Making Customers Smile

A lot of us know that we do our best work when we are happy. If there is stress or tension, we generally either try to avoid the situation or choose the least challenging avenues to get the work done. Those are not always the best pieces of work, they are generally just mediocre.

How Many of Your Customers Are Your "Friends"?

Lets start with the definition of "Friend" here. That shouldn't be a hard question, but if you ask someone what is the meaning of "Friend", you will find a lot of different answers.

A friend defined by an online dictionary is:
1. a person known well to another and regarded with liking, affection, and loyalty; an intimate
2. an acquaintance or associate
3. an ally in a fight or cause; supporter
4. a fellow member of a party, society, etc
5. a patron or supporter: a friend of the opera

The "We got your back" concept for Customer Services

We all know that Customer Services is a very important, if not the most important, touch point to maintain a great customer relation and influence the customer experience overall. If it is through call centers or through the growing social media channels, the same rules apply and we see the same impact on the overall experience.

With all the different ways that customers can reach us today, and the large customer service teams, are we strangling our own capabilities to influence the customer experience? This question led me to think about, what I call, the "we got your back" concept. This is based on what the organization philosophy is with regards to the freedom that a customer service representative/agent has to influence and manage the overall customer experience.

Quality of Customer Experience

In a recent discussion in Gary Lemke's blog posts, the aspect of speed of CRM has been the center of attention. In today's post, the concept is linked to customer delight. Though I appreciate the perspective of the speed of the customer interaction being important to the whole customer experience, I believe that there is something more important than the speed that in a lot of cases results in more satisfied customers.

Customers Response to Change - A Behavioral View

How does a customer react to change? What is the impact on the customer when a change in product or service confronts him/her? These are a couple of the questions which spawned the thoughts around Customer Change Management (as I started to call it). There are various studies ranging from behavioral to business best practices which tell us about how people react to change. The one I found suited a typical response to a change in products/services by a customer is based on “The Stages of Change Model”. This model was originally developed by James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente at the University of Rhode Island back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Preempting Services… Is this the next step?

Traditionally, we wait for our customers to reach out to us for services. Customers go to our self service websites, contact us on social networks, call our call centres or even walk into our service centres to get their queries answered. This is as I term it “Reactive” services. We wait for the customers to come to us. While this works great in a lot of cases, organisations need differentiators.

Employee Satisfaction is directly proportional to Customer Satisfaction

“He who would govern others, first should be master of himself.” – Philip Massinger. We must have hear similar sayings though-out or lives, be it by our parents (explaining to us how we can succeed in life) or our bosses (explaining to us how to lead a team). I have however, thought of putting this in context of Customer Satisfaction. This is how I would say it: “He who wants his customers satisfied, first should satisfy his employees”.

Problem Orientation Vs Solution Orientation

How do you react when a problem is put in front of you? Do you think of the problem or think about the solution?

Let me start with a short story about my recent experience with a customer service desk. Initially, I had a tough time to explain the problem and try to get hold of someone who could help me.

Customer Loyalty... where does it come from?

(This is an article that I had written quite a while back, but it seems to be a good starting point to get the thoughts rolling for this blog. So here it is again...)



Customer Loyalty is also commonly referred to as ‘Customer Satisfaction’. However, these are two different aspects of Customer Relations. Customer Satisfaction helps you build Customer Loyalty. Customer Loyalty is an important part of all business strategies in the current marketplace. However, before we begin to build Customer Loyalty, we need to identify who is the customer for a business. The ‘customer’ is any person (internal or external to the company) who interacts with the company to purchase products or services from them.