Customers who are referred to a business tend to spend more than customers who come in from marketing. As one marketing professional put it to me, “Referred customers come in hot. They trust their peers and they spend more out of the gate than do other new customers.” Good service gets referrals and those referrals are valuable. Here’s how you …
Customer service should work so well that it enables you to focus on what really matters: delivering on your organization’s mission and promises, and engaging with your customers. The right service strategy will enable you to do just that. This video, from my LinkedIn Learning course “Customer Service Strategy,” discusses three key reasons why a customer service strategy is so …
Why is it that professional sports teams put so much focus on tracking statistics? They want to get better. They want to see trends and identify areas where they can make improvements. The same thing goes for quality standards. You will want to measure how things are going so that you can identify areas where your employees and your team …
Have you ever had a metric that drives the wrong behavior? A bus company in a city with a well established international and cosmopolitan flair, had a reputation for too often running late. Leaders decided to give drivers incentives for ending their routes on time. Several months later, passenger satisfaction scores were even worse, and they quickly learned why. When …
Customer advocacy is most effective when the entire organization works together to do what’s best for customers. That’s great for customers, of course, and the organization benefits from their loyalty. But departments across the organization benefit as well. That’s a point that’s sometimes missed. When you harness customer advocacy to help identify and further improvements across functions, you have a …
There are vast differences in how organizations are collecting and using customer feedback, and some are far more effective than others. Your approach to managing customer feedback must be action-oriented. You must do something with it. Too often, organizations miss out on the full value of feedback. Why is that? I see six pitfalls that are easy to avoid if …
As a leader you have to be able to motivate your team members. In fact you probably need to be able to motivate others well beyond those who formally report to you. You may be asking yourself, how on earth can I get people to do things they may not want to do? But that’s not motivation. That’s coercion. Motivation …
Feedback from customers and employees is like oxygen. Your organization must have it to survive and thrive. Whether you’re a print shop with three employees, a government agency with 3,000, or a multinational company with 300,000, you need a strategy to fully leverage feedback. Voice of the customer, or VOC, is the term often used to describe this process. In …
It could be that you have just a few people in a small department or company, handling interactions with customers. On the other hand, you might have thousands of agents working across multiple sites. In either case, or any point in between, you need a Customer Access Strategy. Just think about the inter-related decisions related to rolling out a new …
An important part of customer service leadership is understanding what customers want, and ensuring your delivery and experiences meet their expectations. But what do customers expect? How are those expectations changing? This video from my LinkedIn Learning course “Customer Service Leadership” explores customer expectations and how you can shape services that truly meet the needs of your customers. Understanding customer …
