Why Businesses Should Deliver Better Customer Service. How many times have you hung up on a customer service representative because you felt like the wait was unbearable or you couldn't stand to repeat the same information AGAIN?
Or you just knew that this agent had absolutely no idea what you were taking about and could never possibly help? Have you tried calling your cable or Internet provider's customer service? Since we've all been there the frustration makes for great bonding at cocktail parties but at some point you have to think - how many customers can these companies afford to alienate before they make a change? A new Zogby Analytics study sheds light on some of the biggest customer service complaints businesses face and how dire it has become for everyone involved. Where do customers draw the line on poor customer service? • 15 percent of consumers say they would rather see the dentist than speak with a customer service agent Understand the landscape: Ask for industry references.
15% dread customer service more than dentist. By Catey Hill Shutterstock.com How much do people hate sitting on hold with customer service?
One in six consumers would rather sit in a dentist’s chair, according to a survey released Tuesday by Corvisa Cloud, a customer service company. (Presumably, these respondents have never had a root canal.) What’s more, 13% of consumers would rather endure throngs of Black Friday shoppers than talk to customer service, and for 7% of Americans a trip to the DMV or doing their taxes is preferable to “please hold.” Tough Customer: Retail Robots Why do so many store clerks sound like drones? “When you go into the dentist for a checkup, it’s likely nothing bad is happening — they’ll scrape some plague and give you a free toothbrush,” says Chicago-area psychologist Elizabeth Lombardo.
But, experts point out, you can’t wholly blame customer service for your bad experience. To get better service, Woodward says, check your emotions at the door. The Gamification of Business. The Leading Source for Gamification News & Info. How 'Gamification' Can Make Your Customer Service Worse. Abusive customers.
Low pay. Tuberculosis infections. Customer support can be a miserable job. Software makers have long promised to improve the life of customer support reps, and now they’re at it again. This time, they want to turn customer support into a game. They call it gamification. Companies like Badgeville and Bunchball help businesses add gamification to existing software — such as the customer relationship management service Salesforce.com or the help-desk service Zendesk — while other outfits are adding game mechanics directly to their own applications. Just last week, a startup called PlayVox debuted with a private social network designed for contact centers that includes a gamified training system. On some level, the practice makes sense. “Each time one of us gets a kudos, we give a little ‘woot’ and share our success with the whole office,” he says.
But some believe gamification may do more harm than good. . — Kathy Sierra. UserCentered - Customer service, customer support, community management, and other ways to keep your customers. The longstanding stereotype about Community Managers is that they sneak out of the room at the moment people start talking about “metrics” or “ROI”.
Community Managers are focused on doing the qualitative – limiting frustration and increasing happiness in the community. Creating quantitative metrics from a qualitative activity is asking the left side of the brain to report on the right side’s progress. It hasn’t helped that Zappos, the poster child of “love thy customer and thou shalt succeed”, is largely touted for not measuring call times. People latch on to stories about 6-hour support center calls and Zappos directing customers to other retailers if products are out of stock. The assumption seems to be is that Zappos is successful despite the fact that they don’t use support center metrics. The fact of the matter is that Zappos does have very specific metrics at work in their customer service center. The Zappos Call Center Metrics NetPromoter Score What it is: Why it works: What it is: