There are three levels on which effective customer service creates value: efficiency, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and strategic value. Only a small percent of organizations harness the true strategic potential of the insight that comes from customer service. In the LinkedIn video featured below “Strategic Value” from the course “Service Metrics for Customer Service,” I discuss the importance of capturing …
As a leader, you face many choices when deciding where and how to improve service. And the possibilities multiply when analyzing customer data from sources that range from social posts to surveys to operational metrics. So, which issues do you tackle first? To learn about eight possible factors to consider when prioritizing customer initiatives, take a few minutes to view …
The power of one is among the most important principles for any agent to understand. This video shows the impact each person makes on service level, occupancy and average speed of answer. Using actual data, the video makes it clear that every agent matters to both customers and their co-workers. This video is from the course Customer Service: Working in …
“Not everything that counts can be counted,” and “not everything that can be counted counts.” This quotation is sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein and though the source is not entirely clear, the message is. And it’s fair warning. We’ve got to be mindful about the metrics we establish and how much we read into them. We need to take care …
Quality standards come to life when they guide behavior and enable us to deliver consistent high-quality service. Calibration is an important tool for ensuring consistency in interpreting performance. It also makes coaching far easier. It allows the coaching process to focus on achievements and improvement, rather than concerns around whether scores are accurate or fair. Coaching’s not a prescription for …
The foundation of customer advocacy is knowing your customers. What they need, expect and experience. But that knowledge won’t get you far without the means to act. I explore what that requires in the video below, part of the Lynda.com course Customer Advocacy. Creating the means to act from Customer Advocacy by Brad Cleveland
Have you ever heard that you have to sacrifice quality to improve customer accessibility to services? Or the other way around? That’s one of the most common myths in customer service. Accessibility and quality are closely related and complementary. Learn more about each aspect of customer service and how they support one another in this video from my Lynda.com course …
How many quality standards should you have? If some are good, are more better? How do you ensure that your quality standards really count? Are there alternatives to quality standards in guiding behavior? These questions and more are explored in the video Ensuring Quality Standards Count from my Lynda.com course Quality Standards in Customer Service. If you enjoy this video, …
The number one key to sustaining great service is culture. The culture of doing the daily hard work to focus on what’s best for customers. What do organizations with the most engaged employees and customer-focused cultures have in common? Here is a Lynda.com video from the course Customer Service Leadership that describes seven principles that I’ve seen stand out. Cultivating …
For contact centers to deliver great service they need to get the right resources in the right places at the right times. This is no easy task. I recently created a course for Lynda.com on Managing a Customer Contact Center. In this succinct course, you’ll learn what makes contact centers so complex, how to implement a solid planning framework, and …
