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 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.

Customer Service News (28 Dec - 3 Jan)

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH, AN AIRLINE TICKET GONE AWRY

From New York Times, By David Segal

Apparently even United Airlines has the uncanny ability to test the patience of a monk! It’s hard to believe United’s CRM system and procedures are so rudimentary resulting in such an awful customer experience!

Comcast customer spends four hours cancelling his account 

From Techcrunch, By John Biggs

Not a good start to 2015 for comcast when customer spends four hours on phone trying to cancel his service. Rotten customer service training, unacceptable processes and procedures, crappy product portfolio and pricing strategy, and a futile customer retention strategy. When will big companies ever learn?

 

HOW THIS COMPANY MADE ITS CUSTOMER SUPPORT 'MORE HUMAN'

From Entrepreneur, By Jonathan Blum

Fitocracy, a New York-based online fitness platform, had to solve a tough business problem: how to provide “more human” customer support when its community of 1.5 million users were interested in working with one of its roughly 100 personal fitness trainers. 

 

UBER THREATENS A FEMALE JOURNALIST

From DailyTech, By Jason Mick

Uber definitely made a major fail on this one after its senior executive, Emil Michael, made a repulsive remark in reaction to a report that his company is sexist. When news about Uber drivers’ sexual and physical assaults on its passengers came out, its PR team released statements to discredit the victims’ accounts with gender discriminating comments such as being “drunk” and “provocatively dressed” which may have led to the assaults. Michael singles out female journalist Sarah Lacy, author and editor at PandoDaily, that he will have her and her family stalked and harassed if she continues to criticize Uber.

Customer Service News (2-8 November 2014)

Here's a collection of interesting Customer Service News from around the web (2-8 November 2014).

Singapore Airlines Jets into First Place Thanks to Customer Service

From The National

If you want to elevate your business to a higher ground, look no further than Singaporean Airlines.

It's mandatory for flight attendants to possess great customer service skills, but Singaporean Airlines trains their employees to be number 1. This means they out-class and out-serve competitions such as Dubai-based airlines and Asian luxury flights. 

Read more here

Should Your Business Care About Customer Service in Social Media?

From Helpsocial

This is a very perplexing question for many companies. However, the majority of your customers are on social media, and it would be foolish to not have a strategy and engage with this channel..

Read more here

5 Tips for Delivering Excellent Customer Service through Email

From Social Media Today, By Elizabeth Victor 

A number of businesses are tasked to face customer service responsibilities through email and though it may seem easy to some, it requires a high level of conversational skills to do it well. Elizabeth gives us five amazing tips to succeed on this very artful task. 

Read more here

6 Ways Social Media Is Key to Your Customer Service Strategy

From Business 2 Community, By Ben Puzzuoli 

A great factor Ben mentions is Immediate Response Time, and it's one of the most (if not the most) valuable factors why we’re using social media. There are five more factors, you should check out too.

Read more here

3 E’s of Intelligent Customer Service

From YFS Magazine, By Arundhuti Roy

There are plenty of ways to execute a great customer service plan and they all deliver great results, but here we have 3 E’s that can make Customer Service a little bit easier for you.

Engage, Enhance, and Elevate; these are the three ways to get that engine running. It's important to work hard on your skills, but never forget to work smart.

Read more here