunk” or “they choked.” Here’s the problem: these terms are not only threatening, they are completely useless. There is no such thing as an anti-stink drill or a non-choking procedure. What really happened is that their team dropped a critical pop-fly in the eighth inning, or the opposing team had a more accurate pitcher on the mound – and *that* is what you can actually change. Read more »

How to Tell Anyone Anything - The Power of Acknowledgement

When you coach someone, you are probably hoping it will go something like this: first, you ask someone to change something. Then the other person politely nods their head and says that forthwith they will start logging their cases better, being nicer to customers, coming in on time, showering more often, or whatever.

But it doesn’t ever seem to work that way, does it? Instead, you often hear excuses, defenses, and their side of the story. And I am here to tell you that these things are all *wonderful* to hear. Why? Because they give you the chance to use the most powerful coaching tool of all: acknowledgement.

You see, the only reason that people ever argue with you, push back against you, or “yes” you without buying in is that they feel you don’t see their view of the world. Think carefully about the last time your boss called you out about something – how did you feel inside? Ring-a-ding-ding. We all contain an almost magical ability to justify and defend ourselves, no matter how “right” the other person is. Which means that our usual approach of showing people how wrong they are is generally doomed to failure. Read more »

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In this recession-driven environment, companies are clamoring to increase revenue and save costs; customer retention has never been more important.  Oddly enough, most organizations spend more on marketing to gain customers rather than to retain them.  A published study by the American Society of Quality Control asked the question “Why do customers leave companies?”  Sixty-eight percent of the respondents answered the question with the following “because of the company’s indifferent attitude to the customer.”  So how can organizations change this apathetic attitude and improve customer retention? The white paper “How to Improve Customer Retention by Building Emotionally Engaging Customer Experiences“explores building an emotional connection with your customers to not only retain them, but have them become customer advocates, recommending and staying loyal to the organization. Read more »

How to Tell Anyone Anything - Be Curious, Not Furious

Once in a great while I have the ability to read people’s minds. Since you are reading this blog, I’ll bet that you are a good supervisor of customer contact professionals. I will also bet that you wake up every morning believing that you are a nice person.

And I will bet one other thing: when someone on your team does something you wish they wouldn’t, whether it is coming in late too often or snapping at a difficult customer, you get frustrated and it shows. And then when nothing changes, you wonder what to say to them.

That is where this blog comes in. I would like to change your perspective from what to *say* to what to *ask*. Because when you start asking good questions and taking a learning posture, even in really difficult employee situations, you suddenly gain the power to create real performance change. Compare these two situations and see what I mean: Read more »

In a thriving free enterprise system such as ours, which provides consumers with a wide range of goods and services from which to choose, the most successful businesses are those that display a strong commitment to customer satisfaction. Today foreign competition as well as consumer demands are requiring greater corporate efficiency and productivity. If the United States is to remain a leader in the changing global economy, highest quality customer service must be a personal goal of every employee in business and industry.

A business built on customer service understands and anticipates the customer’s needs. It designs goods and services to meet those needs and builds products that perform to customer expectations. It then packages them carefully, labels them correctly, sells them at a fair price, delivers them as scheduled, and follows up, as necessary, to satisfy the customer. This kind of commitment to service leads to customer loyalty and to genuine improvements at the bottom line. Read more »