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

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 »

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 »

We understand the importance of being able to have a dashboard view of all your Parature reports in one place. So, we’ve teamed up with another Vienna, VA-based company – Sitscape – to deliver a new dashboard experience for all Parature Service Desk Users. With SitScape, you can create personalized dashboards of your Parature system in just minutes.

In your SitScape dashboard, you can assemble Parature reports, tickets, chat, rich media apps like Parature Video, track knowledgebase content and include document views as well. You can even track Parature’s Facebook page from the dashboard. Read more »

Watch the recorded version here

With the downturn in the economy, should companies be spending on Customer Service? Unequivocally, yes. It’s the number one initiative that directly affects a company’s most valuable asset: customers.

What should companies invest in? Customer Service Social Media – It reduces operational costs and improves first call resolution, customer loyalty as well as provides a host of other benefits to marketing, sales, product development, and other critical departments. Companies that want to transform their relationships with customers need to move Social Media to the top of their priority list. It should be the number one customer service initiative in 2009. Read more »

Heavy support traffic

Support traffic can spike for any number of reasons: a less-than-perfect launch or an unexpected bug in a product is discovered, a new ad campaign takes off, or maybe a hot new product is released.

That’s what Chris Henderson, Senior Manager – Customer Service for IGN Network faced. IGN is an online entertainment community of Web sites all centered around the busy world of video games. And in Chris’ case, last September three of IGN’s most popular games all went live in the same month. Her challenge — how to help all these customers at once, without driving up wait times. Read more »

Anger is one of our most powerful and intimate emotions. It is very uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of it. And yet most of us have been taught very little about defusing an angry customer. So most of us simply endure these situations – holding the phone six inches from our ear, making excuses, or going silent – and we feel like deer frozen in the headlights, while all too often the other person gets angrier and angrier. But the good news is that with the right techniques, these situations can be understood and managed.

So why do customers get angry? Since we have all been there ourselves, you probably know the answer: it is usually because we feel that people are not paying attention to us, so we confront them to make them pay attention. This need for attention and a sense of justice drives three key steps for defusing angry customer situations that I call the Triple-A technique: Read more »