Articles
Revenge of the Customer: Just Respond and Say “Yes” - Verne Harnish "Growth Guy"
“The answer’s yes…now what’s the question?” Customer service doesn’t get any more basic than this, unless answering the phone (and responding) is a challenge! Read more
Winning Strategies for Email Management - A Talisma white paper
Over the last decade email has not only evolved into an entrenched medium for personal and business communications, it has also been widely adopted as a channel for customer service and support – with 92 percent of Web sites offering email for customer support as of the third quarter of 2005. Apart from Web sites, organizations also provide email contact addresses on their brochures, annual reports, products, packaging, and various other corporate communications. Read more
Hitting The Moving Target: Measuring Dynamic Customer Service Quality - L. Claire Rudyk, FineLine
Creating an excellent service experience is a dynamic endeavor, where dynamic as a term denotes that the context and expectations for excellent customer service is continually changing. The realities of today’s marketplace are that customers of the commercial or not-for-profit world decide where to buy or how to give by how they perceive their service experience. Today’s customers crave intimacy and connection which drives their decision about the organization with which they choose to interact. Read more
Work smarter not harder
How a 360 degree view of your supporters can help you achieve your goals
The corporate sector has long known the benefit of gathering and analyzing information about customers to inform business decisions. Improved data gathering and analysis technology means that sophisticated business intelligence systems are no longer the exclusive domain of large corporations. Read more
Set Employees Free to Innovate - HumaNext
In a workshop on innovation and creativity at work I was giving to the top leaders of a Fortune 50 company in California, I was discussing the essential ingredients for creating a culture of innovation throughout the organization. I mentioned that one of the key ingredients is freedom. I discussed how successful organizations like 3M, GE, Pfizer, Best Buy, and others have created a culture of innovation. I described how 3M has adopted what it calls “The 15% Rule” where people can devote 15% of their time to projects of their own choosing without seeking approval from above. Read more
Own Your Customers - Empowered employees are a secret to world-class customer service - Ed Horrell
One of the lessons learned from leaders in customer service is that employees who are empowered to make decisions on behalf of their customers provide the best service. This is reflected repeatedly by the companies with reputations for the best in service, but still practiced by too few. Read more
Dining à la carte can be overwhelming
Is your contact center giving you heartburn?
Perhaps the contact center industry should take a page from the restaurant menu. When outsourcing the vital business of customer or donor relations, many organizations quickly become overwhelmed with the myriad decisions related to service options. Read more
*AS FEATURED IN CONNECTIONS MAGAZINE*
Multi-Corporate-Culturalism: Map To Innovation
Can multiple corporate cultures co-exist in one organization? - L. Claire Rudyk, FineLine
Multi-corporate-culturalism. In the contact center business we experience it all the time. We ask the question, how can multiple corporate cultures co-exist happily and profitably in one organization? And even more than co-exist, how can multi-corporate cultures be a continual revenue and innovation opportunity for the contact center and the customer? Read more
Know Your Donor – Strategies to Increase Donations for Nonprofit Organizations - Karen Zapp, PK Scribe, LLC
Copy that inspires larger donations, motivates more advocacy, or spurs greater response of any kind begins with knowing your donor. Strong copy is based on more than mere demographic or geographic data. Fundraising copy based on psychographics resonates with donors and it’s a fundamental key to increased response. Included are several tips to reveal donor psychographics for your nonprofit organization. Read more
First Call Resolution
Does customer satisfaction depend on this? - Ascent Group, Inc
First call resolution is a critical determinat of customer satisfaction - whether your systems and policies make this possible or not. Customers expect to bring a problem or question to your attention and have it resolved in a timely manner. Granted, not everything can be resolved immediately or on the first contact, but advances in technology, increasing empowerment and scrutinizing evalution can cut the percentage that does. Read more
Customer Service Representative Training
What Type of training do CSR's need in order to give your customers excellent service? - Josh Bileski, FineLine
Many organizations define training as demonstrating a set of actions to a group of people in an artificial environment. The hope is that the participants will in some way model those actions they observed in a completely different environment. It is a one-time event that occurs in isolation from the “real world”. Read more
Customer Service Levels
What level of Customer Service does your company fall into? - John R. Di Julius III
It is a fact that most companies in the world today do not execute World Class Customer Service. Most do not even fall into "Good" category. The truth of the matter is that most hover between acceptable levels and poor. The problem arises that many companies don't even know what good customer service actually is, let alone what Excellent or World Class is. The following are characteristics of the five different levels of customer service that all organizations fall into. Read more
