Do you ever feel like you talk in complete shorthand during the workday? 

I do. 

I’ve written entire e-mail subject lines using acronyms, and it wouldn’t be too farfetched to send a message like this to my fellow researchers: “FWIW, the CES scores are on the CCC site.  The rest of the study will be there EOW, but I’ll be OOO on PTO by then. YWIA.”

Maybe it’s a sign of the times.  As a global population, we’re busier than ever before and the efficiencies gained through acronyms might be small but maybe make us feel like we are working faster.  But although this type of acronym alphabet soup is common across many functions, I feel like the customer service world has a very special penchant for the abbreviations.  Knowing that call centers are often a place where folks don’t intend to land (raise your hand if you majored in customer service at university), I thought it might be helpful to make a list of the more commonly-used call center specific acronyms.  Thus the first list you see below.

But the more I thought about it, I also realized that acronyms not related to call centers specifically are also becoming increasingly important for call center professionals to know.  As we move toward full integration of chat channels, surveys by mobile text messaging, and service via social media, we really ought to know our stuff!  So then I came up with the second list you see below, which is more general to the workplace and general online acronym lingo used on blogs and in chat conversations. 

HTH (Hope this helps)! Read More »

Would it shock you to learn that…

• 65% of the largest 100 international companies have active corporate accounts on Twitter?
• 190 million people use Twitter worldwide (18 million in the U.S. – or roughly 6% of adults)?
• More than 2 billion individual tweets are made globally each month?

Maybe not. We know that many companies are moving away from using Twitter simply as a bullhorn for broadcasting corporate messages—and in doing so they’re capturing its potential as a tool for proactive outreach, as well. Best Buy’s Twelpforce is a great example: it aims to bring service and support to a place where customers already feel comfortable.

Part of this evolution involves recognizing that Twitter is a two-way street, and that listening is just as important as speaking (or in this case, tweeting). Deciding on a strategy for responding to individual tweets is an important step to be sure, but Twitter can also be leveraged to help you:

• Get ahead of issues affecting wider segments of your customer base before these problems snowball. Customers today are turning to social media outlets in ever-increasing numbers to share experiences (more often bad experiences than good ones) and banding together to make their collective voice heard. But this also means that minor issues can quickly become major problems; monitoring what customers are experiencing is crucial to staying one step ahead of these troubles. Read More »

(This is a guest post by Pat Spenner, who oversees the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for marketing leaders and their teams. As social media is increasingly important for customer contact leaders and their organizations, we wanted our readers to be aware of MLC’s new article recently published by Harvard Business Review. This post serves as an introduction to the concepts discussed in the article.)

What can moscato teach us about marketing planning and skill sets of socially-savvy marketers? More than you might imagine.

This sweet wine sourced from the Muscat grape was a rounding error on annual wine sales in the US.

Until Drake came along.

“Of the Sir Francis variety?” you ask.

No.

Read More »

This is a guest post by Rebecca Canan of the Communications Executive Council, our sister program for Corporate Communications professionals.

We hear it over and over again from companies in Insurance, Healthcare, Pharma, Energy/Utilities, and Financial Services:

“We want to use social media, but we just can’t! There are too many regulations and risks.”

We’ve been investigating this claim and how much of it is true…what CAN you actually do?  Based on conversations with social media pioneers/”survivors” from the highly regulated space and quantitative research from our social media diagnostic, we’ve come up with a few conclusions.  Check out our article on Forbes.com about six social media principles for companies in highly regulated industries!  Let us know what you think.

Every few months companies pose questions about the upcoming trends of the service and support function.  Though typically prompted by companies revisiting their strategic plans and technology roadmaps, vendor whitepapers are probably equally responsible for causing hype and questions.

I’m certainly an avid reader of trade press and secondary research, and keep a list of the top trends to the side of my desk (CCC members, find the latest here).  But in my role as a researcher, I also try to break away from the latest technology enablers and innovations and consider more holistically what an “excellent” customer experience might truly look like.

So what are the top things that would radically change the service and support experience?  Here’s my take:

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I saw an interview on CNN over the weekend with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. In this short spot, only a few minutes long, one of Dorsey’s few talking points was how wildly popular Twitter is as a customer service platform. 

We all know that Twitter is popular. And not just among the millennial generation—almost 65% of Twitter users are over 35 years old. Last month’s World Cup Final is a prime example of Twitter’s reach—people from 172 countries tweeted in 27 different languages, generating more than 2,000 tweets-per-second.

The opportunities in social media for customer service are many: drive loyalty, deflect contacts, educate customers, and capture VOC. Those are nice goals, but are they really different from goals of the live channel? Mostly not. But there’s something unique about the spirit with which Twitter accomplishes these goals.

Read More »

Having spoken recently with some of CCC’s European members (one from the Travel & Leisure industry and three from the Financial Services industries), one of the questions that invariably arise is: how should I use Twitter or Facebook or other types of Social Media for customer service? 

In my last post about Social Media, I didn’t address this specific question, only venturing as far as to say: 

Using Twitter [or Social Media in general] in the customer service realm is not about amassing the most number of followers or how many emails we send, it’s about measuring the number of customers we help and showing that to executives. Second, it’s using that customer feedback from Social Media to make real improvements, hopefully at the root-cause level, to our customer experience to boost satisfaction and loyalty.

That addresses what Social Media’s general goal/success measure should be, but that doesn’t address the question of how to take action in social media channels to achieve that goal. Read More »

Prank calling is one of those things we know is wrong, but it is hard not to laugh at a good prank call.  It’s a similar feeling to slapstick comedy—you’re indulging in somebody else’s misery.  Once upon a time, to enjoy a good prank call, you actually had to make the calls yourself.  Today, though, YouTube offers a seemingly endless supply of prank calls at your fingertips.  All of the laughs, and none of the guilt.

If you browse the prank calls posted on YouTube, you might find your company is on the wrong end of the joke.  These interactions are generally benign (aside from wasting your money), and your company likely won’t come away with a tarnished reputation (assuming that your rep handled it as a normal call or at least exited the conversation gracefully).  For now let’s entertain ourselves with perhaps the most adorable prank call ever, conducted by Little Becky (she’s a pro).

Read More »

(This is a guest post by Anna Bird of the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for marketing leaders and their teams.)

Best Buy’s Twitter-based customer service tool has created a lot of buzz over the last year. We asked John Bernier, Best Buy’s Social Media Steward, what makes it work behind the scenes. John is the Digital Product Line Manager and Social Media Steward at Best Buy. He develops digital products and tools for Best Buy employees and customers, while shepherding social media initiatives, such as Twelpforce.  He has worked at Best Buy since 2004, playing a variety of roles in marketing communications and marketing strategy. We spoke to him early last month. Read More »

When you step in the elevator at work, what’s everyone doing?  No, I’m not talking about that awkward shuffle to maintain appropriate spacing… Everyone is on their mobile device. Checking e-mail, reading the news, texting.

It’s habitual for me and I’m not alone. Say a friendly “hi” to a co-worker? Nope, gotta get rid of these e-mails burning up my inbox before the third floor. Yes, it’s pathetic.

Welcome to the era of the truly mobile customer.

It’s an understatement to say that we struggle to keep pace with how customers interact with our businesses. Six years ago, I remember advising companies to dive (not just dip a toe in the water, but a cannonball plunge) into self-service.

At the time, self-service portals were nothing more than glorified (and quite stale) FAQs. Most service organizations had minor input into this largely marketing-owned channel. The “call center” think about self-service? Please.

Just as we got serious about getting customers to the web, CCC data highlighted that need to shift focus away from migrating customers to self-service channels, toward getting them to stick in those channels. We discovered that nearly 60% of all phone contacts traveled through the web enroute to the phone, and yes, customers now value self-service just as much as live service. That study was another signal that we’re still playing catch-up with customers.

Last week, I read a startling finding – for the first time, customers are using cellular networks more for data exchange than voice.  Read More »