Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Social Media: a distributed communication channel

2010 was the year that Social Media was really adopted by the mass. There is no way you could have missed that. You can’t watch a TV show without someone telling you to follow them on Facebook or Twitter. Customer complaints turned to media hypes and dominated the news. 2011 will be the year that companies start to realize that Social Media have induced a major shift in balance of power from companies to consumers and can no longer be ignored. Time to incorporate this 'distributed communication' channel in your multi channel customer contact strategy!

Monday, October 25, 2010

Youp 2.0: kwaliteit van klantenservice is exponentieel met aantal volgers

Afgelopen zaterdag herinnerde Youp van 't Hek ons er weer eens aan dat het goed hommeles is met de klantenservice van een grote telecom operator (bedrijf T), iets wat iedereen al wist maar waar ieder normaal mens zich al lang bij neergelegd heeft.

Zo niet Youp. Nadat hij 40.000 Twitter volgers had laten smullen van zijn klantenservice ervaring brak de pleures uit op het hoofdkantoor van deze telecom operator.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Customer Process Management enhances satisfaction

Customer Process Management is a practical management approach which aims to handle, manage and continuously improve customer contact processes and its internal workflows. Its goal is to increase customer satisfaction, retention, productivity and operating profits. It also contributes greatly to employee satisfaction. CPM is about unlocking all relevant customer information and integrally present it to your CSRs. And CPM is all about defining procedures and capture these procedures into processes.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

How to create the Wow in customer experiences.

Customer experiences have a massive impact on companies performance as a whole. Research by Ogilvy indicates that companies that delivered "wow" experiences, because of the great product and experience they offered, scored higher on retention ratios, 84% vs. 30% and cross-sell ratios, 82% vs. 16%, compared with companies that did not. Just take a look at brands like Zappos, Virgin, Apple and Amazon. It seems that they found their way in it. Curious about how to create the "wow" experience yourself?

Thursday, October 7, 2010

KPI's in perspective.

Increasing customer loyalty and decreasing their efforts it no rocket science. In fact, a lot of issues are already known, a lot of software applications and databases have already been installed, most reps have been trained properly and internal processes and procedures have been defined. And yet customers are unsatisfied and disloyal. So, how do you stop that? You could try to analyze the their frustrations. Customers can tell you what's wrong. Then define new, low effort, customer service processes and get some easy to use software which makes it easy for your organization to properly handle a call, integrally present relevant customer information, start up workflows in which customer information can be edited.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Customer service through a website?

How can a company move customers to visit the self-service website? And, how can customers stick to that channel? It is a fair question, because self-service websites are a lot cheaper than a customer service rep (CSR) and additionally, most questions customers ask, can be found on the website. Unfortunately research of the Customer Contact Council shows that 57% of the customers surveyed, have already been on the website first, before calling the organization.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Motives from Apple.

What is the similarity between Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes and other products Apple has ever created and will create in the future? Apart from having created products and services with a great design and a great user interface, Apple products and services deliver great user experiences. From the very start of the company until the introduction of the iPad, almost 40 years later, Apple always knows what customers want and why they want it. How does Apple know that? And, more important, what can you learn from it?

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Interpersonal issues in customer contact events.

Now that we have started removing obstacles in order to decrease customers' effort, why don't we address other aspects on this subject. For example the emotional side of customer interactions. It may be an aspect hard to measure, but how things are being said, sometimes prevail on what is being said. When the message itself is clear to a customer, he or she does not necessarily have to agree with it.