Author Archive
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 [...]
Are you above average?
A number of studies show that most people rate themselves as above average. This wikipedia article on the Lake Wobegon Effect backs this up with science.
When was the last time you asked your customers honestly for feedback, and compared this with previous measures to see if you were improving?
Is this something that should be done [...]
A list of things that make good customer service
Some of these extend into the realm of marketing, operations, and sales, but are all part of providing a good customer service. In no particular order:
Understanding/deciding who the customer is
Offering something of real value
Giving personal attention to each customer
Doing what you say you will
Being honest
Opening up communications and systems
Creating community
What other things make good customer [...]
What is good customer service?
In order to build the best customer service in the world we first of all have to make sure that we know what good customer service is. This might be a case of defining the obvious – in a White Paper I was involved in we defined it as:
giving each customer what they want, when [...]
Starting at the new beginning
The target for the next 600 days is that we will establish a new standard for Customer Service, and be able to donate in excess of $1m per month to good causes before the end of that period. This detail is not fully thought through – like every journey worth making we cannot know all [...]