Customer Service Information
How To Handle Customer Billing Snafus
Q: I just discovered that for the past six months I have been billing a client half of what I should have been. Should I just include the total of the past due balance on his next bill or contact him first to let him know that it's coming? This client has been difficult in the past, so I'd rather not deal with him until I absolutely have to. My partner, on the other hand, thinks we should call the client and let him know what's going on before sending the bill. What do you think?
-- Louis K.
Do You Want More Profits? - Follow The Golden Rules Of Providing Good Customer Service
Last night I was at my computer and a Skype chat window opened up with a link in it from a stranger. I clicked the link and was taken to one of those "You would have to be crazy to pass up this business opportunity" sites. You know, the kind with great testimonials and it seems too good to be true possible outcomes. All it takes is a few hours a day and you can be pulling in thousands of dollars! Wow, sounds great. Of course there was no mention of what the business actually is.
One of the Secrets of a Great Customer Experience
A few weeks ago we conducted our annual ?Customer Experience Study Tour? in London England. This is where we take delegates to visit a number of leading Customer Experience companies for a behind-the-scenes look at how they approach the task of building a great Customer Experience. Companies include Prêt-a-manger, Virgin Atlantic, Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, Dell Computers, T-Mobile, Lexus Cars, AOL and Microsoft. As we travelled around these companies on the luxury coach, I pondered what the common traits are of companies who provide a great Customer Experience. Undoubtedly one of these traits is ?attention to detail?.
Are You A Coward? I Was
Over the last month, I have come to hate emails and answerphones; not because I get 100 emails every day but because emails and answerphones are fast becoming the tool of the coward. At Beyond Philosophy we worked with a client a while ago whose account managers and sales teams never used to speak to anyone! They just used to send emails. If the customer called in they were greeted by answerphones which were kept on all day. You see the sales teams were all busy doing ?real? work. The customers were just interrupting them. Surely this must be the height of ?inside out? behaviour.
Customer No Service - How to Lose a Loyal Customer!
So today was the day where I almost stopped going to my favorite supermarket here in Milwaukee. If you're in Milwaukee, you know the one I'm talking about: the cool one downtown that has 1000 different types of produce, and a whole aisle dedicated to gourmet coffee and teas. The one with the free samples, the wine tasting and cooking courses. Yeah, that one.
Your Career Plan--Think Like A CEO
You?ve been going 6-to-late; exhausted by running the supersonic treadmill of life and wish you had a different job. But you can?t because you have no time and you?re left spent at the end of every day. Conversely, you?re gut tells you that everything would be different if you could only find the right career match. You could stop hitting the snooze button every morning and get back into enjoying the game of life.
Cheap To Keep
You've heard it all before when it comes to stats about customer retention. Acquiring a customer costs five to 10 times more than retaining one. Repeat customers spend, on average, 67 percent more. After 10 purchases a customer has referred as many as seven other people.
What You Need to Know About CRM
1. It?s all about the customer. Some companies focus too much on expensive CRM programs and elaborate IT departments and not enough on what is at the core of CRM. CRM programs need to be designed to appeal to the business? customers. The best Call Centers are the ones which customers find easy to navigate. The best CRM vendors have the customer satisfaction in mind when designing their CRM applications.
Customer Feedback: Everyone has an Opinion - USE IT!
Have you ever been in a department store and known exactly what you were looking for but couldn?t locate any staff to help you find it? Think of your website as your very own department store, and your contact numbers, email addresses, and FAQ?s navigational buttons as your staff. Without these handy interaction tools, your purchaser will get frustrated and E-shop somewhere else.
4 Tips Toward Overcoming Bad Customer Service
Customer service is the pits, you say. You are not alone. One of the biggest gripes from consumers today is the poor service they receive at the hand of service providers. You need not be victimized by lousy service nor do you have to move heaven and earth to get what you want. Let's take a look at four options you can take to get the results that you want and deserve!
And The Difference is... Attitude
I returned a rental car at an airport yesterday. As the person who was going to check me in approached, he smiled (which shocked me) and said, ?Hello Mr. Galler,? which shocked me further as I don?t have a clue how he knew my name ? obviously there was some way of identifying my car, and therefore me, at a distance. ?How was your trip; was everything OK with your car?? he inquired in a friendly, personal tone. ?Everything was fine I replied? ?Great ? I hope we?ll see you back soon. There is some bottled water in the cooler over there for you? he said as he directed me towards the shuttle bus to the terminal.
Adjustment DENIED
It?s just a simple thing ? I bought a new set of shelves for my office. It wasn?t a real problem, but when I got the shelves home, I found dents on the front of the shelves where the package had been leaned up on some other object, the shelves had been removed from the original box and put into another box. The dents didn?t affect the way the shelves worked, but it did affect the way they looked. Normally, I might have overlooked the problem, and just used them anyway, but I felt I had paid full price for the shelves and deserved a discounted price, so I mentioned it to the store manager the next time I was in the store.
Automating Your Help Desk Workflow
Do you know you can open, answer, close and report help desk information without human intervention?
Add Value - And Kill Mediocrity in Customer Service
There are two kinds of customer service we all experience occasionally, outstanding customer service, and bad customer service. What we experience most of the time is mediocre customer service.
The Drawback of Hacking Off a Blogger Through Weak Process Gaps and Pathetic Customer Service
With all of the recent data theft in the financial sector, it is important to make sure that we don't go crazy trying to protect ourselves from risk. Risk management does have a value but this value lies mostly on the front end. Reactionary risk management almost always produces a point at where the value of protecting oneself or one's customers overshadows the product or service that you are offering. The majority of companies always go beyond this point, some thinking they can even sell it to the customer as a security measure and build their brand with it.
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RELATED ARTICLES
Should I Have My Company Mystery Shopped?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said to me, "Oh, you do Mystery Shopping; I always wanted to do that!" I think most people do find the thought of posing as a customer and reporting back on how they were treated, rather intriguing. But there is a lot more to it that skulking around in a trench coat and spy glass!
Customer Service Consultants
When all else fails in your company to meet the needs of your customer consider a customer service consultant. If you find that agents in your company are constantly having misunderstanding that result in loss of customers bring in a consultant. There are a number of resources available in books and on the Internet to help you find which consultant best suits your company.
The Death of the Loyal Customer
One of my classes in management focused on the repeat customer. The course stressed the importance of the repeat customer to the financial welfare of the business. We spent hours discussing ways to turn "first time" buyers into repeat customers. This is not a new concept. We've all heard the term "the customer is always right". And then there is the movie we watch every Christmas where Macy tries to out "customer satisfaction" Gimbel. I prefer to take that concept one step further with what I consider the most valuable asset of a business, the loyal customer.
The Dissatisfied Customer
We, as small business people, naturally dislike complaints from our clients and customers. Because we're intimately involved with our home businesses, small businesses, or freelance careers, any complaint takes on a personal commentator. A dissatisfied customer is a direct reflection on our performance and a blow to our egos. The common reaction of small business people to a consumer complaint is defensive posturing and/or avoidance.
Make Sure You Get The Customer Perspective
Businesses that fail, often forget to seek out the customer perspective. I have talked to some folks at businesses that were less than succesful, and when asked if they actively seek out customer comments, the answer invariably is no. Why don't they do that? Why not get the customer perspective?
What Every Manager Should Know About How to Win the Loyalty of Customers
Dr. Michael LeBoeuf, in his cassette album entitled, Win Customers and Keep Them for Life presents twelve principles that will transform the workplace into a customer-driven, highly motivational team. Dr. LeBoeuf's program goes like this:
Profit from a Customer Service Recovery Program
A client recently said to me: "Most days things seem to run smoothly; but whenever we have a customer complaint, we seem to collapse. Where are we going wrong?"
First Contact: The Source of Customer Loyalty
With customers being smarter, more cost conscious, more product knowledgeable and more demanding, improving customer service has become a major focus within many businesses. In Customer Satisfaction is Worthless; Customer Loyalty is Priceless, author Jeffrey Gitomer contends the real solution is shifting the paradigm away from customer service to customer loyalty. This may be the first step, but the next step is to shift the focus away from loyal customers to loyal employees.
How to Retain Your Customers the Dish Network Way
Customer retention is vital to a business. If you cannot retain your customers you will be continually losing current customers and always on the search for new ones. This can be very expensive. Retaining current customers means continual sales which is essential to keep your business afloat. Here are some keys to keeping your customers that can be learned from looking at the Dish Network business model.
All of the World of Business Is a Stage
One of the basics of acting taught to me in grade school was the important principle of "staying in character." Staying in character means holding the image and personality of the character you are assigned to portray without letting your own personality leak through.
Cheap To Keep
You've heard it all before when it comes to stats about customer retention. Acquiring a customer costs five to 10 times more than retaining one. Repeat customers spend, on average, 67 percent more. After 10 purchases a customer has referred as many as seven other people.
Create Win-Win Deals With Your Competitors
In the competitive world of the 20th century, we generally viewed competitors as the enemy. And a competitor was anyone who sold to the same target audience as us - even if they sold a different item. After all, since there was a finite group of customers and a limited amount of money, if they spent it with your competitor, there was less for you.
Automating Your Customer Support
My regular readers will know that one of the things I highly recommend doing with any online business is automating as many of your day to day tasks as possible.
Empowering Customer Service Vital
It never fails to amaze me how many companies have
employees who are empowered to offer former customers
wonderful incentives to lure them back, yet their customer
service representatives have the ability to offer virtually
nothing to convince an unhappy customer to stay.
Tips for Curing Bad Customer Service
Bad customer service is everywhere these days - unmanned front desks, surly servers, clueless staff, employees talking on the phone, and managers who refuse to acknowledge a customer. It's no longer an exception ... poor service has become the norm.
Customer Service Has Moved Toward Customer Care
As I waited for an answer to my VCR inquiry from a stereo company, the recording stated a "customer care" representative would be available shortly. At that moment, I realized it's finally catching on everywhere. With aging baby boomers, world events and additional pressures in today's society; it is "customer care" that has evolved in our economy. We have moved from a manufacturing economy to a service economy and are currently leaning towards a "servicecare" economy. As we live in a high tech-high button touch environment, many personal contacts have been decreased making each customer interaction more important than ever to corporate imagery. For example, if you call for computer tech support, the representative often makes it a point to address you by first name. If it's the bank credit card company, they may ask "How are you doing today?" This makes the customer feel less like a number and more like a human being.
What Every Manager Should Know About Seeing the World from Where the Customer Is Standing
It is important to remember that the customer doesn't necessarily see things in the same way we do. This point was brought home to me one day while I was shopping with my daughter, Stefanie, who was two years old at the time.
Renewing Customer Loyalty
Every business loses customers, but not many do much about getting them back. And that is a big mistake. Studies show that the average business looses 20 percent of its customer base each year.
Quality vs. Quantity
There is a battle in Call Centers. The teams are Quality vs. Quantity; two performance factors that don't seem to get along.
How Not to Get Stiffed, Improving Your Collection Procedures
Some businesses have slow paying customers or past due balances because they didn't "train" their customers in the beginning.
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