Human and Automated: Customer Experience Management at Its Best
According to customer support technology reviews firm Software Advice and research they conducted, manually trying to manage customer relationships and consumer complaints through email and spreadsheets is going the route of rotary-dial phones! What was once an expectation in large business is becoming stand fare for small business owners as well. Integrated software solutions are…
Holiday Relationships – Focusing on More than the Sale
We are in the throes of the frenzied shopping season, so it seems timely that we remind ourselves of several truths about why we should focus more on customer relationships and less on sales: People want to be viewed as important and unique. (Jumping into a sales process without taking the time to understand the…
Wireless Charging at a Starbucks Near You! Partnering in the Removal of Pain/Drain Points
You have seen us. If you are honest you will admit to being one of us. We are the people trying to appear inconspicuous as we feverishly look for an available power outlet to recharge our laptops, tablets, or cellular phones. We are easily located in a wide number of locations including airports and Starbucks…
Segment Your Service Experiences!
Customers aren’t always right and they certainly aren’t equal, but…customers are always paying the bills! I am stuck by two groups of business leaders – those who treat customers as an after thought to profits or products and those that treat every customer equally. I have always ascribed to Peter Drucker’s adage that we are…
How Sorry Are You? Keys to Driving Satisfaction While Resolving Customer Issues
In addition to their products and services, I am a fan of Zendesk because they openly share pertinent customer experience information. Unlike others who report customer experience results, Zendesk’s data is not the byproduct of surveys but instead emerges from customer interactions with over 25,000 businesses in 140 countries. Here are some high level findings…
Easy Wins
Ahhh, summer – a season of sunshine, valiant efforts to slow one’s life down, and vacation travel. It’s hard not to notice, however, how our great escape efforts are often marked by so much preparatory and participatory stress. Marketing guru (and a man who was kind enough to endorse my Zappos Experience book) Seth Godin recently posted…
Why it’s in your own interest to forget your self-interest
The modern world inundates us with a constant flow of information. Not wanting to miss anything, our tendency is to scan the clutter for ways to improve our businesses. Studying best practices, following experts on Twitter, regularly checking in with our favorite bloggers, we ultimately seek to be better and do better by our customers. …
How to Balance Service Standards with Empowerment
I recently had a conversation with someone who just changed customer-facing jobs. Beyond the dynamics of salary, benefits, and the myriad of other factors that influenced her decision to move on to the next professional opportunity, the way she described her former position stuck with me: “I didn’t like that I couldn’t see customer issues…
True or False? Measuring Performance Leads to Better Service
If you said “Yes” – you are either amazingly astute or you had a chance to look at the recently released Q1 Zendesk Benchmark report. In either case – Congratulations! Zendesk, the maker of customer service software that streamlines customer support and fosters self-service and engagement, studied the use of analytics and their impact on…