You want the virtuous cycle, or the vicious one?
The key is to create a virtuous cycle of great support, product improvement, and customer loyalty & recommendations. It’s a virtuous cycle of good will. Here are the steps:
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:…
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…
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…
I’m not sure I like “4th party” as a description. We spent way too much time at the VRM West Coast Workshop wrangling over the naming of firs, second and third. But when you get past all that, this key idea is really something big: VRM is about enabling the first party. It is also…
Some things that seem to be good are actually failure. I’ll use an example tech support pros will all know: A customer calls, you know the answer, you give it to them and it works, and everyone is happy. Simple, straightforward, case closed. Right? No. This is a failure. Simply put, if you knew the…
This just cracked me up… Markets are Hanging Up On Customers I just recorded my call with Apple Support to improve customer service: [Click to listen] How to hang up on a Mobile Me customer. [From ProjectVRM Blog » Markets are Hanging Up On Customers] Follow the link and have a listen. Truly amazing.