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:
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:…
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…
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’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…
Robert Scoble posted details of this week’s blow-up over failing drives and censored forum posts: Seagate (maker of hard drives and storage devices) has been getting slammed on forums and blogs the past couple of days. Partly because they had a bad batch of hard drives and didn’t properly recognize or fix the problem quickly.…
This week, Ross Mayfield makes an interesting point about the level of service experience at the Apple Store. It’s a brilliant post and poses some great follow-on questions, but the thing I liked most was this point about support knowledge: But I think Apple gets something more than the value of customer experience. According to…