Katie O'Connell

RightNow

In her role as director of customer programs, Katie meets regularly with RightNow clients to learn about their challenges and successes. Previously, Katie ran RightNow’s North America public relations program. Prior to RightNow, she helped drive strategic public relations for Oracle, Siebel, Commerce One, and Informatica.

Social Lessons Learned from drugstore.com

0 comments 4,423 reads

Posted on 2010-08-09

Drugstore.com, a leading online retailer of health, beauty, skincare, vision and pharmacy products, has built a brand known for uncommonly superior customer experiences. As the director of customer care, Lisa Larson spends most of her days ensuring customers have fantastic experiences, even if something goes wrong.

Lisa is a truly innovative customer care executive; she and her team embrace new technology as a way to connect with customers and improve experiences. In fact, Lisa is on Twitter regularly, listening to customers, sharing ideas and solving their problems. You can follow her @DirectorsDesk.

Lisa was recently in New York at ...

Read More »
MySpace: Social Media Transforms Customer Experience

0 comments 1,111 reads

Posted on 2010-06-29

In a session at IQPC’s Call Center Week recently, Tish Whitcraft, senior vice president of customer experience and operations at MySpace, talked about social media and its impact on customer experience. Her observations in bold below:

#1. Increasingly, users will go to their social network to get help rather than going to the company they bought the product from. My thoughts: This can make it difficult to ensure customers get accurate information about a product or brand. (Shameless plug for RightNow: Cloud Monitor and Customer Portal Syndication Widgets can help with this)

#2 Today, the multi-channel customer experience actually...

Read More »
Creating a Candid Culture

0 comments 1,008 reads

Posted on 2010-06-23

Last week in Las Vegas at IQPC Call Center Week I saw Steve Kaay from US Auto Parts deliver an insightful keynote presentation to a room packed full of contact center managers and executives.

Kaay’s presentation focused on customer loyalty and how to get it; his philosophy is to create a candid culture. Check out this clip (http://www.twitvid.com/3EON9) of his presentation where he talks about being honest and transparent with customers. Kaay’s theory is that you need to be forthright with customers, which goes beyond honesty. His assertions – tell the customer everything, don’t just answer their question. Be totally up front when something goes wrong and let the customer know how you are dealing with it. This approach has helped US Auto Parts improve customer satisfaction.

This seems simple and basic, but Kaay shared several stories from the trenches where agents had actually been...

Read More »
Social Media, Customer Service & Comcast

4 comments 2,642 reads

Posted on 2010-06-22

I was in Las Vegas last week at IQPC Call Center Week and I was thrilled to see Frank Eliason, Sr. Director of National Customer Operations at Comcast, on the agenda for this morning’s keynote. BusinessWeek has called Eliason “the most famous customer service manager in the U.S., possibly in the world.” Eliason is a pioneer, he was one of the first to use Twitter (and other social media outlets) as a channel for customer service.

As I settled into my seat Eliason asked the audience, do you think social media is a fad? Surprisingly, quite a few people raised their hands. Eliason, of course, disagrees; he claims social media is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate and that Twitter changed the culture of cable giant Comcast. To prove his point he shared one of my favorite YouTube videos: Socialnomics, the Social Media Revolution. The video, set to hip house music, flashes stats that wowed the audience, including:
• If Facebook was a country, it would be the...

Read More »