Customer Service Articles & News
Customer Service and Marketing that Works
Go into many businesses today and try and get service, its sometimes impossible! The customer service officer is on the phone talking about personal issues, there is not enough staff, and they are disinterested and distracted.
Complaining Consumers
The salesman’s job is to be well informed; extremely well informed. For this information is how he earns his bread. At a car dealership the commission over the MSRP on some cars would barely be enough to pay rent. A dealer must fight for every penny of the margin in order to receive the best paycheck. On the other hand, the consumer must also fight for every penny in order to receive the best deal.
Call Center Software Your Tool of Choice in Customer Relations
The call center represents your first line of communication with customers and potential customers. Whether you choose to outsource this service or to establish an in-company call center, this is one area in which quality is paramount and cannot be compromised. Clients’ questions and concerns need to be dealt with courteously and effectively, and sales calls require careful handling - as some members of the public have grown wary of unsolicited calls due to the sheer bulk of such calls that ...
Under Promise & Over Perform: The Art of Managing Customer Expectations
I’ll always feel warmly about Conrad’s restaurant, in Glendale, California. On the morning of the Northridge earthquake, Conrad’s was the only restaurant in town that opened for business, and stayed open until the last customer went home. (For the record, I had a jumbo burger with Swiss cheese, grilled onions, fries, and two chocolate shakes with lots of whipped cream and extra cherries on top.) The line of hungry patrons shoe-laced down the block, but instead of being ...
Customer Service And Marketing - Its Not That Hard!
Customer Service and Marketing that Works Go into many businesses today and try and get service, its sometimes impossible! The customer service officer is on the phone talking about personal issues, there is not enough staff, and they are disinterested and distracted. The old days of customer service is where you the customer were viewed as valuable and important and you received service from a person and not a machine. With an emphasis on shareholder wealth and increased profits the shift ...
Customer Service, the Internet's Primary Neglected Business Concern
Customer service is everything to a business. Just look at big, successful retail chains: They let you return perfectly good merchandise just because you changed your mind. Is that insane? Yes, pretty much, but it's also good customer service, and it's a good investment, and the "secret" of success, for a lot of big companies.
Customers Hold Onto the Ones You've Got
You probably spend a great deal of your time looking for new customers or clients. However, are you sure your doing enough to hold onto the ones you've got.
We Sell For Less and Our Stores Are a Mess!
What kind of image do you present when marketing your products? Are you professional and well organized or does your store/site/whatever scream, "sloppy!," to those who matter the most: your customers? Let's see how one leading retailer is winning the sales war, but losing an important battle: store organization.
Customer Satisfaction and the Service Business
The relationship between customer satisfaction and success of a service business is a direct one. Customer satisfaction measurement, however, is a much more complex matter. Customer satisfaction is a qualitative assessment of the services you provide, and therefore it is a surrogate measure of the value of your services to your customers.
Passing the After Sales Test
Some time ago a major UK food retailer decided to branch out into non-foods. Well, they all do it now, but in those days it was unheard of. Alongside the fruit and vegetables, meat and tinned foods they sold refrigerators that they had purchased at very low cost from an eastern European company (these were the days when East and West Europe rarely traded with each other). These fridges were very cheap – and they worked! The retailer passed on much of this low cost to grateful ...
Making Your Contacts Work For You
The best way to explain this concept is to tell you a story. While calling for lease purchasing property, I spoke with an older widowed woman. I went through my script and when I asked her why she thought her home hadn’t sold, she said to me, I just don’t know, I put it in the paper. I then asked her if she had a FSBO sign in her yard, or if she had posted any flyers around the neighborhood or in the nearby markets. She said, why no, I haven’t. To make a long story short she said she would ...
Importance of Good Customer Support in Online Computer Peripherals Shops
Looking for hi-fi computer peripherals? Finding it tough to decide on the product you need to purchase? Not sure about the models that are available? Not sure about the configuration that would best suit your need? Worried that your budget might not fetch you your long dreamt hi-fi? Just relax!! There are many great world class online computer peripherals shopping centers. They offer you not only the best computer peripherals but also friendly online help in their world class online computer ...
5 Golden Online/Offline Business Rules To LIVE Or DIE By
Whether online or off, if you plan on running or maintaining any type of credibility within your business, there are some guidelines that are safe to say any existing or potential customer expects if they are to do immediate or future business with you.
Automating Your Customer Support
My regular readers will know that one of the things I highly recommend doing with any online business is automating as many of your day to day tasks as possible.
Automating Your Help Desk Workflow
Do you know you can open, answer, close and report help desk information without human intervention?
How Not to Get Stiffed, Improving Your Collection Procedures
Some businesses have slow paying customers or past due balances because they didn’t “train” their customers in the beginning.
And The Difference is... Attitude
I returned a rental car at an airport yesterday. As the person who was going to check me in approached, he smiled (which shocked me) and said, “Hello Mr. Galler,” which shocked me further as I don’t have a clue how he knew my name – obviously there was some way of identifying my car, and therefore me, at a distance. “How was your trip; was everything OK with your car?” he inquired in a friendly, personal tone. “Everything was fine I replied” “Great – I hope we’ll see you back soon. ...
Client Service as a Competitive Advantage
As someone who has been heavily involved facilitating strategic planning processes with organizations during the last 15+ years, I often find it somewhat amusing how people answer the questions I pose.
CRM Its Relevance
In today's demanding economy, the first line of any business during economic uncertainty is to get closer to the customer. Customers often want information along with a quote or invoice on the spot. With lack of information, the customers do not fix loyalty to a particular product or service and tend to depend on impulse decision. The companies are no exception to this. In the process "hot prospects" turn ice cold. Speed of information flow and speed of converting information into ...
The Drawback of Hacking Off a Blogger Through Weak Process Gaps and Pathetic Customer Service
With all of the recent data theft in the financial sector, it is important to make sure that we don't go crazy trying to protect ourselves from risk. Risk management does have a value but this value lies mostly on the front end. Reactionary risk management almost always produces a point at where the value of protecting oneself or one's customers overshadows the product or service that you are offering. The majority of companies always go beyond this point, some thinking they can ...
4 Tips Toward Overcoming Bad Customer Service
Customer service is the pits, you say. You are not alone. One of the biggest gripes from consumers today is the poor service they receive at the hand of service providers. You need not be victimized by lousy service nor do you have to move heaven and earth to get what you want. Let's take a look at four options you can take to get the results that you want and deserve!
Add Value And Kill Mediocrity in Customer Service
There are two kinds of customer service we all experience occasionally, outstanding customer service, and bad customer service. What we experience most of the time is mediocre customer service.
Adjustment DENIED
It’s just a simple thing – I bought a new set of shelves for my office. It wasn’t a real problem, but when I got the shelves home, I found dents on the front of the shelves where the package had been leaned up on some other object, the shelves had been removed from the original box and put into another box. The dents didn’t affect the way the shelves worked, but it did affect the way they looked. Normally, I might have overlooked the problem, and just used them anyway, but I felt I had ...
4 Things Your Clients Want From Your Company
Sure, all clients are different. They have different kinds of strengths, weaknesses, cultures and goals. Even what blocks their efficiency and growth (blind spots) is different. Davis, Kingsley & Company has conducted hundreds of interviews and there are four strong themes that always emerge.
What You Need to Know About CRM
1. It’s all about the customer. Some companies focus too much on expensive CRM programs and elaborate IT departments and not enough on what is at the core of CRM. CRM programs need to be designed to appeal to the business’ customers. The best Call Centers are the ones which customers find easy to navigate. The best CRM vendors have the customer satisfaction in mind when designing their CRM applications.
Cheap To Keep
You've heard it all before when it comes to stats about customer retention. Acquiring a customer costs five to 10 times more than retaining one. Repeat customers spend, on average, 67 percent more. After 10 purchases a customer has referred as many as seven other people.
Customer Feedback: Everyone has an Opinion USE IT!
Have you ever been in a department store and known exactly what you were looking for but couldn’t locate any staff to help you find it? Think of your website as your very own department store, and your contact numbers, email addresses, and FAQ’s navigational buttons as your staff. Without these handy interaction tools, your purchaser will get frustrated and E-shop somewhere else.
Your Career Plan Think Like A CEO
You’ve been going 6-to-late; exhausted by running the supersonic treadmill of life and wish you had a different job. But you can’t because you have no time and you’re left spent at the end of every day. Conversely, you’re gut tells you that everything would be different if you could only find the right career match. You could stop hitting the snooze button every morning and get back into enjoying the game of life.
Customer No Service How to Lose a Loyal Customer!
So today was the day where I almost stopped going to my favorite supermarket here in Milwaukee. If you're in Milwaukee, you know the one I'm talking about: the cool one downtown that has 1000 different types of produce, and a whole aisle dedicated to gourmet coffee and teas. The one with the free samples, the wine tasting and cooking courses. Yeah, that one.
One of the Secrets of a Great Customer