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!
Dell Customer Service Think Tank
by Kevin Stirtz on June 25, 2012
Don’t communicate. Conversate.
by Kevin Stirtz on May 23, 2011 · 4 comments
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 [...]
Mitch Joel explains Web 2.0 (and why it matters)
by Kevin Stirtz on November 5, 2010
Mitch Joel hates it when you say “Web 2.0“. I know. He told me. Okay, he didn’t actually tell me in person as in, we’re having coffee at Starbucks and he said, “by the way Kevin…” I was listening to a webinar Mitch did earlier this year. He was talking mostly about Web 2.0 and how it’s changed much of our world. And he ranted a bit about the term “Web 2.0″. He really dislikes it. But more important is what he did about it. He spent a fair amount of time explaining how our world is different now, because [...]
Social media tools to save you time
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 [...]
Is social media driving Shamrock Shake surge?
by Kevin Stirtz on March 17, 2010
In 2006, while writing an article for AllBusiness.com, I discovered Google had about 39,000 listings for the search: “Shamrock Shake”. Today, the same search throws us 877,000 possibilities. That’s like the city of Muskogee, Oklahoma, growing to the size of Detroit in four years. There are over 200 videos about these fun, minty shakes. Roughly 20,000 people do a search related to them every month. There are currently about 11,000 blog posts that mention them. And news items abound. Just this morning I was talking on the radio about it with John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee. I’d call that customer [...]
Social media elevates the power of Nice
by Kevin Stirtz on March 17, 2010 · 4 comments
Today, Erik Qualman, at ClickZ, published his proposed list of social media thought leaders. It lays out his plan to create a crowd-sourced ranking of the most influential people in social media today. As I scanned the list of 32 contenders many of the names were familiar. Some more familiar than others. I counted at least 8 of them (25% of the list) with whom I’ve had a conversation or two in the past year. This is one clue of how powerful social media can be. Back in the day, before social media technology, it would have been highly unlikely [...]
Tiny shop uses Twitter to connect to one customer at a time
by Kevin Stirtz on March 10, 2010
Often my conversations with people make me think we’re facing a growing technology divide. One group of my friends and colleagues are actively online and, for the most part, use social media like Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn. But others stare at me like I’m speaking in tongues when I talk about using these social media tools to connect with their customers. That’s why I love Chris Brogan’s recent post about a small comic shop in Amesbury, MA that uses Twitter very effectively. As Chris points out: And Mick runs a small store with just a few employees. If he can [...]
Better customer service means staying in the game
by Kevin Stirtz on December 23, 2009
Too often when a company (or person) fails at customer service, they run from the failure. They never return to the “scene of the crime”. I understand why. Most of us would rather move on to future successes than be reminded of past failures. But the best customer service companies take their failures head on. They fix them and they learn from them. Recently I contacted a company for customer service and they dropped the ball. Since I never heard from them, I wrote about it here and on Twitter. Not long after that someone from the company contacted me. [...]
Do what your marketing says you will
by Kevin Stirtz on December 8, 2009
Here is your Daily Dose of Amazing Service: Do what your marketing says you will And here are some additional thoughts on this topic… A few weeks ago I traded in my old iPod for the new Touch 3G. To keep it clean and like new, I bought a case for it from a company called Riot Outfitters. When I had a question about the case I decided to contact them using Twitter. After I found them on Twitter, I was pleasantly surprised by their Twitter profile which says: “Made to protect and serve electronic devices. Each RIOT product is [...]
Social media rescues customers before company does
by Kevin Stirtz on December 3, 2009 · 3 comments
Yesterday evening my anti-virus software went crazy. It started finding viruses all over my netbook. After several hours of banging my head against our kitchen table, with no success in cleaning up the problem, I turned to my good friend Google for help. There I discovered (to my great relief) that there was no virus on my computer. Instead, my anti-virus software had a problem. I learned this because millions of others were having the same experience. Because many of them were discussing it online I was able to conclude that it was a software malfunction that would soon be [...]
