Peter Leppik
Peter Leppik
Peter U. Leppik is president and CEO of Vocalabs. He founded Vocal Laboratories Inc. in 2001 to apply scientific principles of data collection and analysis to the problem of improving customer service. Leppik has led efforts to measure, compare and publish customer service quality through third party, independent research. At Vocalabs, Leppik has assembled a team of professionals with deep expertise in survey methodology, data communications and data visualization to provide clients with best-in-class tools for improving customer service through real-time customer feedback.
Starting Over
Resolution is a key metric in customer service. Whether you successfully resolve a customers issue on a given call drives customer satisfaction, loyalty, operating...
Too Many Surveys
Is it possible to do too many customer surveys? Ask yourself instead: is it possible to ask someone for too many favors? When you ask…
Pretty Good Practice: Track Service Recovery
Service Recovery is what you do when a customer has a really bad experience. It can be triggered by a complaint, a bad survey...
Go Ahead and Complain. We’re All Listening
Yesterday the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) released part of the database of consumer complaints about banks. Right now this is a limited data...
How Not To Handle Negative Feedback
What's the right way to deal with negative customer feedback? Opinions may differ, but I think everyone agrees that you shouldn't send the following...
Getting Started on Customer Feedback
You've just been given the task of starting a new customer feedback program. Where do you start? Before you ask a single survey question, before…
Reporting Right
If you're getting good feedback from your customers, congratulations. You've solved the first third of the problem of building an effective program. The next piece...
Simple is Hard
If you hang around user interface designers long enough, eventually you will hear the phrase "Simple is hard." Designing an intutiive, easy to use system...
When to Break the Rules
In an in-flight emergency requiring immediate action, the pilot in command may deviate from any rule of this part to the extent required to...
Pretty Good Practice: Listen to Interview Recordings
As I like to tell our clients, "statistics prove, but stories persuade." We naturally respond more to one customer's story than to a dry...
Everything’s Fine, Why Do You Ask?
A few weeks ago I purchased a very expensive piece of software from a company I'll call Baked Mud Software. As part of the...
Declining service and sneaky price increases
In our business office, we've used Comcast's business-grade cable modem service for Internet access since 2007. In general we've been satisfied: the service is...
Pretty Good Practice: Survey Continuously
Many companies like to collect customer feedback on a regular schedule: monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc. This is a good idea, but it's an even...
What to Do with Free Responses?
Free response questions (aka open-ended questions, aka verbatims) are a powerful tool for finding out what's top-of-mind with customers. The traditional method for dealing...
The Graph we Didn’t Include
One graph we did not include in the recent NCSS report is the complaints about how hard it was to find the phone number...
What to Do About a Bad Survey
Consumerist today has a story of a car buyer who was told he had to give the dealer top marks on the customer survey...
Customer Service and Loyalty
Conventional wisdom--and a moderate amount of academic research--holds that better customer service leads to increased customer loyalty. The effect takes some time, however. If customers...
T-Mobile’s Future
T-Mobile is in the news today for announcing that it plans to reduce its customer service operation by 1,900 people over the next several...
Understanding Patterns of Customer Behavior
Advanced analytics tools have made it easier than ever to identify patterns of customer behavior. It's now much easier to learn things like how...
Service Recovery
In customer service surveys it's fairly common to find customers who need more attention from the company. If a customer expresses dissatisfaction during an...