Customer Service

Smarter organizations today realize that attending to the quality of customer experience could just be the differentiator that they were on the lookout for. When Patricia Seybold introduced "Quality of Customer Experience," the entire world sat up and noticed. Why QCE? There area several reasons: QC...

The majority of today's contact centers employ well-designed, sophisticated self-service strategies, but even with a highly successful self-service application boasting a high call-completion rate, people will always need to talk to people. That is why there will always be a need for live service in...

What if you answered the phone one day to a friendly voice offering tech support for some software that had been troubling you? "Not possible," you'd say. We all know the drill with technical difficulties. We call up the software company during business hours and then sit on hold only to get an agen...

There's been much ado about social media as the latest, greatest customer service tool -- but all that ado does little to help a corporation steer the conversation around perils and toward profits. So, buzz aside, where is the leverage in a set of tools that is seemingly all talk and little substanc...

The relationship between a business and its customers is determined by the interchanges that occur between them. These interactions are complex. They occur over a wide range of communication channels, such as phone, email, Web and text, including some outside of organizational control like social me...

As the population ages, financial institutions and other service providers will have to learn to adapt their marketing approaches to appeal to a sector that has high disposable income and substantial spending power. In some cases, they will also have physical limitations that will impede online acti...

While CRM has always been "social," it's now starting to get "Social" -- in other words, it's starting to tap into the ways customers have seized control of their relationships with the people they buy from through technology, participation and the ability to reach more people -- and more-important ...

Contact center managers have started to think beyond "service levels," "average talk time" and "wait time." Slowly yet steadily, FCR has found its way into customer operations dashboards. A dual function of customer experience and contact center efficiency, FCR accurately portrays the overall health...

Excellent online customer service may be worth $17.3 billion in 2010, according to a new Ovum survey commissioned by StellaService. That's the round figure for the 10.7 percent premium the report suggests customers are willing to pay for good customer service. The survey was conducted across multipl...

Throughout the economic downtown, business managers heard virtually every cost-cutting measure, from furlough days to reducing IT investment. As we see shoots of recovery, we are reminded that no company can cost-cut its way to excellence; without some focus on the customer, eventually service start...

Service is becoming perhaps the most important leg of CRM. It's not just me saying it -- it's many others, including Paul Greenberg, who literally wrote the book on CRM. With the economy in the state it's in, that makes sense; keeping the customers you already have has never been more important. How...

The big question as we move through 2010 may be, "What does the future hold?" But really, the past year will give us a clearer glimpse into the future than any crystal ball possibly could. 2010 is the year of the customer. December 31st, 2009, marked the end of one of the toughest years companies h...

The commercial airline business -- ever sensitive to booms ands busts -- is struggling to maintain traffic in the short run while also trying to build a customer base for the future. Rather than compete on price and schedule alone, airlines are moving away from a mass marketing and commodity approac...

For businesses serving the public, employees are the face of the company. Likewise, the manner in which employees interact with customers shapes their perception of the business and its brand. Ultimately, customer loyalty is built through positive interactions and high-quality customer service that ...

Businesses all over the world have made enormous investments in service -- both in people and in technology. The amount of thought dedicated to service is enormous, and the time spent trying to make service divisions more efficient is countless. Guess what? Most of this money, time and effort has be...