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

True Questions from the Front Lines of Customer Support and the Answers from Rich Gallagher

The webinar “Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You: True Tales from the Front Lines of Customer Support” was attended by hundreds of customer service and support professionals who submitted numerous questions for Rich G. during and prior to the webinar. Due to the time constraints of the event, Rich was unable to answer all of those great questions; however he has been gracious enough with his time to answer each and every one which we are posting in a two part series here. Read first part here.

Whether you attended the webinar or not, you may find that Rich’s answers to these questions may also help you turn your challenging customer situations into positive customer experiences.

Congratulations to Rick Bruce, Jason Lorenz and L. Graves who submitted the winning stories for a copy of Rich Gallagher’s latest book “How to Tell Anyone Anything: Breakthrough Techniques for Handling Difficult Conversations at Work.” Read more »

True Questions from the Front Lines of Customer Support and the Answers from Rich Gallagher

The webinar “Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You: True Tales from the Front Lines of Customer Support” was attended by hundreds of customer service and support professionals who submitted numerous questions for Rich G. during and prior to the webinar. Due to the time constraints of the event, Rich was unable to answer all of those great questions; however he has been gracious enough with his time to answer each and every one which we are posting in a two part series here.

Whether you attended the webinar or not, you may find that Rich’s answers to these questions may also help you turn your challenging customer situations into positive customer experiences.

Congratulations to Rick Bruce, Jason Lorenz and L. Graves who submitted the winning stories for a copy of Rich Gallagher’s latest book “How to Tell Anyone Anything: Breakthrough Techniques for Handling Difficult Conversations at Work.”

If you did not attend the webinar, we invite you to watch it now. Share your thoughts and continue the discussion here. Read more »

Webinar: Getting Your Worst Customers to Love You

Most customer support teams are good at handling routine transactions. But what about a customer who is threatening to sue you? Or asks to have you fired? Or an employee who got so fed up with IT support that he smashed his laptop and then ran over it?

All of these are real situations that support professionals reported in a recent survey sponsored by Supportindustry.com and Parature. This interactive webinar, teaming communications skills expert and bestselling author Rich Gallagher with Parature’s VP of Marketing Gary McNeil, looks at how to handle situations like these and more. The open panel discussion format will examine the best practices, tools and technology behind handling your worst-case scenarios. Read more »

"Best Practices in Customer Service" Webinar Series

Delivered by the industry’s leading minds, this thought leadership series is designed to serve as a valuable resource to provide insight into customer service best practices and industry trends. The webinars in this series are ‘must attend’ events for any organization committed to improving the customer experience. We invite you to register for one or register for all depending on the topics that interest you.

Customer service industry experts, Robert Spector – bestselling author, Rich Gallagher of Point of Contact Group, Paige Newcombe of Coremetrics, John Ragsdale of Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), Dr. Natalie Petouhoff of Forrester Research, Jay Topper of Rosetta Stone, Sahar Hashemi of Coffee Republic, Lorraine Grubbs-West of Lessons in Loyalty and Southwest Airlines, and Lisa Ford – customer service expert will focus on current industry technologies, best practices and trends that are key for organizations to improve their support processes to improve the customer experience. 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 »

Watch this webinar

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 »

Download the White Paper

In today’s environment, the customer has never been more important - customer satisfaction and retention are critical to any organization’s success, and customer service is essential to that end. The most efficient and successful customer support departments are versatile; providing their customers with a preferred method of support. Today’s customers are tech-savvy and require so much more than simple phone support. Integrated multi-channel service options, such as self-service via knowledgebases and downloads, live chat sessions, mobile applications, ticket systems, social networks, and easy issue escalation paths via the Web must be implemented to empower support teams to provide the level of service that customers expect. 

The white paper entitled “Multi-Channel Service: Enhancing the Customer Experience” is available for download now.

The webinar features John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research for the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA). His area of expertise is in creating strategies for improving the overall customer experience and services operation through technology.

If you missed the webinar, the recorded version is available here. Share your thoughts and continue the discussion here.

A copy of this presentation is available in our SlideShare profile.

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.

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 »