Tech Support folks should also be friendly and like helping people. They should be communicative both inside the organization and with customers. Dont just expect your team to “be professional”. That admonition is at the core of the wooden, scripted responses that frustrate customers.
This recent research is shows the difference you can get when focusing on resolving problems: The study found that customers from each company are generally satisfied with hold times, ease of reaching an agent and agent professionalism. In contrast, there was a significant difference in the percentage of customers who reported their problem was solved:…
Arianna Huffington was the morning Keynote Speaker at the Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp for Non-Profit, Saturday in Berkeley, CA. I was looking forward to her speech. I enjoy Arianna on KCRW’s Left, Right, and Center and usually agree with her editorials in The Huffington Post. I knew it would be a good speech – an…
Twitter is getting another big wave of adoption and many people are asking again what it’s for. How could short broadcasted text messages limited to 140 characters be useful? What utility could it possible have? For tech support organizations I think it’s very useful, in two primary ways: for “eavesdropping” on people who are talking…
Check out the post by Jon Mountjoy on the feedback request from Apple after getting his Macbook Pro serviced at the Apple Store. The folks at Apple have done a very nice job on this process. Compare it to what you do. How does your feedback process make your customers feel? An interesting example is…
Spam in Twitter is becoming a problem. Full 75% of my new followers yesterday were some kind of crass commercial, “I’ll show you how to twitter for money” or “check out my new multi-level marketing scheme.” But some folks are using twitter for their business in some useful and interesting way. The latest I’ve learned…
My friend Ken wrote a nice piece a couple days ago about ROI and the role of the community manager. In particular, I liked this observation: … The community is not a structured presence. You cannot simply pen in the community as they’re a wild herd of virtual voices. The skill of the community manager…
I spent the day hanging out at WhereCamp09, enjoying the geekdom and learning about great new projects. These folks are really doing amazing stuff. But it surprised me how little the geo-geeks have done to embrace the social web. The folks hanging at WhereCamp definitely need to be plugging in to the ID/Privacy/InfoCard/VRM effort. Too…
Last week I attended the VRM West Coast Workshop and one of the many impressive folks I met there was Joe Andrieu of Switchbook. In a recent blog post, Joe describes the The Identity Quartet – the key services that allow user to express their identity in online services. It’s one of the most clear…
Congratulations to my friends at Seesmic for being at the front of the Facebook Open Stream… To get things started we’ve worked alongside a few beta partners to test the Facebook Open Stream API. For example, Seesmic Desktop is now a full-featured client for the stream and Adobe has created a simple stream Notifier using…