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...

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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...

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...

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...

I was talking to a representative from a major company the other day and he told me about a strategy he uses to improve the level of customer service that he provides. He told me that he tries to engage customers on a human level. How he attempts to engage customers on a human level is really quite ...

When I wrote my post about moving help outside of the help center, I promised to write a post about one of the main benefits of actually moving hep outside of the help center (besides the logical conclusion that customers will actually use the documentation more). The second benefit (and perhaps mor...

Not that long ago a reader asked me to write a post following up after a sale to thank the customer and then offer any help. This is an issue I sort of talk about in a post I wrote about closing the sale on a good note, but not exactly the same. A lot of companies incorrectly assume that when the cu...