Customer Support Professional Blog

Sometimes it’s very interesting to look back into the past. Comparing what was available that time with the state of the art we can make inferences about future techology direction.
Back in 2000 Joseph Yue from the University of Colorado at Boulder wrote the article The Use Of ICQ In Providing Real Time Reference Services which […]

There’s a well known article by Meredith Gossland with a nice header CRM = Customers (don’t) Really Matter. In short it says that all software CRM systems can do nothing in customer retention and you should avoid using them in your company.
There’re a lot of nice points in the article and it’s very well written […]

You already know shit rolls downhill. In casual games, customer support is at the bottom of that hill. Actually, it’s in a valley, nestled between the company and the consumer. When anyone on either side makes a mistake, it rolls down the hill, and the support team deals with it.
– William Kinnikin

I feel a little […]

Be reactive
Respond promptly. Even if you simply confirm to the customer that you have reproduced his problem he feels that his issue is being taken care of and not waiting in a dusty pile of other issues. Moreover fast response means you as a support person can get more useful information in less time while […]

Customer service is not about metrics, it is about customers.
– Chuck Dennis

There’s a common wisdom that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. This is mostly correct. However you should be careful not to get into trap of measuring and not to let benchmarks replace real things.
When you start measuring your performance in some […]

This post is inspired by topics on CSM forum and JoS The Business of Software forum.
We often see or hear this 24 hours a day 7 days a week thing when customer support service availability time is advertised. It sounds really cool. It means you as a customer can apply for support at any time […]

Have you ever experienced mediocre customer support? Remember being unable to get to the right person, never getting promised callbacks, being put on hold for long minutes, reading standard autoresponder ‘Thank you for your feedback…’ bullshit, waiting for email response for weeks, getting wrong or unprofessional answers, being redirected to other departments and so on. […]