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

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I read something that I felt was truly worth repeating.

The vast majority of customers we spoke with made the task pleasant and enjoyable.
This is a quote from Tom Vanderwell while he was doing surveys with people at a store’s checkout line.  It applies to every thing you [...]

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The QAQNA blog posted a link to the 10 worst presentation habits.  Initially, these were written by Carmine Gallo, an author on communication, who also wrote about 5 ways to ruin your next presentation.
If you present or use powerpoint for anything (training, business pitches, customer quality reviews, etc), please read both of these.  They’ll help [...]

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Customer Service in Different Countries was the blog posting that made me chuckle a little… The reason it did so was that one of my friend living outside the US has been regaling me with some problems that she’s been having.  She doesn’t live in one of the 11 countries surveyed by Accenture.  They did [...]

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Historically speaking, call centers have all too often been split — you’re either a selling agent or you’re a service agent. These two hiring profiles were polar opposites and even when sitting together in the same area they held themselves apart by force of personality and title separation. This was the paradigm that [...]

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Tom Vander Well’s QAQNA blog had an amusing post today that I wanted to share.  He talks about how you “Dress” your conversation.
Basically, his point is that a company with a physical dress code expects that their employees adhere to it. Coming to work in shorts and a T-shirt when the dress code is slacks [...]

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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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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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