Misinformation in customer service is pretty common. It’s probably something you’ve experienced firsthand as well. You call a company and you’re told one thing by one representative. Then you call back a few days later and you’re told that what the first representative told y...

Employees, especially customer service representatives, usually don’t like having to go out of their way to do something for a customer. It may be because they don’t have the time, it could be because they lack the dedication, or one of any other number of reasons. But, the point is - mo...

Though this is more Tom’s area of expertise, I’d like to write about call monitoring and quality assurance. I have been working with a rapidly growing technology company over the last couple of weeks and one of their internal customer service focuses is on call monitoring. They’ve ...

The video-sharing web site Vimeo is an extremely well designed web site. Just from looking at and exploring the web site, you can tell the designers spent a lot of time thinking about how it would work and how users would interact with it. As you’d expect from such a web site, Vimeo’s he...

Every now and then I find myself talking to an executive who mentions an endgame, finish line, or a similar sports metaphor that talks about an end of customer service improvement or an overall goal that can be reached. When I hear this, I have to interrupt and ask a question. My interrupting has no...

This is the third portion of a four part interview with Christoph Guttentag, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions at Duke University. In this part of the interview, Christoph explains the aspects of the admissions process that he thinks Duke excels at, discusses some of his office’s customer servi...

A lot of companies spend a lot of money on surveying their customers. These companies are doing the right thing (surveying your customers is great), but chances are, there is a group that they’re forgetting to survey: their service providers. Employees, especially frontline service providers, ...

I was reading about an interesting policy at a fairly progressive technology company based in a major city. They have about 400 employees or so and an interesting policy when it comes to buying their employees lunch. Quite simply, their policy is “we’ll buy you lunch if you eat with some...

At the same car dealership with the exceptional waiting room, there were a series of “red phones” that customers could pick up to talk to the dealership’s owner. Supposedly (these phones are promoted not only at the dealership, but in most of the dealership’s marketing materi...

I’ve been reading Managing Online Forums by Patrick O’Keefe over the last few days. The book was an interesting read because Patrick has an interesting, very hands on background. He has a lot of experience running some very large and very successful forum communities and as a result of t...