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Ideas from Customer Service is the New Marketing #2

A zillion great ideas from the Customer Service is the New Marketing conference.

  1. Wesabe’s CEO answers his own phone and the phone number is on the public support site.  People call all the time to see if it’s real – then get so surprised that they hang up when he answers.  It’s a huge confidence-builder for new customers.
  2. Let the community help itself. There is no more cost-effective service than customer-to-customer service.
  3. Communicate MORE when things are going wrong. Use a blog that is hosted somewhere else so you have a way to communicate if your site goes down.
  4. The average employee doesn’t spend their time handling business process. They handle exceptions to business process. How do you prepare them?
  5. Find customers who support other customers (like those people who voluntarily answer questions in the forums).  Support those people. Give them knowledge, attention, recognition, and gratitude.
  6. Enlist the community to help moderate, edit, and improve.  Do they have the tools?
  7. When you email a customer-satisfaction survey, if anyone checks “unhappy” — immediately and automatically page your senior service team and your CEO to get it fixed on the spot.
  8. Surveys with open-text question are hard to compile, so companies avoid them.  What should you do with all that messy data? Read it and learn!
  9. Customers who are great contributors are doing it for their own reasons, not yours. Figure out what motivates them.
  10. Get smaller as you grow.  Break customer service into smaller and smaller teams focused on supporting very specific segments.

From the panel “Scaling Customer Service”

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