Customer Service

Disasters -- be they man-made or natural, like Hurricane Sandy -- showcase the best in people. Neighbor helps neighbor like never before, people share what they have, and assistance comes from unexpected places. They also showcase people at their worst -- looters, scammers and other lowlifes emerge ...

Forty-seven percent of all social media users have used their networks to get customer service from a company, with usage as high as 59 percent among 18-24 year olds, according to a new study from NM Incite. Almost one in three social media users said they preferred to contact a company that way, an...

It used to be that your business could provide a basic level of service and your customers would be perfectly happy. Some form of help, delivered at the speed of the business and within the parameters of your company's policies, was usually OK -- and if it wasn't, you could probably get away with...

Moxie Software recently released two separate, albeit highly complementary, CRM self-service applications. One is a revamped version of its self-service application called "Knowledge Spaces." Enhancements allow users to "widgetize" pieces of the application and embed just those portions on a website...

The billing function conjures up many images, few of them positive. Essential to success of your business, yet often a burden for most organizations independent of size or market, billing is seen as a necessary evil to collect cash and enable organizations to stay alive. Over the past few years, how...

Now is the golden age of marketing. I was tempted to write the second golden age since history sometimes seems to repeat but I am more of the Mark Twain school of history and he believed that history did not repeat itself but that it rhymed. In that vein, what could be seen as the first golden age o...

Increasingly, CRM vendors -- and their customers -- are recognizing the value of applying mobile technologies to the self-service piece of a CRM operations. In response, more and more vendors are rolling out new applications for companies that wish to target this emerging, but rapidly growing, deman...

Buried in a recent J.D. Power and Associates 2012 U.S. Credit Card Satisfaction study -- which showed consumers' satisfaction with credit cards was at a six-year high -- was this very telling factoid: Only 7 percent of credit card customers use their mobile phones to complete transactions, up from 4...

Kana Software is pushing into the mid-market space with a new offering called "Kana Express." It is a multi-channel Web customer service application divided into four modules, all of which can be deployed separately or used as a whole suite. Scaled-down versions of more robust customer service appl...

Customer satisfaction with the credit card industry has stabilized after years of dramatic changes to the space, according to J.D. Power and Associates' 2012 U.S. Credit Card Satisfaction study. It found that for the third consecutive year, customers' satisfaction with their credits cards has increa...

Jeff Hasen, Hipcricket's CMO, recently had what he called his "10 millionth" bad customer experience with Comcast. It's galling enough to be treated poorly by a company when you buy just about all of its services, as Hasen does with Comcast. Worse, though, is when you are a mobile CRM expert, as Ha...

A marketing campaign by Southwest Airlines to mark the growth of its Facebook fan base to 3-million turned into an unmitigated PR nightmare last Friday. Southwest offered discounted flights that day to celebrate the social media milestone. Unfortunately, customers who tried to take advantage of the ...

A company's reputation is based on the customer's experience. Fixing or preventing problems is half of the service equation; communicating with customers is the other half. Customer service is as important, if not more important than the immediate resolution of the problem. An integral part of the c...

Social media sites are all about having conversations, and that's true for businesses as well as individuals. The trick for businesses is knowing how and when to engage in these conversations -- and how to keep up with them. Like any conversation, listening is important, and it's one way that busine...

Kana plans to build out its customer service experience management bona fides with its recent acquisition of contact center provider Ciboodle from the Sword Group. The point of the acquisition is to weave together Ciboodle's chief strengths -- its process-based customer contact management platform,...