Customer Service

Even among companies that admit their journeys need work, most believe they know the areas that need improvement. This is classic company-first thinking on what should be a customer-first concept.

Customer service is a big deal in e-commerce, as many customers view it as an important factor in their purchasing decisions. Providing a flawless customer experience is integral to optimizing customer retention -- particularly important with ever-lucrative subscription services.

Your new salespeople have very specific expectations of how their workday should flow. These 20-somethings want to sign a contract poolside, then post about it on Instagram -- #workingpoolside, anyone? They want to approve a purchase order on the go as they head to post-work Pilates and pizza. They ...

I'm struck by the extent to which Apple and Tesla are executing a model very similar to IBM's. While IBM has evolved to put the customer at the center always, Apple and Tesla are nuanced in that respect, much like IBM was in the past. I worked at IBM when it imploded in the early 1990s, so I can spe...

What's the big deal, I thought? Last week Salesforce announced it was paying in the range of $1.35 billion for ClickSoftware, a private field service automation and workforce management company. At first, I attributed it to a slow summer news cycle when many people in the industry are off trout fish...

E-commerce has exploded since Amazon and eBay were founded in 1995. Today, e-commerce is part of everyday life. By 2023, retail e-commerce sales in the U.S. are projected to surpass $735 billion. Even industries like food, healthcare and banking, which previously were dominated by offline transactio...

The contact center uses familiar benchmarks to determine if a call, chat or email is successful or not. Call metrics such as net promoter score, handle time, and amount of silence are correlated with positive or negative outcomes. However, insights from speech analytics technology prove that these m...

The definition of "baggage" varies depending on whom you ask. For instance, a travel agent or a road-weary businessperson will describe a container used to carry personal belongings on a trip. A therapist might describe emotions from previous relationships that hamper a person's ability to have a he...

Recent events have led to many people learning about a long-understood rhetorical tactic called "Gish galloping." Named after creationist Duane Gish, it is the technique of confronting an opponent with a rapid-fire series of arguments -- including half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies. C...