Flavio Martins

I love customer service and spend hours each day, working, training, inspiring, promoting, and dreaming up ways to make customer service awesome. For all of the customer service talk and training that goes on, there’s a dark side to customer service that we’ve all seen too many times.

I recently came across a disturbing blog post with confessions of a customer service representative. It’s not pretty and it’s the reason why so many people hate customer service.

The mega corporations don’t send their customer service outside because of quality, they do it because it’s cheap. Shortcuts will be taken. When shortcuts are taken with employees in customer service, bad customer service happens.

What will it take for companies to...

One of the greatest challenges to developing the customer experience and consistently delivering great customer service is dealing with employee turnover.

I’m asked about how to manage employee turnover more than any other question, and probably more than all of the other questions combined. Ask any customer service manager or if you attend any customer service type conference, and you’re bound to hear about the topic of employee turnover.

Call centers are generally associated with high employee turnover rates. It’s not a myth, high employee turnover at call centers is a fact.

33% – average turnover rate in US call centers.
47% – average turnover rate in retail call centers.
51% – average turnover rate in subcontractor call centers.

(Source:...

I’m generally frustrated with customer service from most phone, Internet, and cable providers, and I’m not the only one. Providing customer service as a corporate giant is tough. Millions of customers, thousands of employees interacting with those customers. It’s an ultra complicated process managing all of the systems, processes, and people involved. But complexity is not an excuse.

I was sitting at my desk today when my cell phone rang. The caller ID listed a Minnesota number I didn’t recognize, but I picked it up anyway. The woman on the other end was hysterical.

Between sobs, I’m able to figure out that:

1. I have no idea who is calling me.
2. She’s having some MAJOR T-Mobile customer service problems.

All of her data? Gone. Apps? Gone. Contacts? Gone. Long story short: Everything gone. The response from the T-Mobile customer service rep? I don’t care. We can’t do anything about it. Call the phone...

Have you ever called an offshore customer service call center and been frustrated with the customer experience? Ever wish something could be done to improve the customer experience in call centers? If the government gets its way, changes to offshore call centers are on their way.

Lauren Carlson, at the CRM review site Software Advice, recently discussed the government customer service fix bill, officially known as the U.S. Call Center and Consumer Protection Act or (H.R. 3596), and how 3 major service companies are leading the way in showing that...