Everything should be Negotiable

How many times have you called a customer service help line and not gotten a satisfactory response? Or a human one for that matter? Customer service should not be a chore that is farmed out with limited training to people that can’t really do much for you. To often customer service gets a bad rap for being unable to solve your issue and you often leave the conversation angrier then when you began it.

What can you do then to stop this wave of frustration? Pay customers for their time on the phone? Offer incentives for quality answers? Casual Friday? Maybe, but none of these solutions offer any real progress to solving the customer service headache.

Ways to Change:

1.    Reward Innovation. The best solutions usually come from the call center floor. The people in the trenches know the best ways to find out whether something works or not simply by testing it. So ask them to come up with solutions.

2.    Don’t block access, enable it. If you can’t trust your customer service employees to do the right thing and solve problems by giving them access to a system that would allow this. Why are they employed by you? What value could they be possibly adding?

3.    Utilize every channel (and make sure people can access your services from where THEY are and not where you are). This is getting more and more important as time goes on. People don’t use one form of communication to reach people anymore. They utilize several…until they get a response they prefer. The phone and email have been the standard for to long: let’s open up the door for a variety of services.

Empowerment is the only way to ensure customers have a more positive experience. You need to allow people to actually help people in order to help people? Not exactly rocket science but in today’s world it seems pretty damn close.

Does your company have the same commitment to customer service as the rescuer? It should.

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This is a guest post by Stuart Foster.

Stuart Foster is a marketing/PR consultant in the Boston area. He specializes in brand management, social media, and blog outreach. He authors a blog at Thelostjacket.com

BlogHer Comes to Boston! FTW

I was really bummed this summer when I couldn’t make it out to San Francisco for the annual BlogHer Conference. Lucky for me (and you!), the Outreach Tour is coming to Boston this weekend - Saturday 10/11! As I’ve been sharing my glee with everyone who will listen, I’ve been getting a mixed bag of reactions (I find that I often get mixed reactions from people whenever I talk about an event/conference/anything that has “women” “her” “female” etc in the title. These “mixed” (read: usually negative) reactions are often, if not always, from men).

I was talking to one of my guy friends about BlogHer a few days after getting back from BlogWorld Expo in Vegas, and he said he didn’t get it — why, if I had just gone to a major conference about blogging, was a conference for women bloggers necessary? I sputtered for a moment, I mean, DUH. But then I stopped to really think about it. Why is it important?

My guy friend said he understands that women have not reached equal standing in many aspects, but that new media seems to be a field where the playing has been leveled. This made me pause again. It’s true, there are a lot of prominent women in the field. So, if the field is leveled, why does the idea of a community for women seem so darn important?!

I have been extremely fortunate in that my life has rarely been limited by my gender (I’m a girl…in case you were wondering *wink*). But, I know this isn’t true for all women. So, is this why it is important? So that women have a place to feel equal? Is it because tech is usually a sphere reserved for guys and diving in can be daunting? It is for the camaraderie?

Since I obviously don’t have the answer (I think it is a combo of a lot of things), I went a-hunting. One of the first thing I noticed while scouring the BlogHer website is that the answer wasn’t there. Their mission statement gave me a starting point

BlogHer’s mission is to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community and economic empowerment

but somehow that isn’t enough (no offense!). I read that and think “yea! right on!” but there is something more than that that is triggering a reaction in me (and others - for good or bad).

I’m still trying to figure it out. So, in the mean time… What is your reaction (positive or negative) to BlogHer? Why do YOU think BlogHer Conferences are or aren’t important?

Regardless, I’m SUPER psyched for BlogHer Boston this Saturday. If you are there, please say hi!!