Customer Service Archives

What customers expect from your call center

on April 2, 2015 9:54 AM

This is a guest post from Meghan Greene of The Marketing Zen & Kova Corp. Learn more about her and her company at the end of the post.

Your call center is the hub of your customer service operation, and to best appease your customers, you need to meet their expectations. In this technology driven decade, consumers have grown accustomed to getting results instantaneously. As a result, they place an extremely high value on their time. This attitude includes demanding fast, diligent and effective problem resolution when contacting your call center.

In order to run a call center efficiently and keep your customer happy at the same time, it is important to utilize the best workforce management software possible and learn what your customers want from you.

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Customer Service

Guide: How to get a refund from a difficult company

By Adam Williams

on July 10, 2014 11:31 AM

We’ve all had those moments when trying to get good service or a refund from a company and we can’t seem to get anywhere. Either the customer service reps haven’t been empowered to solve your problem or they are just borderline incompetent. So what do you do?

It can feel great to just get angry and yell at the reps. I’ve certainly taken that approach at times. Which can sometimes work but often doesn’t yield as good of a result as you could be getting.

Recently, I had the displeasure of having a miserable service experience with a company that I was paying several thousand dollars. The short of it was that they suffered from an inability to communicate and keep their commitments. They also overcharged me by nearly $700!

I’m not going to go into who they are because I’m happy with the end result and the objective of this post is to talk about how to work with difficult service organizations, not my one experience.

My result: I was able to get the service level I needed, a refund of my $700 and a 25% discount off the total I had spent.

Let me teach you how to do it.

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Customer Service

A rarely used but must ask question on any customer service survey

By Adam Williams

on June 3, 2013 10:18 PM

How many times have you found yourself frustrated out of your mind because the customer service rep you are speaking with can’t help you due to a company policy? I know that I’ve found myself much too often in that situation.

I don’t fault the customer service rep, though I think they receive the brunt of the frustration. It’s just so aggravating ~~and common~~ to talk to a company with self-serving policies that don’t enable a rep to help the customer.

Which is why I was so surprised by one of three questions that I was asked by Amazon after a recent customer service encounter.

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Customer Service

What Netflix and GoDaddy don’t understand about customer service

By Adam Williams

on October 16, 2012 6:54 AM

Did you ditch Netflix after it announced price increases late summer 2011 or when it announced Quikster? Or did you leave GoDaddy after it supported SOPA or had massive downtime in September 2012?

I did.

In fact, a lot of people did.

But why? Both services had a large user base. So why did people jump ship when there was a bump in the road instead of giving them a chance to recover?

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Customer Service

It’s not you, it’s me: Why you should fire some customers

By Adam Williams

on October 9, 2012 8:00 AM

The old adage that the customer is always right is wrong – plain and simple. A company that finds itself constantly beholden to the whims of customers will experience higher levels of stress, not necessarily profit.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of listening to George Roberts, former EVP of Oracle, talk about some of his business philosophies. He mentioned the Anything for a Buck syndrome. Basically, it’s when a company will do anything for a buck.

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Customer Service

Good customer service comes from the process not the end result

By Adam Williams

on May 4, 2012 3:38 PM

I’m baffled by companies that don’t understand that it’s the process and not the end result that leaves either a good or bad impression with a customer.

I’ll use Delta Airlines as an example. I have a friend, we’ll call him John, that is a Diamond Medallion member of Delta’s loyalty program. Diamond is the very top rank within the Medallion program. In fact, John spends over $100,000 each year flying with Delta.

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Customer Service

CASE STUDY: How Cake Hair Salon exceeds customer expectations

By Adam Williams

on October 18, 2011 12:04 PM

Exceeding customer expectations

When you sit down in Randy’s chair, rather than generically asking, “How do you want your hair cut today?” he crouches down so he’s eye-to-eye with you and starts asking questions like, “What do you like about your hair? What don’t you like? Why do you want that color?” In fact, he’ll tell you not to get a particular service if he thinks it will damage your hair (even though he would have made more money). That’s why Randy has a successful salon, Cake Hair Salon, and has been hired by Redken to fly all over the country teaching other stylists.

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