customer service

I originally wrote today’s post for NICE inContact. It appeared on their site on July 1, 2021.

I originally published today’s post for StellaConnect. It appeared on their site on May 25, 2021.

What’s the secret to a great customer experience?

I’ll keep today’s post simple – and fun. Bob Farrell, founder of Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlors, shared the secret to a great customer experience in 1973 (yes, almost 50 years ago!!), when he developed a motivational speech for new employees called Give ’em the Pickle!, based on a letter he received from a disappointed customer.

Customer experience has become a necessity for business success. Every day, consumers have a greater ability to interact with businesses and brands, and the majority of them expect companies to understand their expectations from the start. Studies show that 73% of consumers say good experience with a company is instrumental in influencing their brand loyalty.

From Contact centre to Customer Value Centre: read our new opinion paper. As we are not at the CCW, please watch also our webinar!

Dear Reader,

Understanding the difference between customer experience and customer service will save you money in your contact center!

There’s a quote (which I may have evolved over the years) from Chris Zane, founder of Zane’s Cycles, that goes like this: “Customer service is what happens when the experience breaks down.”

It’s a great quote for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it nicely differentiates “customer experience” and “customer service,” which people often confuse to be one and the same. Not so.

As a customer experience professional, you focus a lot on the customer. You put the customer on a pedestal. You put the customer front and center. And rightly so; without customers, you have no business. But you have to remember this: in order to deliberately design a customer-centric culture, you must put employees more first. Only when employees have a great experience can customers have a great experience, too.

Social media has become the go-to channel for customers and brands to communicate with one another. The conversation can involve anything from questions to complaints to shout-outs, but whatever the context, brands must be ready to respond with stellar customer service. Below are 11 methods for providing customer service through social.

I don’t think there is any need to push the statement “a great customer experience leads to happier customers, which in turn leads to higher profit” anymore – over the past 20 years we have seen thousands of books and articles, and a multitude of that number in PowerPoint slides, proving time and again that happier customers lead to faster growth, increased share prices against the not-so-customer-centric peer group, more loyalty/less churn, etc. 

While my blog was being “reworked” (read: unhacked), I posted in Linked-In about the webinar I did last week with Microsoft.

That was the first of a three-webinar series on the challenges affecting customer service these days and for the next couple of years.  The first webinar was on the evolving role of customer service and how it is going to look in the next decade.