For the sixteen years I’ve been working in and around the Customer Service business, I’d always bought into the notion that to delight customers was to win their loyalty. Year after year, conference after conference, company outing after company outing—some variation of the ‘we have to delight our customers to win their hearts and minds’ was repeated. 

There wasn’t a contact center or rental car lobby I’d enter that didn’t have some poster with a metamorphic image proclaiming what it means to ‘strive for excellence’ in customer service or ‘go beyond’ to do our very best for customers. It wasn’t uncommon for these slogans to appear in lunchrooms, mission statements, even employee badges. Turns out, what we think about delighting customers and what customers really want are two very different things.

I take inspiration for that statement in the research that the Corpor... read more >

Why do employees often take the rap for bad customer experiences? We often hear: 

“They lack training." "There is too much turn over; low pay means low motivation." "We didn’t hire the right people, and they just don’t care.” This seems to indicate that with a little training and the right person, customer experience would be great. In most cases the person saying this should look in the mirror because evidence shows that poor customer service is often not the employees’ fault. Truth is, companies often demoralize employees and undermine their efforts.

So, if we want to find the root source for bad service, where should we look? Recently, I wrote a blog about how service design and strategy are crucial. Bad service design along with untested business rules can crush employee morale. 

Let’s look at two more factors that can make or break employees serving customers—culture... read more >

There is a fundamental shift underway in how consumers interact with businesses. According to research from Ovum on consumer preferences for customer service, the use of email, web chat, web self-service, social media, mobile and SMS for customer service have more than doubled in the past two years. And, they expect these conversations to continue, at the same time consumers rely upon picking up the telephone to call an agent to resolve the same issue. 

What’s the secret to interacting with your voice customers with emerging customer preferences across social, mobile and web?

New Channels = New Challenges Companies now have an opportunity to better engage customers through a variety of communications channels and devices.  These new opportunities come with significant challenges, as individual voice, web, mobile and social channels require different technologies, processes, and resources.  For example, companies need to meet the need... read more >

In the article,   Advertising Analytics 2.0   that appears in the March 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review, Wes Nichols makes the case that, "Marketers now have an unprecedented ability to fine-tune their allocation decisions while making course corrections in real time." The idea in brief, “The days of correlating sales data with a few dozen discrete advertising variables are over. Many of the world's biggest companies are now deploying analytics 2.0, a set of capabilities that can chew through terabytes of data and hundreds of variables in real time to reveal how advertising touch points interact dynamically. The result: 10% to 30% improvements in marketing performance.”

Nichols lays out three broad activities:

Attribution quantifies the contribution of each element of advertising. Optimization uses predictive analytics tools to run scenarios for business planning. Allocation redistributes resources across marketing... read more >

There’s been a lot written about how we bring innovation into customer service. Much of that discussion centers on how a new mobile app or technology is going to change the way companies and customers engage. While I love to see these new demonstrations, I often find the people charged with delivering customer service have two fundamental problems to deal with that technology won't. Addressing these issues can turn you from victim into customer service leader and catapult your company from laggard to customer service market leader.

Paths to Creating Victims The first issue is an organizational one. I speak with many customer service executives who continue to find themselves outflanked by either another department’s efforts to engage the customer or by a slow-moving corporate bureaucracy that is afraid of taking risks, wants everything validated by external consultants, and manages by committee what a small group should be developing requ... read more >