customer support
Getting to know you…
Getting to know your customers is a good thing; we all understand this. But if you get to know your customers by gathering data about them, a funny things happen: your customers expect you to know about them. And to behave accordingly.
I have a a Canon printer. (It’s a PIXMA MX700. I like it a [...]
TXU Energy: a dank, unpleasant pit of bad service
We’ve written about how customer service is part of your marketing, and how bad service can undo all the great marketing in the world. Yesterday I came across a prime example of this from TXU Energy, an electricity reseller here in Texas (and a pretty large one).
TXU does lots and lots of advertising. Before I [...]
Hold the ads, please
David Reich at My 2 Cents wrote about ads that play while you’re on hold:
Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal tells the story. Callers to customer service, while waiting for the next available representative, are seen as a huge captive audience. More than 320 million calls a month and growing, says one of the companies [...]
Just another “somebody done somebody wrong” post
Let me put on my cowboy hat and strum a steel guitar; it’s time for a tale of woe. (With a little marketing lesson, too!)
We’ve been together for years - back to the 90s. We’ve been through a lot; emergency (late) gift purchases, shopping for myself, all of it. Our relationship expanded into new and [...]
Comcast-ic
We are Comcast subscribers, cable TV and Internet access, and I haven’t given much thought to the service one way of the other. It seems pretty reliable. We haven’t had a lot of tear-our-hair-out experiences with them.
The other day, Comcast e-mail - just one of several e-mail systems I rely on, but an important one [...]
Does this describe your voicemail menu?
Seth Godin offers one of the best metaphors for the experience of seeking help via phone from almost every company in existence:
Let’s say the person in charge of your retail operations does the following every single day:
Puts up a sign indicating which of five doors customers should use.
Locks that door.
Randomly unlocks another door.
When someone figures [...]
In praise of customer service at Dunkin’ Donuts
I don’t "do" Starbucks.
Yes, I like and admire the fact that they give people a coffee-house-ish place to hang out.
I like that they offer Wi-Fi.
I like that they have a certain canned hip to them, and that they offer their workers benefits.
But I don’t "do" Starbucks.
I do Dunkin’ Donuts.
This is partially in support of [...]
If the Online Shoe Shopping Fits…
Because I have a somewhat odd shoe size - 10 AAA (recently widened from AAAA, but fortunately not lengthened) I order most of my shoes on line. This is a bit chancy, of course, but mostly I know what’s going to work and what’s not. And you can always send them back.
Last weekend, I spent [...]
Customer service: don’t be like the big guys. Please.
The other day I was part of a conversation about how small business want to offer the kinds of web functionality that the big guys have - online customers support and ordering, that sort of thing. It occurred to me later, though, that in my experience, small businesses tend to do a far better job [...]
Spitting bullets at word-spotting
Let’s face it, I don’t know anybody who enjoys calling into a call center.
Yes, sometimes we’re calling to order something, and we generally get a very pleasant person - say , some nice women up in Maine who works for LL Bean is really trying to help me figure out whether the Swimming Pool blue [...]
