by Kevin Stirtz on June 25, 2012
This morning Dell is hosting a Customer Service Think Tank in Austin. It get started at 9:00 am and end at 5:00 pm. We will be talking about these topics: Social Service Internal Challenges Future of Service Unconference topics (we will choose these on the fly) You can join us on Twitter and Google Plus using the hashtag: #WinningService Or experience the livestream here. I posted more information on topics and participants last week. Please join us!
by Kevin Stirtz on June 17, 2012
A few days ago I wrote about our experiences at a local Perkins Restaurant and how they continually earn our loyalty as customers. Within 24 hours of this article being published, someone from Perkins corporate offices had contacted me and asked for the specific location I referred to in the article. He wanted to recognize the people at that store. Hats off to Perkins for monitoring the web and for acting quickly on positive news. It’s one thing to notice when people are talking about your brand. It’s another to take fast action in response. But then they did more. [...]
by Kevin Stirtz on May 31, 2012
When Dave Carroll was finally told by a United Airlines employee he would get no reimbursement for his broken guitar (and that it was his fault) he began a journey that even he never imagined. His goal at that time was to write three songs about how United Airlines broke his guitar. He had hoped to reach a million people with his story. Instead, he reached 100 million people, he has elevated his profile as a singer/song writer (a talented one too) and he has become something of a celebrity in the world of customer service. Oh, and he has [...]
by Kevin Stirtz on November 24, 2011 · 1 comment
My friend Jim Logan called me the other day. He was excited about a book he had just finished. It’s the latest book by Gary Vaynerchuck and it’s called: The Thank You Economy. Some people think this book is about social media. And it is. But the reason Jim was so excited, and the reason he called me, was because this book is about much more. It’s about how any of us can use social media to increase customer loyalty. This book is really about finding better ways to connect with, understand and care for our customers. It’s also about [...]
Our friends at Dictionary.com define the word communicate this way: To impart knowledge of; make known: to communicate information This is something companies are very good at. They should be. Big companies have entire departments dedicated to communicating. They “impart information” and make their messages known on a grand scale. For decades, big business (and small business too) has spentvast amounts of money perfecting the fine art of communicating. Trouble is, being a skilled communicator isn’t worth much anymore. Because, as the definition above implies, communicating is a one-way deal. To be successful, all you have to do is make your story known. If you are [...]
by Kevin Stirtz Yo, dude, don’t leave me hanging Every day the Internet makes it easier for people to connect. Employees, customers, friends, family, neighbors…you name it. We have more technology than ever before that can help us reach out to people. If we choose to. And that’s a big problem for many businesses. They choose to NOT reach out to customers. Actually it’s worse than that. Too many businesses ignore when customers reach out to them. Every day businesses are served up piping hot customer engagement opportunities and they walk right by. They ignore their customers’ attempts to connect and converse [...]
by Kevin Stirtz Chris Garrett wrote a post a while ago about being real vs. phony. Here’s what he says about real people: Too many companies hire and train robots to handle the vast majority of their customer contact. They treat employees like equipment. They seem to believe people’s behaviors can be designed and managed like machines. A key tool in this strategy is the much-maligned script. Most employees despise them. So do many customers. To a customer, a scripted employee sounds like a phony, uncaring employee. When management forces unnatural scripting on employees, they can be become the robots Chris talks [...]
by Kevin Stirtz on October 19, 2010
If you use social media to connect with your customers you probably have a similar lament as many of us. It takes a lot of time! But it’s important so we do it. The good news is, using social media platforms to engage your customers gets easier every day. And today, my friend, Paul Chaney, tells us about several that make his life easier. Maybe they’ll work for you too. In his article, Paul describes these five tools to use social media more efficiently: Nutshell Mail Sprout Social TweetDeck HootSuite CoTweet Paul reviews the features of each tool and offers [...]
by Kevin Stirtz on April 1, 2010
Last month I wrote about an article that suggests social media is driving growth in customer service jobs. While I haven’t decided if this is true, it does seem the customer service sector is seeing strong growth. Based on data from Indeed.com, there are 29% more customer service jobs available today than one month ago. Customer Service Jobs Available March 1, 2010: 572,909 April 1, 2010: 737,286 Increase of 28.7% That seems to be a big increase. Of course, this is not a scientific survey. I’m just using data from one source, Indeed.com. It could be they have added job [...]
by Kevin Stirtz on March 29, 2010
I’m sick and tired of surveys. I’m tired of being interrupted at home or in my office by the caller who expects 5-10 minutes of my time as a reward for interrupting me. I am sick of being stopped mid-bite in chain restaurants to complete a 100 question survey. And I really hate being told by my car dealer: “We’d really appreciate if you could give us all 10s on the customer satisfaction survey you get.” The problem with surveys is they are artificial. They do not allow a natural, open, two-way conversation with customers. And people tend to answer [...]
