Bill Price
Don’t Ask, Know! What Are Your Customers Not Saying? Not Doing?
Over the past 5 years we have seen an explosion of customer surveys including ones administered to us in IVR or email post-call, forms passed out onboard aircraft, online during web sessions, emailed to our Inboxes, outbound...
Who Ordered the King Salmon?
How many times has this happened to you? You settle into a comfortable booth at the hot new restaurant in town with your partner and two of her favorite friends who are in town, and after reviewing...
Delivering Great Me2B Customer Experiences With an Energized Workforce
In my last two columns I introduced the “7 Customer Needs that Lead to a Winning 'Me2B'Culture”1 and the “4 Foundations Needed to Deliver Great Me2B Customer Experiences”2. Both are based on the research and interviews into...
4 Foundations Needed to Deliver Great Me2B Customer Experiences
In my last column 7 Customer Needs that Lead to a Winning “Me2B” Culture I introduced the results of the research and interviews into companies that uniformly deliver great customer experiences that my co-author David Jaffe. These insights are in our...
7 Customer Needs that Lead to a Winning “Me2B” Culture
Soon after my co-author David Jaffe and I got our 1st book published (The Best Service is No Service: Liberating Your Customers From Customer Service, Keep Them Happy and Control Costs, Wiley/Jossey-Bass, 2008), we got a lot of comments on its...
Contact Center Metrics: AHT is Out, FCR is In (But Not Enough!)
Customer support contact centers exist to fix problems or clear up confusion, while sales or collections centers help produce revenues. For years the key metric for both types of centers was speed: contacts handled per hour per agent (CPH) or its flipside average time...
Best and worst experiences?
Try this simple "ice breaker" to generate lots of discussion around the room ... "what has been your best customer experience, ever?" and "what's been your worst customer experience ever?" At Amazon.com where I ran CS 1999-2001, Jeff Bezos would challenge us with...
The Perfect Time to Reinvest in Process and People
Companies that shirk customer experience during down economies do it at their own peril, providing ample reason for their customers to experiment with other providers and switch allegiances. Instead, this is precisely the right time for companies to reinvest in customer experience, cleansing their...
Four Big Steps to Trim Contact Center Costs and Improve Customer Experiences
Sure it's tough now, and it's liable to get tougher before the world powers and consumers pull out of the recession. But, it's also an exciting—and critically important—time to figure out how to balance customer experience (CE) and costs in your contact center operations....
There’s Something Wrong if Your People Are Hitting Their Marks and Your Customers Are...
Contact centers today talk a whole lot about empowering agents, investing in their skill development and reducing escalating attrition. Unfortunately, most companies are unable to track individual customer contacts and attach crisp, actionable performance measurement and management to them. Instead, they still overly rely...
“Please Enter Your Number. Please Enter Your Number”; Contact Technology Shouldn’t Be This Hard
Here's one of my favorite examples of the customer, technology and contact centers not being in sync. Customers kept calling my client's toll-free number to find the closest store where they could buy the company's hot new products. The voice response system prompted, "Please...
“We’ve Made This Customer’s Life Hell”: There Are Fun, Easy Ways to Give Your...
It still amazes me how many customer service operations still do not display complete purchase history and contact history with their customers. Hasn't this been available for more than 10 years now? What might be new is adding IVR and web hits...
The Best Service Is No Service
After years spent heading contact centers and then consulting with businesses on how to improve customer service, CustomerThink Advisory Council panelist Bill Price has co-authored a book that enumerates the seven principles he believes will make your customers happier while lowering your costs. The...
“Sorry. I’ll Make Sure We Fix That”
Almost every company in the last two years has told me "our products aren't really very different from our competitors', so we have to differentiate based on delivering great customer experiences … so how in the heck do we do that?" Good question, and...
Give Your Customer-Facing Employees the Tools to See the Whole Customer
It's not often that I see true ambassadors handling customer issues, despite plaintive cries from customer-facing employees who keep saying, 'just give me the tools to do my job,' and often lament, 'my customers know more about us than I know about them.' I promise...
Connect Online for Better Customer Care
Expedia, Amazon, eBay, Hyatt and many other companies have successfully exploited the online channel for sales, but surprisingly few companies have figured out that connecting online for customer care with their customers can deliver a superior experience for them, and more deeply satisfy their...
Dumb Things That Companies Do
You would think by now with all of the talk about "customer experience" and 'human factors" that companies (or organizations in general) could get the basics right, but they don't. Instead, I am constantly amazed (and professionally depressed) about all of the...
The Wonderful World of Wikis Is Changing the Face of CRM
Best known for underpinning Wikipedia, open-source software known as wiki has mushroomed as the core of "Web 2.0," a wonderful world with significant implications for CRM. A wiki (pronounced wick-ee or wee-kee) is, as Wikipedia defines it, a type of web site "that allows users...
Get Out There!
Practically every company claims that "customers are our most important focus" but practice shows that this isn't always borne out. How much time do you spend listening to your customers, REALLY listening, and learning from them? Ever taken the time to double-jack with your...
Premier Support Programs: All Customers Aren’t Equal
Almost every marketing text since Theodore (Ted) Levitt and Philip Kotler came onto the scene have emphasized that customer segmentation is key to attract the best customers and extract the most from them. As a result, telemarketing and telesales operations have a finely tuned...