Customer Service

Business intelligence applications have always delighted company executives -- at least as they watched simulated exercises on a sales rep's laptop. Real-world execution, though? Until recently, that has left much to be desired. To be sure, it is not entirely the fault of the vendor. Earlier generat...

Sprint had a problem ubiquitous to all retailers: a percentage of customers unhappy with its products and services. However, for Sprint -- one of the nation's largest wireless telecom providers with a complex supply chain that touches upon numerous and overlapping related customer service processes ...

There are a few challenges facing the North American customer care outsourcing industry that may dampen growth in the coming years, according to a new Frost & Sullivan report that projects earned revenues to reach US$20.1 billion in 2012 from $19.5 billion in 2005. These predictions are intentio...

RightNow Technologies has introduced two new voice applications that provide contact center agents with enough identifying information about the customer to eliminate the need to repeat information when a call is transferred to a new agent. The new functionality addresses a long-standing customer c...

In many companies, marketing is experiencing a resurgence and new relevance, a rejuvenation if you will towards aligning closer to customers than ever before. What's most encouraging about this is the fact that strategies based on dated cause-and-effect relationships with clients are, through the u...

A new report shows that government agencies are "reinventing" themselves with online customer service. The study indicates that the Internet is thus "redefining" the relationship between citizens and their governments, as government agencies around the world adopt digital applications, from allowing...

CRM vendors -- the champions of customer service best practices -- received dismal ratings for their own treatment of online customers in a new survey. The Customer Respect Group has rated customer service in such industries as banking, airline and travel, telecom, consumer goods, manufacturing, foo...

I am a bit of an economics junkie. My interest in the dismal science carries over from my interest in evolution and can be summarized as, why things are the way they are and how they got that way. I am currently finishing up a book that gets me where I live, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinc...

Lest any doubt remains that U.S. customers do not appreciate hearing heavy accents when they're on the phone with contact center agents, a new survey reveals that this is, in fact, one of the top sources of frustration among those who call for assistance. Difficult-to-understand accents was the top ...

When the sales team operates with urgency, the soul of a company is alive, thriving and growing. The sales department is the company's heartbeat and is absolutely necessary to create a sense of purpose and maintain a constant focus on delivering value to customers. Great salespeople are constantly t...

Personal banking is called retail banking in the biz because traditionally consumer banking occurred in a building on Main Street, Anytown, U.S.A. The bank sat among department and hardware stores, coffee and flower shops. In the eyes of consumers, it was another downtown retailer. But in the mid-1...

You don't need to go far to see how different the 00s are from the 90s, just take a look at selling. Ahh, the 90s, lots of people in sales tell me you didn't make sales calls in the 90s, it was more like making appointments to take orders. Gurus of selling like Jim Dickie of CSO Insights, reported...

Paul English, a Massachusetts-based software engineer turned customer service "guru," has become famous nearly overnight for his "dial zero for a human" automated phone system revolt. Judging from the widespread phenomenon and national attention, this is a customer service movement long overdue. H...

In August 2005, specialty retailer Casual Male struck a bargain with its customers: If it didn't have a best-selling item in a particular size or color in stock, it would get it within five days. If it couldn't deliver, the customer would get the item for free. Nine months later, Casual Male is out ...

Few events are likely to have a more devastating effect on a company -- or even the industry it represents -- than being exposed for deliberately misleading customers about the safety of its products. The sunscreen industry may be forced to crawl out of a ditch due to this sort of deception. Last mo...