Archive for October, 2008
Remembering our principles
Our 600 days countdown to establishing a new standard for Customer Service (and causing good while we are at it) began in September, but we actually started our ‘mission’ to improve customer service through technology much earlier. At the beginning of his year we wrote two white papers called ‘Customer Service 2.0: Collaborative Self-Service through [...]
Customers are more important than internal customers
I have hear it suggested that:
internal customers are as important as external customers.
customer service lessons about customers can be related to internal customers
good internal customer service means that overall customer service will improve
meeting internal SLAs means that customers will be satisfied
many other variants of internal customers=external customers
And I disagree for the simple reason that it [...]
Grouping customer service activity
This week three of us spent some time at the UK Institute of Customer Service Annual User Conference where I learned to articulate better a few groupings of activity that improve customer service.
The grouping activities were:
Monitor Customer Service
Surprisingly few people do this. Peter Drucker told us “What get’s measured gets managed”, so it logically follows [...]
The first 20 days – retrospective
We are 20 days along our 600 day journey to provide the world’s best customer service platform and contribute to good in the process. What did we achieve so far?
this blog
our new name,
our new logo,
commissioned our new website,
commissioned AdWords testing,
attracted our first sign-up based solely on adwords/test site
two customers running on the platform (although one [...]
Defining Value
I recently embarked on a reread of Lean Thinking the classic from Womack and Jones.There is a lot to think about in the book regarding systems thinking – but a big takeaway I got from the book this time was different to my earlier reading and it is this:
Understanding what is valuable to the customer [...]
Free prize inside – great book (praise 4 years late)
I thought I had read most things written by Seth Godin. (I pre-ordered Meatball Sundae and Tribes). I had totally missed Free Prize Inside, and had it recommended recently. I grabbed a copy and digested it in a day or so. And then I bought a 20 copies for my colleagues.
Following the Purple Cow theme [...]
Customer service in the clouds
At a Cloud Computing event in Santa Clara, CA where people are talking about the technology of cloud computing,
I am sure that other people have noticed the benefit to end customers that I am looking forward to providing:
failover, load balancing and disaster recovery such that the end customer has more reliable up-time
SaaS 70, level 2 [...]