Tiffany Maleshefski

Zendesk

Tiffany Maleshefski is the editor of Zengage and brings more than 10 years of journalism and custom content experience to Zendesk’s company blog. Prior to her tenure at Zendesk, she helped manage the custom content arm AllBusiness.com, where she helped a large number of corporate organizations develop original and innovative content for their company websites. Her work has appeared in eWeek, the San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Magazine, Plenty, Strings, and Muso, among others.

The Level of Support Customers Expect From Online Retailers

0 comments 890 reads

Posted on 2011-10-04

Given the fact that online spending has jumped from $29.7 billion in 2007 to a whopping $38 billion in 2011, it’s clear that customers are embracing the online shopping experience faster than ever before (with no signs of that embracement waning…possibly ever). With that growth comes a steady stream of customer support requests, issues, and the like, and a customer base that’s become deftly skilled at venting their customer support woes to their peers. For online retailers, having a bulletproof support strategy in place can no longer be an after thought.

And there’s no time like the holidays to really prove that point. For most organizations, the holidays are the true test of any company’s support team. The best way to prep: figure out just exactly what customers expect out of online support.

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Love ‘Em or Hate ‘Em, Call Centers Are Here to Stay

0 comments 864 reads

Posted on 2011-09-12

No one relishes the thought of having to phone up a support agent to have their issue resolved. The long hold times, the endless maze of menu options, and the dread of getting transferred to a dizzying stream of agents and having to retell your story every single time. Ugh.

But guess what? Companies don’t relish the thought of phone support either.

As the infographic below shows, the cost of phone support and building out traditional call centers is expensive. The average cost of an inbound call is $5.90. Sounds pretty low, until you consider that call centers on average field about 45.4 billion calls per year. And as their company grows and their number of support agents increases, it can be difficult to scale the kind of personal customer support they had at the beginning. Plus, building out call center can often take months to get ramped up and require and intense amount of training.

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Customer Experience Is More Important Than Advertising

2 comments 2,620 reads

Posted on 2011-07-05

Even if Don Draper himself fleshed out your latest ad campaign, nothing can replace the incredible value of providing customers with the best possible customer experience. Think about it, if you went the fanciest restaurant in town and everyone treated you poorly, would you go back?

With peer-to-peer reviews carrying even more weight thanks to the power of Facebook, Twitter, and the barrage of other social media channels rising in popularity at breakneck speed, it’s never been more important to invest in customer service. Because, hey, bad news travels fast. It’s one of the reasons why we recently introduced our Customer Satisfaction Ratings feature, so organizations have a proper tool...

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How to Avoid an Online Customer Service Fiasco

0 comments 1,128 reads

Posted on 2011-06-14

The real-time web has given customers amazing power to vent their issues in a very public and gigantic space. It’s why companies such as Comcast launched @ComcastCares, a Twitter channel completely devoted to customer support and well, customer complaints. Because let’s face it, if there is ever an industry that can provoke mass ire it’s the cable companies.

These days, it’s very easy for customers to get the message out when they feel a company has wronged them. Get a few folks on Twitter, tack on a hashtag to the tune of #thiscompanysucks, and suddenly you’re at the center of a nationally trending conversation that could’ve been easily prevented had you just been prepared. More than ever, companies need to have a strategy in place to prevent online customer service dust ups from becoming full-blown disasters.

The infographic below offers tips on how to get started:

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It’s Time to Offer Customer Support in Real-Time (and More of What We Learned at #RLTM)

0 comments 774 reads

Posted on 2011-06-10

Your customers are moving at the speed of light and they expect you are too.

Consider this: 572,000 Twitter accounts are created every day, and approximately 1 billion tweets are released every six days. How many of those tweets are from your customers? And what are you doing to respond?

While most customers still typically accept responses to their issues within 24 hours, that period of time still feels much longer than it used to. These days, even a couple of hours can feel like an eternity, and conversely, it’s absolutely crazy how much can happen in just a couple of hours.

If you haven’t incorporated social media into your customer support strategy, you have to start now. This instance. Seriously, leave this post and go tweet something. We’ll wait…but your customers won’t.

This week, we had the opportunity to attend Realtime NY 11 (formerly TWTRCON), and met and mingled with some of the industry’s most influential leaders in and around social media....

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Mobile Apps in the Enterprise Are the Future

0 comments 1,011 reads

Posted on 2011-05-24

Your laptop isn’t irrelevant yet, but it might be soon. Sales of web-enabled smartphones, tablets, and e-readers have surpassed web-enabled laptops, notebooks, and desktop computers.

By 2016, the number of mobile apps downloads are estimated to reach 44 billion and the worldwide online app market is expected to grow from approximately $6.8 billion in 2010 to $25 billion by 2015.

Mobile apps in the business sphere is the future. Decision makers now see that these tools increase productivity, reduce paperwork, and increase revenue in ways other devices simply cannot. It’s why we released today’s updates to our iPhone and iPad help desk software mobile apps, and why we will continue to improve and build upon these apps, as well as our Android and...

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Why You Can’t Ignore Twitter

0 comments 865 reads

Posted on 2011-05-18
- Because Twitter claims to have more than 175 million users, and
- 93% of social media users believe a company should have a presence in social media, and
- 85% of those users believe a company should interact with their customers, and
- 44% of Twitter users have recommended a product, and/li>
- 58% of people who sai if they had tweeted about a bad experience, they would like the company to respond to it
- Source: ISMDealers
Bottom line: Businesses cannot ignore Twitter, especially when it comes to support.
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Zack Urlocker Gets Forbes.com Hip on Groupon’s Customer Service

0 comments 1,480 reads

Posted on 2011-05-10

Everyone wants to know how Groupon does it. How it’s managed to acquire more than 25 million subscribers in North America and more than 50 million worldwide in less than three years. How it’s grown to support more than 200 deals a day, when only a year ago it was supporting a handful. How it manages to file a whopping 15,000 support requests each day. Pause. Let that sink in a little bit more. How it fields 15,000 SUPPORT REQUESTS EACH DAY, resolving 50 percent of those tickets in less than four hours, and at the very least, responding to every single ticket in less than 24 hours.

Totally impressive. Really, it’s downright astounding. And for this reason and so many more, we couldn’t be more happy to call Groupon a customer. To know that in some way we’ve helped them become the ubiquitous force that’s disrupting e-commerce and becoming the model for how to do customer support is incredibly satisfying. We have learned a lot from Groupon, and...

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The History of Customer Support

0 comments 1,017 reads

Posted on 2011-04-22

There was a time when customer support meant you told a shop owner your issue with what they sold you, and they either decided the problem was for them to fix or your own damn fault. But then the telephone was invented and everything changed. Call centers emerged, phone trees were born, and suddenly there was no way around pressing “1″ for one thing and “2″ for another. It’s actually pretty interesting stuff.

So when you find yourself wondering how on earth hold music came to be, and why it always seem to be smooth jazz, let this little history lesson fill in some of the blanks.

Image originally posted on Zengage, The Zendesk Blog

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Inside the Mind of a Customer Support Agent

0 comments 1,111 reads

Posted on 2011-04-14

Before the award nominations start rolling in for best infographic ever, we need to give credit where credit is due. So a big shout out to the folks at Get Satisfaction, who, after publishing their take on what goes on inside the mind of a community manager, inspired us to ~~steal the idea~~ create a similar infographic.

Just who IS that person who takes your agitated telephone calls? What’s the real deal with the guy or gal who resolves your issues via live chat? What makes them so nice? What makes them turn mean? Are they really just robots? Do they even like tacos?

Well folks, the mystery of what makes your local support agent tick has been revealed, here, today, on this very blog! Let the mind games begin!

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