Customer Service

Remember the bad old days of customer self-service? Automated systems would present you with five or more different options -- any one of which could lead to five or more other options. With touchtone systems, accidentally pressing the wrong number at a prompt could result in instant death by discon...

Aretha Franklin didn't intend it, but she offered a powerful business lesson when she sang "R.E.S.P.E.C.T -- find out what it means to me." Customer relationship management has evolved into customer experience management, and respect is the biggest part of providing an excellent customer experience....

Imagine this all-too-common scenario: A customer needs to add a new line to his cellphone plan. He's had a number of reception and phone issues, and he will stay with his current company only if offered a very good deal. However, the agent -- unaware of the prolonged dissatisfaction and insensitive ...

Last week, I made the suggestion that we have overdone our reliance on customer experience as a customer intimacy tool -- something that I stand by. The idea of customer experience looms large, and there is no denying its power as a theme in CRM. But if our interpretation of customer experience is...

The last 10 years has brought sea changes to the customer service industry from both operations and technology standpoints. Organizations have moved away from traditional domestic live phone support toward new technologies and business models such as interactive voice response, intelligent scripting...

Last week I was doing some research for a speech, and I remembered something from a weekend stint at a cooking school that I decided to run down. I was trying to make a point about customer experience when it occurred to me that the idea has ancient roots. Hospitality law is a body of law that deal...

Driven by competitive pressure to improve the customer experience, organizations are moving toward an online self-service model that pushes the boundaries of electronic information presentation, or e-presentment. Yet as they embrace this model, new challenges await, including how to ensure customer...

Increasing contact center efficiency has always been a clear path to cutting costs, regardless of economic conditions. Increasing productivity and doing more with existing resources are now more important than ever, but cutting call center costs does not have to result in poorer customer service. Un...

For decades, companies have leveraged technology with the twin goals of reducing the cost of customer support while improving its quality and dependability. This is reflected in the significant investments many organizations have made in providing information, products and services through self-serv...

There's a saying in the business world: Customer acquisition is an investment, but customer retention delivers profitability. So, how do you retain your customers and earn their loyalty? It's like any successful relationship: If you want customers to be loyal to you, you must be loyal to them and de...

Business schools have been discussing General Motor's loss of market shar for decades already, and the added denouement of the company's bankruptcy filing will no doubt drive many academic papers for decades to come. The roots of GM's fall from grace are numerous, and it would be incorrect to attrib...

Sarah Betesh's career in customer service began in box office call centers at venues such as the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia. She moved on to Tickets.com and Vertical Alliance, at one point becoming a call center manager. However, in spite of her success, Betesh left her call center care...

Not that long ago, the outsourcing of customer service to home-based agents was a small niche category, viewed as not quite on par with a bricks-and-mortar call center operation. For a number of reasons, that perception is changing -- starting with the lower costs involved and ending with the growin...

Consona offers a line of enterprise resource management and customer relationship management software that is made up of parts that are more recognizable than the whole. Remember Onyx? It belongs to Consona. Same with Knova and, more recently, SupportSoft. Over the last few years, Consona has been s...

Several years ago, while selling software in the British telecom market, I met the CMO of a smallish network operator. He described the issues his business was facing, and when I asked him his churn rate, he replied, almost casually, that it was "about normal for our industry: 37 percent." He must ...