John Goodman: Getting the Measurable Payoff from Technology-Enabled High-Touch Service
Beyond The Norm: Empowering Staff To Say “No”
Most service units focus on creating guardrails and consistency. This can create a lose-lose-lose for the customer, the employee, and the company via dissatisfaction, frustration, lost revenue, and negative word of mouth. You should encourage your staff and supervisors to intelligently go beyond the...
The Payoff of Communicating Risk to Customers
Many customer relationships involve the potential risk of encountering problems that the customer does not fully understand. In many cases, the customer does not understand what they have bought and in others, such as warranties and insurance, they are expected to understand which risks...
Implementing Proactive Service and Psychic Pizza
In 2014, I produced a video for the American Society for Quality on "Delivering Psychic Pizza." The basic concept is to provide information (or the pizza) just before the customer needs or gets around to ordering it. While many organizations are now executing proactive...
Your Contact Center Monitoring and Coaching May Be Doing More Harm Than Good
Discard the illusion of fairness and actionability of the "random sample of 10 cases!" When I interview contact center supervisors and managers to explore their biggest frustrations, one of the most prevalent issues is the amount of time and hassle associated with customer service rep...
How Customer Service Agents Create Positive Emotions: Four Delighters Drive Loyalty
Howard Lax, in his Dec 2nd, 2021 CustomerThink article, complained that everyone talks about CX but few take specific actions. Also, Alan Zorfas and David Leemon state in the Harvard Business Review that an emotionally connected customer has twice the lifetime value than one...
AARP’s Journey to Strategic Self-Service: How to Maximize Both the Top and Bottom Lines
Dissatisfaction is only one touch away For the past five years, my local drug store, part of a large national chain, had a simple, very effective, Interactive Voice Response System (IVR) for requesting refills. Their IVR did three things well: take refill orders, give pharmacy...
6 Actions to Deliver a Great Self-Service Experience
The covid pandemic produced a strong move to self-service while still maintaining phone access for more complex issues. However, the results have not always been positive. In his Washington Post Magazine column, “Your Call Is Unimportant To Us,” Gene Weingarten noted that, “the delay...
Five Ways to Create Delight on the Cheap, Digitally and Profitably
I recently visited two clients who established a Customer Service Departmental goal of “always exceeding customer expectations.” One of the companies even instructed the front line customer service representative (CSR) to end the call or email with, in part, “I hope I have exceeded...
Stop the Annual Do-You-Love-Us Survey: 16 Tactical Best Practices for Survey Execution
The annual relationship survey is dreaded in many companies by both executives and customers. In moments of candor, descriptions of “waste of time, puts me to sleep, nothing new, and fails to move the needle” are used. However, some companies are continually improving and...
How to Get Executives to Support CX Improvements? Appeal to Greed
Why is it so hard to get CX initiatives funded? Bob Thompson, CEO of CustomerThink.com, recently related to me that his conversations with customer experience (CX) execs are rife with concerns about the lack of genuine top management support and unwillingness to fund CX initiatives....