Overview

Customer Skill-Based Routing

Posted on 15 August 2012 by

The product or service your company provides may not change at all from one customer to the next, but the way in which you provide it could change greatly, because of the customer.  How well do you know your customers, and how are you using that knowledge to better serve them?

I was an IT guy, here at Interactive Intelligence, for 8 years. My role was providing desktop support for our diverse user base –my internal customers. On one end of the spectrum, we have software developers writing code for an all-in-one communications platform and on the other end, [...]

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An Open Letter to Customer Service Providers

Posted on 9 February 2012 by

Dear Customer Service Provider, 

My role in the Customer Service industry is that of your customer.  In the corporate hierarchy, that should place me one step directly above the CEO.  I am the lifeblood of the entire company.  Without my involvement, there’s literally no reason for your company to exist.  Now that we have a proper perspective, there are four things I’d like to say.  

First, I don’t want to call you.  Nothing personal, but it’s a pain.  I have better things to do than wait on hold to speak to someone who doesn’t know [...]

Category: Best Practices, Contact Center, Industry Trends and news | Leave a comment

Rocky Doesn’t Work Here

Posted on 11 August 2011 by

We’re living in a stressful time.  The topic on a lot of minds these days is money… more specifically credit (or as I like to think of it, “the art of spending money you don’t have".  I recently had the opportunity to visit a company in the Accounts Receivable Management (ARM) industry.  These folks are most commonly known as “collectors.”

I had no prior experience in the ARM vertical, and what I knew of collectors was largely dramatized on TV or in movies.  This being the case, I was excited to see and learn some new things.  I imagined a high-stress [...]

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Read This for a Tax Break

Posted on 14 April 2011 by

Tick tock, tick tock… April 18 waits for no man. 

Let me spoil the surprise for you now.  There’s no (direct) monetary benefit at the end of this post, but I’m going to keep it short for a reason.  The tax break that you’re getting here is a break from filling out forms and deciphering the tax code.  A moment of clarity. A “guided exhale,” if you will.

Think about all of the confusing documents and work sheets we’re saddled with every year around this time.  Think about who has created those forms.  The procedures are documented by [...]

Category: Business Process Automation, Contact Center | Leave a comment

‘Tis The Season (To Know Thy Customer)

Posted on 29 November 2010 by

Sing it with me… It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

Ah, the smooth crooning of Andy Williams.  Nothing puts me in the holiday mindset quite like music.  And Black Friday.  Personally I cower from the teeming throngs of shoppers, but I am fascinated by the whole phenomenon.  If you’re a retailer, you’re likely well acquainted with the aforementioned throngs.  I realize things can get pretty crazy with crowd dynamics, and I stumbled across some interesting articles this weekend that I thought you might be interested in.

A newspaper carried an article about the season’s hottest tech gifts.  [...]

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Good Customer Service Can Erase A Bad Customer Experience

Posted on 21 October 2010 by

Recently my family took a short weekend road trip. There was an event in a nearby city that we wanted to get an early start on, so it made sense for us to drive there the night before and get a hotel room. We decided to use a prominent and aptly-named internet service to help us book said room, and found a reasonable rate within about 30 miles of our destination.

We hit the road late that night and arrived at the hotel just after midnight to find several other patrons standing in the lobby looking tired. It was [...]

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The “Why Can’t I” Principle

Posted on 14 September 2010 by

I stayed one night in a $70 hotel room with free wi-fi.  I then moved into a room roughly twice that much where I had to pay $10 for 24 hours of access.

Smart phones.  Flip cameras.  Text messages.  The world is getting smarter, in terms of a general technology awareness.  This isn’t specific to a particular industry or application, rather it’s a simple (maybe even unconscious) sense that things should be easier, or better.  A company provides a service that makes a customer do a double-take and say “Get out of here!  That’s cool!”

Take the wi-fi example.  [...]

Category: Best Practices | One comment