Archive for the ‘customer satisfaction’ Category

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Customer Service Roundup 1/10/13

Thursday, January 10th, 2013

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ARMA has been ruminating on these customer service articles of late:

An important piece of customer service wisdom from Forbes for organizations that make traditional customer service forums difficult to use:

When companies make more traditional methods of contact easily available on their website, customers rarely turn to Twitter for customer service. Only when companies corrupt traditional channels and aren’t responsive (for example, an airline may take two days to return an email but only 20 minutes to answer a Tweet) do customers flock to social media to air their grievances. It’s not that customers enjoy asking for help in 140 characters or less. It’s that they like the way and the speed in which they are (currently) treated on social channels.

Customer service lessons to avoid, via a Huffington Post roundup.  These companies are those with the lowest American Customer Service Index scores.

For a demonstration of commendable response to critical customer feedback, look at this restaurateur’s response to community criticism’s of DC diner “The Coupe.” 

Finally, an interesting piece at Time tackles the nuance between customers who change their service providers because of bad service and those who change because an alternate provider offers better service:

If bad customer service is less of a problem, why are more people switching providers? Well, the absence of good customer service may have something to do with it. In the survey, 85% of consumers who had switched providers said that the company could have retained their business by doing something differently—resolving the problem during the first contact (rather than requiring multiple phone calls and follow-ups), for instance, or giving them some kind of reward or special treatment as thanks for being a loyal customer.

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Lessons in Customer Service

Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

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Two lessons in customer service gained through the experiences of Who’s Your Gladys? and 1to1 Media:

Could your customers be frustrated with the service they received at your company? Most will never tell you.  Do you appreciate the ones that do? The guy who talked my husband into buying deck screws probably thought he was helping Cliff do a better job of securing the deck.

… but he sure didn’t.  Marilyn Suttle offers suggestions on how to keep a loyal customer courtesy of her husband’s most recent experience at the local hardware store:

I’ll never know this with any certainty, but it seemed as if the dealership was informed of my dissatisfaction with the previous service appointment and then acted on this information. When companies listen to their customers and then demonstrate that they’ve acted on these insights in some way, this helps to strengthen customer loyalty and lifetime value. A free car wash may not seem like much, but the gesture itself meant a lot to me

And here, learn from Tom Hoffman’s experiences with Nissan about the value of listening to customer feedback.

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Customer Service 101 and Beyond

Friday, March 9th, 2012

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Finding the right way to respond to a customer’s concerns, including potentially in difficult times like in a heated moment or when your business has failed to meet their expectations, isn’t always easy. 

Susan Ward makes the case here for your initial customer service skills.  Some of them are straight forward instructions, like answering your phone and listening to your customers.  But some also get to the meat of what really resonates with customers, like her suggestion to help customers even when there’s no financial gain!

How does customer service evolve in light of the social media customer service revolution?  Duke Chung at Mashable picks apart the ways that the traditional channels of customer service are changed by the interactions brands have through Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.  Particularly the trending practice of “cutting the line” by going directly to company top brass through tweets and emails.  He also talks about the power of customer service metrics that can be drawn from the data created by those social networks.  He’s a little vague on this last piece, but it dovetailed well with a post by Karine del Moro, guest blogging at 1to1 Media, about identifying the “voice of the consumer” and how to introduce that voice to your other feedback loops.  Well worth the read if you’re looking to capitalize on all the information you’ve garnered through social media channels.

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2/1/12 Customer Service #Roundup

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

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Smashing Magazine delivers a great long form article on upping the ante with customer service.  The article has both broad strokes, including advice like “If we do not engage with our clients in a real, personal way, then we are just another vendor — and vendors are easily replaceable with better cheaper options,”  (emphasis in original)  as well as case studies, like the work they did with the Tori Lynn Andreozzi Foundation.

A new customer service interface called Desk.com could be a powerful asset for small businesses in particular because it streamlines the various streams of communication that your customers might reach out to you through.  Desk.com’s parent company Assistly (a recent acquisition of Salesforce) works well with massive companies like Starbucks and Bank of America, but Desk.com is more tailored to smaller customer service teams, including those at TED, Spotify, Yelp, Vimeo and Instagram.

Tech Journal shares their thoughts on the concept of “customer blind spots,” and speak firmly in favor of continuing to wow customers after the point of purchase in order to avoid them switching to competitors.  They surveyed a number of customers, and identified that in particular “Wireless phone, cable and gas/electric utilities providers each experienced the greatest increase in consumer switching – five percentage points.”  They determine that the blind spots come from this observation:

The study found that consumers rate “having the service experience match the promise a company makes to me up front” as one of the most important areas of customer service. Yet the greatest service frustration cited is a provider’s failure to deliver on the service experience promised up front.

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1/25/11 Customer Service #Roundup

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

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Some great posts from stalwart content creators in the last week or so in the realm of customer service:

Ron Kaufman, guestposting at Who’s Your Gladys?, writes a great piece on overcoming initial defensiveness when faced with customer criticism and how he got beyond that to create an engaged customer.  His anecdote is as telling about himself as his methods, and worth learning from.

Lisa Barone articulates a nuanced point here about the difference between being the face of a company or a brand and “injecting personality” into your social media.  A serious misstep from a well-known brand to learn from here.

At Duct Tape Marketing, Jon Jantsch gives an overview of how to create both a shared sense of ownership between employers and staff as well as guidelines for actual, brick and mortar shared ownership.  A bit controversial, but easy to see the benefits of “…remove[ing] politics and free[ing] people to stretch far beyond the confines of the normal job description.” 

The Susan Boyle intro, while a lovely story, actually seemed to distract from the point made by Cynthia Clark over at 1to1 Media about centering the customer’s voice in company reflections.  Click through for case studies including Avon and Boston Scientific.

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Customer Service Roundup 1/11/12

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

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Some articles we’ve been perusing at ARMA:

Ivana Taylor at OPEN Forum wrote an article including great tips on improving customer service, particularly through website design and navigation.  If you’ve been struggling with how to bring the mobile and digital experiences to your business, this could be a good introduction.

Marilyn at Who’s Your Gladys? has a consistently fresh perspective on customer satisfaction.  Her most recent article on company vision is no exception.  She starts by asking a question that makes you groan, but then smartly turns around and demonstrates that she knows very well that its groanworthy.  In the interest of broadening company vision to include the perspectives of employees, she poses a few questions that you could as well.  One in particular stands out:  “If you were to take 5% more responsibility for creating a happy work place environment this year, what would you do?”  Your employees’ answers might surprise you.

Ginger Conlin at 1to1 Media has issued a call to arms, particular for those who frequent NYC, to chime in on your most customer-centric venues.  Head over to give your two cents or just check out the list!

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The Constant Question in Customer Service

Tuesday, December 27th, 2011

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The question, of course, is whether the customer is happy, and by extension, whether they’ll come back.  Like most companies, both customer-facing and B2B, ARMA wonders if the folks we work with and provide services for are happy.  And we ask them in a variety of ways, in an effort to get the best sense of how they feel about our services. 

John Mariotti suggests that the best way to ascertain customer happiness is to make it simple.  He boils most of it down to the classic query “Would you recommend this to a friend?” followed by a request for a typed answer rather than picking only from a list of drop downs.  Read the rest of his post for the rationale, but he could be onto something. 

How do you measure customer satisfaction with your services?

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10/19/11 Customer Service Roundup

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

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Here are some articles from around the web about customer service that caught our eye recently:

At 1to1 Media, guest blogger Paul Hagen talked at some length about the conversations that came out of a roundtable dedicated to the process of analyzing and improving customer experience.  He reported that roundtable members emphasized the importance of culture:

…ideas for building culture included: A “stupid policies” contest, in which employees were asked to submit stupid policies that got in the way of delivering good customer experiences…and the top 10 were given awards. A “words we use” routine, where people were required to put some small amount of money in a jar if they used words that were internal jargon, rather than words that were customer-friendly.

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We’ve talked time and time again about the benefits of going one step beyond what your customer or client is expecting.  Marilyn at Who’s Your Gladys? gives us one more example over at their blog where she describes an experience a colleague of hers had with a photographer she employed.  Worth reading.

And finally, Mike Periu talks about some of his pet peeves with customer service over at OPEN Forum.  Always worth checking to make sure you’re not committing an easily fixed customer service sin!

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Bouncing Back from Failures with Customer Service

Friday, October 14th, 2011

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At ARMA, if something doesn’t work, we always strive to acknowledge the problem and fix it.  Two posts this week caught our eye by looking critically at how to get back on your feet in the face of service failure or even perceived service failure.

Jeanne Bliss at Small Business Trends wrote about Griffin Hospital, a Connecticut health care provider that flipped its customer ratings from abysmal to top marks.  (In short, its about likeability.)  Read her post to see how they transformed the “emotional journey of going to the hospital begins in the parking lot” and the effect it had on their customers’ experience.

Lori at Who’s Your Gladys? tackled the issue from the perspective of businesses that may or may not agree with their customers’ negative experiences with them, but with tips on how to rise above the experience and improve the customer interaction regardless.  Try putting a few of her zen tricks in your toolbox the next time you have a hard time with a client or customer.  This isn’t just mindfulness though, try out this exercise:

Challenge yourself (or your team) to always, no exceptions, respond to all of a difficult customer’s requests with enthusiasm and the highest levels of professionalism.

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Responsiveness is priority #1

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

Have you ever called a company just to have the phone ring endlessly? Have you been placed on hold for what seems like hours? Have you sent an email with a question that never received an answer? If so, you have experienced the frustration that comes from a lack of responsiveness.

If nothing else, customer service should be responsive. A customer prefers a response, even one he or she doesn’t like to no response at all. Silence is never golden when it comes to customer service. A response does not have to comprehensive–it can be something like “we need to investigate this further, and we will get back to you.”

Train customer service representatives–and by this we mean anyone dealing with customers (sales, reception, and so forth) to respond to customer outreach withing a set amount of time. If an email arrives, the response should be within X number of hours and so forth. A phone should never ring more than X times.  Hold times should be limited to X minutes.

Companies need to create a responsiveness policy in order to make sure the customers are not frustrated. Avoiding customer frustration may put your company on the road to customer satisfaction.

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