Welcome to the Monthly Mash, a mashup of tools, tales and tips on customer service and the customer experience from around the blogosphere.
One of my favorite customer experience resources is, believe it or not, a Twitter chat. What wisdom can be gleaned about customer service and the customer experience from an hour of rapid-fire 140 character missives? Quite a few as it turns out.
Pithy, it seems, is often profound.
For those interested in customer experience, the information optimization company Vivisimo’s CXO Twitter chat can not be beat. The #CXO chat is “a weekly conversation at 12 Noon EST, on Twitter. Each week we discuss a different customer experience optimization topic.”
Some previous CXO chat topics have included social media for customer service, improving the customer experience, and maintaining a spirit of customer service within an organization. Vivisimo usually brings in a customer service expert to lend their expertise to the weekly gathering. Previous featured guests include Mark Schaefer, Kate Leggett, Kate Nasser, Richard Shapiro, and Drew Marshall.
While the Monday 12p EST time slot can be a challenge, I highly recommend giving the #CXO twitter chat a try! The regulars there are extremely welcoming to newcomers, and every hour has great questions and perspectives on how we can all improve our customer’s experiences.
A collection of the best posts about customer service and the customer experience I read this past month.
Sometimes the most popular post from the previous month; sometimes just the one I liked best.
What is the real cost of bad service?
This question should be on the mind of every company that sells business to business (B2B). Over the past few days, my Market Development Coordinator and I were unfortunate enough to get a guided tour of software licensing hell. After purchasing a software license days ago and trying for hours to get the proper activation information from our “account” on the web, we were forced to enter the wonderful world of call center limbo. Here is the play-by-play:
Ignoring the natural frustration we all feel as humans in a process like this, as a business owner my calculation is different. My time and my organization’s time is valuable. As a result, the software I purchased from this company had a cost far in excess of what was advertised online. In fact, the cost of the product was more than doubled by the time we spent to get it operational.
The next time I consider buying a product from this company (unfortunately, they are a market leader with incredible products), I will remember how difficult this experience was and will probably evaluate substitutes. If the company was not so dominant in their space, I would probably not even consider going back.
In general, consumers do not evaluate their customer service experience from the standpoint of economic opportunity cost — but you can be sure that many business customers do. For all the energy spent on pricing strategy and marketing, if you sell B2B, you should be aware that time is money and that wasting your customers time through a poor customer experience has a cost.
Sure, it might not affect the 1st sale — but it could certainly ensure that there is never a 2nd.
By Adam Toporek. Adam Toporek is an internationally recognized customer service expert, keynote speaker, and workshop leader. He is the author of Be Your Customer's Hero: Real-World Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines (2015), as well as the founder of the popular Customers That Stick® blog and co-host of the Crack the Customer Code podcast.