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…
Category Archives: Process
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…
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…
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…
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…
What good are data, anyway?
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…
Steve’s HR Technology – Journal – The Conference Room Paradox
Steve Boese considers the conference room… You know you have all been there before. The big conference room paradox. Organizations drag everyone into a central location called ‘the office’, but then parcel out space in small increments of cubes and private offices, and there is hardly any space to actually interact and communicate and collaborate….
