Management, Human Resources, and Life in a Customer Focused World

Back at the end of January 2008, MSN published an article called “10 Ways to Get Fired From a Home-Based Position” by the CEO of VIPDesk. (I can’t find the link anymore).
Here’s a few that I want to stress.

Having customers hear your kids playing in the background

Working in a noisy area or with the TV [...]

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For those few people that still don’t believe that customer service has an impact on the success or failure of a company, here’s some quotes and surveys published by CNN Money:
A new study from Accenture (NYSE:ACN) ACN found that 59% of people had actually stopped doing business with companies in the past year due to poor [...]

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One thing that I’ve noticed some companies doing is having annual meetings to discuss what the best and worst were for the year prior.  Once those have been determined, the team begins to brainstorm and figure out what to do this year to prevent failures again and what needs to be done to sustain the [...]

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MSN’s Careerbuilder.com wrote an article called 13 Things Not to Share with Your Co-Workers. Most of them make sense.
Medical history? Gossip? Religion? Politics?  You are at work, so keep it to a minimum or, preferably, not at all.  The fact is that people spend 40+ hours a week in the office together, nearly as much [...]

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I’m sure all of us have either asked or been asked this question — or both. It is a default question, a very boring question in an interview that tends to be responded to in a very cookie cutter fashion. How to answer them in a standard way can be found here, here, [...]

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A little customer service goes a long way « Palmetto PR Divas
To the technician in the blog post above, it meant nothing. The person was simply an object to be worked on, as though he were in a factory and the child was nothing but a generic “widget”. There’s a difference — if you’re in [...]

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“I believe that an over reliance on metrics plague the call center industry at the expense of the customer experience.” (Metrics-Schmetrics « rich mclafferty’s customer experience weblog)
Rich has an interesting point. Although I only partially agree, the fact is that metrics alone is not the way to measure your call center. Measure your center by [...]

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From the blog –Service Untitled » Make a quick attempt. – customer service and customer service experience blog
“If you have the customer’s phone number (from a voicemail or a callback request), put it into your system and see if anything comes up. If you have their email address, look it up. If you have their [...]

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Customer service is a term that many companies use.  “Please call our customer service line at xxx.” The problem that I see is that a customer service department doesn’t always equate to customer service.
A few days ago, I was on hold with a company for fourty minutes on their 877 phone line.  The conversation lasted [...]

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Brad Worthley is a well known speaker, consultant and behavior change specialist. He publishes a monthly newsletter called “Exceed Customer Expectations!”. I find his insight and thoughts to be quite interesting sometimes. In April 2008 newsletter, he wrote:
When you get busy and the adrenaline is running, you may find yourself speaking to customers faster than [...]

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