Richard Shapiro

Last week, I was extremely fortunate to have attended Chad McDaniel’s Execs In The Know Conference in Bonita Springs, Florida. The weather was excellent and the content was amazing. We started with a visit to Sony’s Customer Experience Center. The Sony associates we met at each step of the tour were enthusiastic, knowledgeable and extremely welcoming.

The keynote addresses from both Scott Monty of Ford Motor Company and Anne McGraw of Nissan were both thoughtful and thought-provoking. During the conference, Chad’s 2012 Customer Experience Management Benchmark Study was released. One of the findings received a great deal of attention and created discussion: Forty-nine percent of the participating companies said the traffic to their traditional channels (phone and email) had increased over the last year, reinforcing the need to heavily support those channels in addition to investing in social media and...

My wife and I are renovating our home. Every time we start to tell someone about our project they all say, “Tell me your disaster story”; the contractor didn’t show up, they did shoddy work, forgot to place an order with one of their suppliers, didn’t submit the permit in time, etc., etc., etc.

Well, we don’t have one bad story. We have 20 good ones. From the beginning, our contractor, Michael, would tell us, “We have a problem, but don’t worry. I have two solutions and you get to choose which one you want.” He might say, “One option might cost a bit more, and the other one might take more time.”

We love Michael because he doesn’t leave us with a problem; he leaves us with solutions.

In the world of business, many business partners and company associates communicate problems without being trained to think about potential fixes. It’s clearly possible that the resolution might cost too much or has been tried in the past and did not work,...

Whenever I hear contact center managers talk about excessive hold times in the queue, it makes me think of research our firm has conducted for one of our consumer product clients.

The problem:

As happens sometimes, the company had released several new brands and Marketing promoted them via an extensive advertising campaign. However, they failed to notify the contact center in a timely manner. As a result of the promotions, the contact center’s volume of calls doubled within a month. Instead of consumers waiting less than one minute to reach a representative, they were now experiencing delays of as much as 15 to 20 minutes. Of course, after numerous attempts to reach the department, some consumers just gave up and never did connect to the company.

The experiment:

Our client asked us to conduct research to assess the effect of the longer wait times on brand...

Let’s start with my wishes for customer service in 2013:

Care about my business: In my experience, most frontline associates don’t seem to understand the concept of showing appreciation for the consumer’s business. Maybe an easier concept is to train your associates on the concept of showing the customer that you care about their business. Make the customer feel that you care that they are purchasing goods and services from your company versus your competitors. Try to communicate a clear message to consumers that your company wants to do business with them not just today, but into the future too.

Tell me what you can do: The word that consumers hate the most is “no”. “No it’s not in stock.” “No, it’s not our policy.” “No, it’s two days after our return policy.” Don’t tell the consumer what you can’t do, tell them what you can do.

Check first, then communicate: There is an old saying for carpenters; “Measure...