Personalized service that sells

Companies are often searching for ways to delight their customers, increase incremental sales, and reduce their inventory of low-volume or one-off items. These goals are typically pursued individually, but there's no reason you can't achieve all three at once. The secret is connecting your customer's personal interests with your unique inventory items. Here are three steps to take to use personal service to increase special sales and deepen customer engagement.

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Cool customer service tool you shouldn't have to need

I recently heard about a cool new web-based service called Fonolo that helps you bypass the endless phone trees many companies require you to navigate when calling customer service. It will do much of the menu navigation for you and then call you when you get to the right spot. The short video below explains it better than I can and the Fonolo website does an even better job.

As great as this concept is, it is sad that anyone would need it. Companies who truly care about their customers would have their phones ring directly to a live person or a simple menu that says "Press 1 for a live person or 2 for automated self-service." Anything else may be more efficient for the company but is ultimately aggravating for the customer.

Of course, there's always Get Human for those companies (like Amazon) that are so extreme they make it hard for you to even find their number!

Monday morning coffee: a great way to start the week

Today was the fifth consecutive Monday morning I had met someone for coffee. Each meeting was a great conversation, has yielded new ideas and resources, and has started my week on a very positive note. These meetings have also caused me to take my own advice -- continuously learn from those around you. As a result, I have not had a case of the Monday's in over a month.

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Managing customer service email

Last week I made a short post about customer service email response times and vowed to do a little (unscientific) research on the subject. Twenty four hours is a standard response time, but there's a little more to it.

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Email response times

I sent a "fire and forget" email to Dyson's customer service department last week. Fire and forget as in, "I fired off the email" and then "I forgot I sent it". Their response came almost a week later, which got me thinking. What is the appropriate amount of time to respond to a customer service email?

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