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

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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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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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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“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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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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There is a topic that is always a challenge at a so called “customer service center”.  These call centers or service centers perceive themselves as answering customer questions and giving the customer information about their account.  They perceive themselves as separate from the revenue, separate from the sales, and separate from the success or failure [...]

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One of the blogs that I read is by Penelope Trunk called the Brazen Careerist. She’s got some very interesting topics and subjects that she covers. In July of ‘08, she wrote a post called:
Figure out how much you should be paid (and three cheers for transparent salaries)
I thought it was quite interesting, specifically the [...]

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If you run a customer service organization and you have heard “the system won’t let me” from your agents, think about whether you’ve given your agents enough empowerment and/or whether the systems are what are keeping you down.
Service Untitled » The system won’t let me. – customer service and customer service experience blog
The writer of [...]

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