Recently I had the opportunity to visit the Australia Zoo, which is owned by the family of the late Steve Irwin. Irwin’s documentaries on wildlife and conservation helped make the zoo a popular tourist destination. As they describe it, “the Australia Zoo is a team of passionate conservationists working around the clock to deliver an animal experience like no other.” …
    
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Too often, I’ll see a vision or mission statement on an entry wall, but then observe very different priorities in day-to-day operations. We put our customers first, but keep the time you spend with them to three minutes. Or we deliver world class service, but we sure don’t have the resources we need on Mondays. In the most successful organizations, …
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On a recent trip to the Bahamas, I was reminded of the importance of an effective service strategy. As a customer service professional, it’s easy to get caught up in the daily details and lose sight of what ties it all together. There are many ways to approach strategy, but there are some common characteristics among organizations that have the …
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Ensuring that your organization is making required investments is an essential step in developing your customer service strategy. You will need to define, at a high level, the investments and funding necessary to support your vision. In my recent LinkedIn Learning course “Customer Service Strategy,” I explore four key principles that can help with this step. Make the required investments …
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Many contact centers have been through consolidations or restructurings that are really just cleanup efforts for lack of having or using an effective customer access strategy. For example, I recall helping an insurance company with agent group “consolidation.” Their sales team would sell an account to a major client and, if pressed by the prospect, would agree to provide a …
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As a primary customer touchpoint, the contact center has enormous potential to provide other business units with valuable intelligence and support. This can include input on customers, products, services and processes — information that, when captured, identified, assimilated and turned into usable knowledge, can literally transform an organization’s ability to identify and meet customer expectations and demands. The benefits can …
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Effective communication across an organization is essential to sharing and using voice of the customer. And there are plenty of additional reasons to strengthen ties. Opportunities for ongoing product and service improvements and innovations almost always involve other areas. Root-causes must often be addressed elsewhere; an issue that deteriorates high levels of customer satisfaction may involve processes far beyond the …
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One of the most important leadership priorities in today’s economy is to ensure that your customer contact center delivers maximum strategic value to your organization. That, in turn, is what will get you the support you need from colleagues across the organization. It’s what will secure adequate funding, and will facilitate the means to attract the talents required. And it …
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Many contact centers have been through consolidations or restructurings that are really just cleanup efforts for lack of having or using an effective customer access strategy. For example, I recall helping an insurance company with agent group “consolidation.” Their sales team would sell an account to a major client and, if pressed by the prospect, would agree to provide a …
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