Lydia Neptune

Zendesk

Lydia Neptune recently returned to writing after a nearly 15-year-long detour through the world of corporate finance, having worked for companies in the fields of publishing and technology. In her business tenure, she most enjoyed explaining financial concepts to non-financial people, and she hopes to continue to combine business sense and communication through her freelance writing. A transplant to Denver by way of San Francisco, she enjoys international travel, cooking and reading (or any combination thereof.)

Gartner Predicts Social Media Will Be a Support Tool Among 40 Percent of the Top 1,000 Companies

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Posted on 2011-05-18

By now, most companies have gotten the memo about brand management via social media. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, you know the drill. As corporate social media strategy matures, what’s on the horizon?

It’s customer service.

“In 2010, only 5 percent of organizations took advantage of social/collaborative customer action to improve service processes; however, customer demand and heightened business awareness is making this a top issue among customer service managers,” says Gartner’s research VP Drew Kraus. “At current trajectories, within five years we expect that community peer-to-peer support projects will supplement or replace Tier 1 contact center support in more than 40 percent of top 1,000 companies with a contact center.”

The report notes that companies are being pushed along this path by clever customers, who find that ...

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Increase efficiency, Drive Down Cost, and Improve customer Satisfaction All at the Same Time

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Posted on 2011-05-02

How can your organization increase efficiency, drive down cost, and improve customer satisfaction all at the same time? By getting it right the first time – increasing first call resolution (FCR) is an incredibly powerful way for a call center to achieve success. Call center consulting company SQM contends that every 1 percent improvement in FCR equals a 1 percent improvement in customer satisfaction. Increases in FCR also and subsequent customer satisfaction levels, over time, decrease operational costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars on average.

“First call resolution is extremely important for two reasons; first, your customers will be more satisfied with your service, and second, it is more efficient which keeps the total cost of call competitive,” says Kim Box, who led call center operations at Hewlett-P for 15 years. So...

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Key Metrics to Measure for Social Media

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Posted on 2011-03-08

Customers are using social media to talk about your brand, whether or not your company chooses to participate in the discussion.

You know this. It’s why your have a company Facebook page and Twitter feed, where the chatter about your brand can be gratifying or cringe inducing. But how to make these conversations useful and integrated into a long-term strategic support plan.

What the Heck Do All These Conversations Mean?

While forward-thinking companies have integrated social media brand and customer engagement strategy, others are lagging behind. A recent survey by marketing services provider Alterian revealed that 70 percent of respondents either had little understanding of the social media conversations going on about their brands, or were using a few ad-hoc tools to try to...

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Self-Service Support: Are You Doing It Wrong?

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Posted on 2011-03-07

Customer self-service certainly has its advantages: customers can find answers they need regardless of call center hours, without waiting for an agent to assist them, at remarkable cost savings to the company. However, when an interactive voice response (IVR) system is poorly designed, hard to use, or inefficient, irritated callers either transfer to an agent (who then has to cool the situation down) or worse, they drop the call – and maybe the company – entirely.

Customer contact professionals recently surveyed by the International Customer Management Institute gave most of their own self-service channels (IVR systems, web knowledge bases, virtual agents, etc.) a mediocre rating, and many say that they don’t have any idea of what their customers think of their self-service experience. Kind of surprising considering the amount of investment that goes into the systems, the level of cost savings these systems are supposed to achieve, and most...

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Mobile Devices Are Transforming Customer Service

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Posted on 2011-02-15

Experts are saying that 2011 is the year that mobile computing will transform customer service. That’s because mobile apps are “expanding the scope of customer service – mobile apps allow us to offer new functionality,” according to Diane Clarkson, an analyst at Forrester Research. “We can now use our mobile devices to learn if an item is in stock, to deposit checks, and to get assembly instructions. This functionality is often a service or deflects a call for service,” Clarkson notes in a recent blog post that takes a closer look at the various forces helping to change the definition of customer service.

There are numerous challenges for companies in offering this kind of functionality, such as security issues and multiple platforms and operating systems to navigate. But with 15 million iPads sold last year and...

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