Guest Service

Outstanding customer service does exist - and its embodied in Kristi of L.L. Bean. She is all about accountability, attitude, and action!

Why do customers leave? The conventional wisdom is the belief that either the price they had to pay got to high or their needs for the offering changed. And, that is the certainly the sound of their fury upon exit. We also believe that what we hear at account closing or a departing huff is the whole story. It is only thunder—the air rushing back together after their departure. Assume customers’ stated reasons for departure represented only 10% of the whole truth.

Summer isn't over yet, but retailers are already shifting into holiday sales mode. And this year's holiday retail season is expected to be strong. Decreases in unemployment and gas prices, as well as an increased willingness to spend could lead to a 5.7 percent year-over-year increase in U.S. retail sales during November and December—the highest growth rate since 2011, predicts eMarketer.

In a world gone crazy for data, businesses are managing to more performance measures than ever before. And we’re all scrambling for that one golden metric that solves everything. The customer experience and loyalty landscape is papered with metrics that have fallen in and out of favor, with none becoming the sole star that measures all we need to know.

It's often the details that elevate a customer experience from average to impressive.

It’s a hypercompetitive market and you are doing everything you can to retain your customers, yet you know that no matter what you do, you will still lose some customers to competitors. The competition to acquire new customers is fierce. How do you maintain your customer base? Our research team at Georgia State University looked at a large national telecommunications firm and found that it can be profitable to go after lost customers and win back their business.

When a company's employees aren't aligned with its organizational identity, the result is unhappy customers.

Virtually all businesses acknowledge the importance of customer satisfaction – it’s usually right there in the mission statement. But the way businesses handle customer service has a more direct impact on the company’s bottom line than many people realize. A Harvard Business Review study recently quantified the value of the customer experience, demonstrating that delivering excellent support generates high returns.

A gamified business environment is not only a means to gauge performance, but rather it is a means to motivate people to work even better. However, it’s not just about numbers and achievements. It’s an ongoing process that enables people to learn, innovate and take new perspectives on their work. A gamified environment also leads to innovation and even ideation – something that works in line with the wisdom and the power of crowds.

“Unfortunately, with all of that complaining, the implications of customer complaint behavior for organizations have been examined far less often. Yet, how an organization responds to a complaint can have a major impact on its customer’s post-complaint consumer behavior, from re-purchase intentions to likelihood to engage in word-of-mouth activities, and it may even affect the valance of the word-of-mouth message,” says Moshe Davidow, a professor at the University of Haifa, and a prominent researcher in corporate complaint resolution.

So how do you ensure that your contact centre adapts to meet the changing needs of the customer and that best practice is being observed?

A few years ago, it was common for organizational leaders to debate the value of cloud-based solutions, but those days are in the past, maintains Forrester Research analyst Liz Herbert. "Decades of fighting the cloud are over," says Herbert. "The cloud has become the first approach for most solutions, and in some cases, it's the only approach. Now, it's more about deciding which type of cloud—public, private, hybrid, etc.—makes sense for a company's needs."

To stay ahead of the competition, it’s important for marketing leaders to have an eye on trends that have the potential to accelerate—or disrupt—their business. At Opticon 2015, Mary Hamilton,…

Our world is nothing like our “father’s Oldsmobile.” Change is a constant yet those four words do not adequately capture what is going on. We are in the midst of a world shift that will forever change our and the lives of our grandchildren.

Amazon Prime Day, which celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Prime members’ program on July 15, 2015, has taken a lot of flack as a bad customer experience, based on negative tweets and members’ frustration about the quality, availability, and accessibility of the items featured in the sale.

Sport is often a metaphor for the challenges that companies face when seeking to deploy a winning customer experience strategy. There appears to be no shortage of lessons to be learned from almost any sport, and the tougher the contest the more relevant, compelling and powerful the examples seem to be.

Customer service stories often surface in a negative light—a service wasn’t cancelled, no one responded to a problem, or a company didn’t deliver on its promise. In fact, nearly one-third of consumers think that businesses are paying less attention to providing great customer service.

And unfortunately, the customer is always right about this. While over 80% of companies boast that they provide “superior” customer service, only 8% of customers actually agree with them.

Every business out there knows (or pretends to) that customers are their bread and butter, yet customer experience gets either swept under the rug or remains a non-issue. The prevalence of headline-g…