Customer Service

Jeff Hasen, Hipcricket's CMO, recently had what he called his "10 millionth" bad customer experience with Comcast. It's galling enough to be treated poorly by a company when you buy just about all of its services, as Hasen does with Comcast. Worse, though, is when you are a mobile CRM expert, as Ha...

A marketing campaign by Southwest Airlines to mark the growth of its Facebook fan base to 3-million turned into an unmitigated PR nightmare last Friday. Southwest offered discounted flights that day to celebrate the social media milestone. Unfortunately, customers who tried to take advantage of the ...

A company's reputation is based on the customer's experience. Fixing or preventing problems is half of the service equation; communicating with customers is the other half. Customer service is as important, if not more important than the immediate resolution of the problem. An integral part of the c...

Social media sites are all about having conversations, and that's true for businesses as well as individuals. The trick for businesses is knowing how and when to engage in these conversations -- and how to keep up with them. Like any conversation, listening is important, and it's one way that busine...

Kana plans to build out its customer service experience management bona fides with its recent acquisition of contact center provider Ciboodle from the Sword Group. The point of the acquisition is to weave together Ciboodle's chief strengths -- its process-based customer contact management platform,...

Travel always seems to elicit great customer service stories -- that is, great stories from my perspective as a person who writes about CRM; not great as in "my experience while traveling was wonderful, stress-free and restored my faith in humanity." As fodder for columns, they're great. They're o...

Avaya has added new products and enhanced existing ones in its Customer Experience Interaction Management portfolio. The overarching goal of the changes was to allow users to reach out to customers via any channel the customers chose -- for example, mobile application, social media or phone. Such ac...

One would almost think we have entered a stage of customer service nirvana: Two industry categories not ordinarily associated with high levels of customer service satisfaction -- airlines and fast food -- have garnered relatively good scores in a new American Customer Satisfaction Index report. The ...

Customer satisfaction with the airline industry took a dip in J.D. Power and Associates' 2012 North America Airline Satisfaction study after two consecutive years of improvement. The drop was not a large one; overall, passenger satisfaction dropped to 681 index points on a 1,000-point scale. In 2011...

Banks have still not made important reforms or improvements in their checking account practices, according to an update Pew Charitable Trusts made to a report it released in April 2011, "Hidden Risks: The Case for Safe and Transparent Checking Accounts." The original report set out a discouraging li...

If a customer walked into one of your brick-and-mortar stores -- assuming, for this exercise, that you have brick-and-mortar stores -- and asked if you had any Sleepytime Pajamas, how would you want your sales associate to respond? Whether you only carried Sweet Dreams Pajamas, you'd just sold out o...

Consumers face a number of hurdles if they want to switch banks -- which they increasingly do, as their banks continue to raise fees, raise minimum balances, and create entirely new charges. Some bank policies are, in fact, designed to make it challenging -- and expensive -- for customers to walk aw...

Customer service is a crucial part of the customer experience. That seems immediately obvious. And customer experience is the big buzzword right now, so companies are going bonkers revamping their customer service operations. Right? Would that it were so. Almost paradoxically, many businesses are st...

There are three things certain in life. We all know the two cited by Benjamin Franklin, but there's a third certainty that we all face regularly and have to cope with constantly. That's the certainty that we'll make mistakes. Everyone makes them; if it hasn't happened to your business, you haven't b...

The proliferation of customer service channels can be both a blessing and a curse. It can be a blessing in that companies now have more ways than ever to address customer needs and resolve customer issues, potentially leading to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. At the same tim...