Customer Service News (8-21 February 2015)
15 traits of top tier support departments
From Help Scout By Gregory Ciotti
Kind words are worth much and cost little. This creates opportunity: when you can’t out-spend the competition, the solution is to out-support them.
3 questions to ask before launching live chat for customer service
From CustomersThatStick By Adam Toporek
Live chat allows organizations to assist online customers in real time. When customers run into a problem, the customer can immediately take advantage of the live chat feature, interact with reps, and hopefully have their question answered or issue resolved quickly. However, investing in a new or lightly staffed customer service channel comes at a cost. Live chat is not for every customer, or every organization.
6 ways to keep your inside sales reps motivated
From Texocc By Silky Sinha
Motivating and engaging your employees is directly linked to company revenue, employee retention and customer satisfaction. But, motivating a sales team and garnering loyalty and commitment from them is a huge challenge for many sales leaders.
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IS THE BRAND DIFFERENTIATOR
From Loyalty360 By Jim Tierney
Customer experience is such a massively important focus now for brands because they know it can be the most crucial differentiating factor in their collective goal of brand loyalty.
WANT BETTER CUSTOMER REVIEWS? BE A BETTER COMPANY
From Fast Company By Jim Tierney
Customers will tolerate being screwed over by a company much more calmly if that company gives a slice of its profits to good causes.
Customer Service News (1-7 February 2015)
BECOMING CUSTOMER-CENTRIC: 5 WAYS TO WALK THE TALK
From Entrepreneur By Adrian Davis
Value is defined and created by your customers. Therefore, your approach to value creation must begin with, and be in partnership with, and end with the customer. Adrian outlines three key steps to selling value: (1) Start with the customer, (2) Collaborate with the customer, and (3) Work with your customer.
BECOMING CUSTOMER-CENTRIC: 5 WAYS TO WALK THE TALK
From 360 Connext By Jeannine Walters
Jeannie outlines five key customer-centric ideas and tactics that should be included in any strategic play including (1) Mention customers in your KPIs, (2) Revise your communication’s strategy, (3) Keep investing in employees, (4) Stop shooting the messengers, and (5) Invite your customers into your most important meetings.
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IS THE NEW BATTLEGROUND FOR WINNING CUSTOMER LOYALTY
From B2Community By Larisa Bedgood
(B2Community) In the age of the empowered customer, you need your customers more than they need you. Consumers have more options than ever before and access to more products on more channels. Creating loyal brand advocates is no longer a matter of competing on price or product features. More so than ever before, customer experience is the new currency driving loyalty in 2015.
10 WAYS TO KEEP MAKING YOUR CLIENTS HAPPIER AND HAPPIER
From Entrepreneur By Rocco Baldassarre
According to Forest Research, it costs five times more to find a new customer than to retain a current customers. Sometimes, small changes have a big impact on how customers perceive the quality of your service and make the difference between loyalty and high churn rates. Rocco lists ten ways to increase customer retention for service businesses.
THE ULTIMATE LIST OF NET PROMOTER® BEST PRACTICE TIPS
From Genroe By Adam Ramshaw
Note that these tips pretty much apply to any Voice of the Customer or Customer feedback (but not market research) process. So regardless of whether you are using Customer Effort Score, Customer Satisfaction or NPS® you can apply them to your business. For example, NPS is an operational tool, NPS is not just a metric, involve customer facing employees, and create a customer service improvement team.
Customer Centricity
Customer Service News (4-10 January 2015)
5 Best Practices for Exceptional Customer Service
From SalesForce By Emily Stanford
Customers are more connected, informed, and empowered than ever before. Customer expectations are very high demanding businesses adapt their customer service strategy accordingly including interacting with customers via their preferred channel, the move to mobile support, leveraging content, utilizing gamification to improve agent performance, and hiring an A-team.
Defining the “Customer Experience”
From LinkedIn By Don Peppers
Before you start the year with ambitions of a “Great” Customer Experience, we may very well need to answer one basic question. What is “Customer Experience”?
Don answers this question in a very detailed manner by breaking down the term’s truest definition, “The totality of a customer’s individual interactions with a brand, over time.” A good read to start your year!
How to Make Customer Experience Your Greatest Strength
From Inc. By Christina Desmarais
If you read Don’s article, you will love how this one gets you closer to your goal. Christina gives us tips on how to actually make “Customer Experience” happen.
These tips can help you perform as the customers go through every possible touch point of your company. May it be the initial interaction, or the post transaction, these tips have you covered.
She Lied To Me: A Great Customer Service Experience Turns Ugly
From Hyken By Shep Hyken
Shep reminds us of a very important policy in Customer Service that one should never forget; there is NO lying in Customer Service.