Joanna Jones

Call cen­ters are at the core of the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and are often under con­stant scrutiny from the pub­lic and indus­try to ensure a high level of ser­vice is pro­vided.  Busi­nesses today acknowl­edge that the sus­tain­able dif­fer­en­tia­tor between com­pa­nies is dri­ven by the level...

I’m a client-facing tech sup­port agent for a soft­ware com­pany. In a nut­shell, my job con­sists of going to client’s offices, diag­nos­ing prob­lems, solv­ing the prob­lem, and mov­ing on to the next client. How­ever, my job entails so much more than that. It’s a...

The Com­cast customer-service call that went viral last week is still light­ing up the inter­net. The call, which a cus­tomer recorded, cap­tures a frus­trat­ing (okay, let’s just say it – hell­ish) con­ver­sa­tion that he had with a Com­cast cus­tomer ser­vice rep. For those of...

If you are in man­age­ment, you are tasked with the never-ending job of coach­ing employ­ees, guid­ing their behav­ior, and help­ing employ­ees per­form their best. When employ­ees are in a work­place with a well-defined cul­ture, your lead­er­ship tasks become immea­sur­ably eas­ier; in an envi­ron­ment with...

July 4th seem like an appro­pri­ate time to bring out a top 4 list. This week, we’ll be explor­ing the top 4 man­age­ment tools that you can bring to your call cen­ter. Your end goal as a man­ager is to achieve increased cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion, so...

Email in the busi­ness world unfor­tu­nately gets over­looked in cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing courses these days – in fact, it’s almost seen as passé. It’s assumed that every­one is so com­fort­able with email by now, that to take extra time to train peo­ple on email...

A well-trained employee can make all the dif­fer­ence when it comes to cus­tomer ser­vice and how the employee deals with cus­tomer esca­la­tions, solves cus­tomer prob­lems, and upsells or cross-sells your prod­ucts. When you invest in train­ing pro­grams for your employ­ees, you’ll prob­a­bly find that...

If one of your goals this year is to reduce employee turnover, you’re not alone. Employee turnover is costly, aggra­vat­ing, time-consuming, and it erodes hard-built team­work efforts. An arti­cle in Fast Com­pany dis­cussed the issue of employee turnover, and it gave tips for reduc­ing...

Ask­ing for refer­rals and actu­ally get­ting suc­cess­ful refer­rals are two sep­a­rate things. If you are rely­ing on your cus­tomers to tell oth­ers about your busi­ness, sim­ply because you asked them to, you’re essen­tially ask­ing your cus­tomers to do the work for you. While some...

Tele­sales can be an intense envi­ron­ment, and tele­sales teams are often on the move, in and out of the office. Ask­ing your team to stay abreast of the lat­est prod­uct changes and to keep cur­rent on their train­ing can be a has­sle – yet...

If you work as a call cen­ter man­ager or exec­u­tive, hir­ing new call cen­ter employ­ees, unfor­tu­nately, tends to be a fre­quent activ­ity. In an indus­try noto­ri­ous for high turnover rates (60% is an aver­age for many call cen­ters), recruit­ing, screen­ing, and hir­ing employ­ees is...

A well-trained field ser­vice team is the face of a com­pany. When a tech­ni­cian arrives at a busi­ness or res­i­dence for trou­bleshoot­ing and repair, the impres­sion he or she leaves will be more telling than a company’s snazzy brand promises or expen­sive com­mer­cials. If...

If you peruse through the busi­ness sec­tion of any book­store, or if you hap­pen to be brows­ing the best­seller book titles at the air­port book kiosk, undoubt­edly, you'll see a whole host of books and titles related to man­age­ment skills and insider tips from...

If you are around kids at all dur­ing the hol­i­days, you may be notic­ing their lists being made for Santa. This got us think­ing … what would an adult list for Santa look like? Since we hap­pen to work in the world of cus­tomer...

Amazon.com's rise to a $75 billion/year com­pany did not hap­pen acci­den­tally. At the helm, CEO Jeff Bezos has strate­gi­cally crafted his cus­tomer ser­vice prac­tices, busi­ness prowess, and atten­tion to met­rics into every facet of the com­pany. A recent Bloomberg in-depth arti­cle pro­files the man...

Using live chat to assist cus­tomers with tech­ni­cal sup­port issues may sound like a thorny com­bi­na­tion, espe­cially if you have a com­plex prod­uct or ser­vice that reps in your call cen­ter typ­i­cally han­dle. How­ever, live chat is a great medium for tech­ni­cal sup­port cus­tomer...

Hal­loween was just here – pump­kins still grace doorsteps, and the leaves are falling – yet step into a retail store, and you're likely to hear hol­i­day music blar­ing and be greeted by green and red col­ors bedeck­ing the shelves. Yes, the hol­i­day "sea­son" is...

There is a rea­son why orga­ni­za­tional psy­chol­o­gists are often called in to help com­pa­nies restruc­ture work flows, advise on coach­ing prac­tices, and develop plans to help moti­vate and inspire employ­ees: It works. Some­times just rear­rang­ing sub­tle dif­fer­ences in cor­po­rate struc­tures and work­flows can have...

Here's a pop quiz for all of you who are won­der­ing what skills will be required to advance quickly in your career: Name the top skills that com­pa­nies want from their employees: Tech­ni­cal skills/hard skills Social media skills Soft skills You may think that with…