I spoke to a group of entrepreneurs recently regarding the connection between Support and Customer Development. This has been a favorite subject of mine for some time, but this was the first time I tried to do a comprehensive presentation on the topic. As I put together the presentation, I realized that there was really…
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Author Archives: darius
Support and Customer Development
Written on May 31, 2011 by darius in CRM, Leadership, Management, Measurement, Process, Support Fundamentals, Technology, User Experience
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Signal vs. Noise
These habits are designed to create unexpected moments with Signal. Each moment with Signal is a moment that you’re killing the Noise and they exist so you remember what it feels like to care rather than just do. Excerpt from: Rands In Repose: The Noise What habits have you created in order to put more…
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A platform powerhouse at Salesforce.com?
Dreamforce 2010, the Salesforce.com annual show, has already been interesting after just the first day. There have been interesting product introductions, and lots of announcements from partners and developers that continue to build on the Force.com platform ecosystem. Because of my interest in startups and small, fast growing companies, the new integration announced by Zendesk…
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Why do customers call you?
Written on November 30, 2010 by darius in Leadership, Management, Measurement, Support Fundamentals, User Experience
Call deflection has been a big thing in support for years. Get the customers to look it up themselves; give them some stuff from the knowledge-base before letting them submit a case – heck, some companies even leave customers on hold just so that some of them will go away. But why are these customers…
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Silos and Collaboration
Michael Fauscette has excellent advice on fixing the silo problem and implementing collaborative workflows: Organizational fixes * Change incentive compensation plans to encourage and reward working across departments * Reward and recognize cross group collaboration efforts (and do it in big, visible ways) * Build cross functional teams to attack problems and issues. Reward their…
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Better, Faster… More Friendly?
The most productive and high-performing teams I’ve seen have had a high degree of camaraderie and fun in the regular workday. Stowe writes about a recent cognition study, with implications for social tools. This suggests that work places where friendly interaction is the norm should have more focused and production workers, while settings where friendly interaction…
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Discipline and Improvement
A great support organization is disciplined. it makes commitments and delivers. But it also understands that it not only needs to handle whatever problems come, but also that it needs to understand those problems deeply and ensure that they are fixed. In the context of the product, the support organization brings a back to the…
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Some rules to live by…
Joseph Jaffe wrote a fun piece over at DestinationCRM on the 10 New Rules of Customer Service. I especially like #10: 10. Customer service is alive — Mistakes will always happen, but as long as they only happen once, they’ll most likely become learning opportunities. There’s no playbook or script when it comes to working…
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ATT’s contract stickiness
TechCrunch reports that there are some disparities between the estimates of ATT subscriber loss expected if they lose their exclusivity on the iPhone and how ATT CEO Randall Stephenson is portraying the situation. Earlier today, a study by Credit Suisse was released stating that 23 percent of iPhone users currently on AT&T would switch to Verizon if…
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What good are data, anyway?
Written on August 31, 2010 by darius in Management, Measurement, Process, Support Fundamentals, User Experience
Every customer care team I see is buried in data: call durations, inbound call rates, case deflection rates, survey results, case closure time, and all sliced and diced by category, time of day, and product line. It can be overwhelming and confusing. Most of the data monitored is useful only as indicators of the health of…
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