Customer Success!

Help your Customer Service Teams Excel!   If you’ve ever worked in a Contact Centre or been around one for any reasonable stretch of time, you'll know that individuals working in the front-line naturally want to do the right thing by customers. Despite this, there are difficulties and complexities, competing priorities and bad performance measures dragging down the overall quality of service provided. Some organisations seemingly prevent good customer service from ever being possible with kooky policies and procedures. Whilst performing "Agent Shadowing" onsite the other day, I saw a great example of this. This agent (which we will call "Frank") is front-line of a large contact centre in Melbourne. His focus and approach was spot-on, looking to provide good customer outcomes by going over and above his remit as a front-line advocate. In this particular instance, a customer who was clearly frustrated and panicked, called in asking for help....

Using Feedback to Drive a Top Performing Team There I was, feeling angry, dejected, lost and alone. How could anyone be so downright nasty and spiteful to call out that my performance could have been better in that important customer meeting (where I may have checked out of the conversation early, behaved completely disengaged in front of the customer, and allowed the rest of the team to make up for my non-performance). I reflect back on my early years in my professional career where feedback like this felt like a knife through the heart! I always took feedback so personally, and I avoided it like the plague. The reality was that the leadership team actually wanted me to succeed, and these types of conversations were supposed to help me be aware of my limitations, improve my professionalism and reach deeper to increase my working performance (despite how brutalised I felt). Using feedback to improve all our performances is a valuable tool, not just within the organisation, bu...

This is an article originally published in Marketing Magazine Paul Bichsel has six ways to deliver the best omnichannel customer experience. Digital disruption, increased competition, eroding customer loyalty and high employee turnover are all leading businesses to invest more and more into customer experience (CX). Everyone is scrambling for new ways to build customer loyalty, trust and evangelism. But there’s a problem... Relationships are complicated, and too many companies are forgetting this when it comes to CX. In fact, any customer service interaction is four times more likely to drive disloyalty than loyalty. Often what organisations think the customer will like, isn’t what they need. What customers expect from any interaction with a brand is responsiveness, transparency and empowerment. Follow the leaders Innovative companies have one thing in common – they think about the entire customer relationship, merging the physical and online experience using multiple ...