Creative Customer Service
By Joanne L. Smikle, Smiklespeaks.com |
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Three cheers for the folk who make service fun! Three cheers for the
folks who use creativity in all of they do to satisfy customers, from
planning to implementation and evaluation. These are the folks who are
in the trenches everyday, earning your company its reputation as a
service leader. But, what do these people and the organizations that
support them do differently to separate them from the rest? This article
highlights the strategies employed by these leaders that enable them to
move from ordinary to extraordinary. |
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Strategic Positioning for Service Success Strategic Positioning for
Service Success
By
Joanne L. Smikle, Smiklespeaks.com |
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Customers are lamenting the lack of service. Whether in the
financial industry, telecommunications or retail, a customer somewhere
is talking about egregious acts committed by someone in your
organization. Whether you are in the north, south, east or west, a
customer remembers the last unpleasant interaction with your
employee.Why is that? Well the reasons are multiple and many point to
the lack of service leadership. The notion, the very idea, of
service leadership, is uncommon in many organizations. Service is one of
those lesser priorities relegated to middle management, not worthy of
the time and attention of the executive ranks. And, many organizations
fail to see the connection between service and the bottom-line. |
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Password Management Best Practices
By M-Tech, Mercury Information Technology, Inc. |
This document describes and justifies current best practices for
password management
in an enterprise network. It is intended to offer reasoned guidance to
information technology
decision makers when they set security policy and design network
infrastructure that
includes passwords. |
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Motivate Your Team to Higher Standards
By Julie Mohr |
Most help desks focus on support delivery and don’t spend time examining
their support processes and procedures. Performance monitoring and
reporting, based on established success criteria, is the best insurance
that your business is succeeding and prepared for growth.
To be effective your performance measurements must be established for
both individual and team performance. The feedback report must include a
statement of the team’s results compared to performance standards for
each measurement, and a statement of the individual’s results compared
to individual performance standards. |
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The Web Was Made for Customer Service
By Jim Sterne |
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If you have any doubts about
the importance, value, and potential of the Internet, go pick up another
book. There are plenty of titles out there to convince you the Web is
changing the face of the planet. It's true. Enough said.
This book does not set out to
convince you the world has changed. We take that for granted and look
for ways to leverage that knowledge while our competitors are still
wondering why they're losing business.
The only questions that remain are; How can I use the Web better? How
can I provide an interactive experience that increases customer
satisfaction and put up a sufficiently high barrier to competition that
I bond my customers to buying from me now and forever? |
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Designing Categories for Business Benefit
By Jennifer Streitwieser |
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How you categorize your service events drives virtually every downstream
action you take to resolve your customers’ requests. Escalations,
standard operating procedures, reporting, knowledge creation, service
level management—they all (ought to) tie back to the issues you support
and the actions you take to resolve them. Yet, categories are the bane
of many service organizations. Categories are often outdated,
irrelevant, and unused, and no one can seem to untangle them or take
responsibility for them. Organizations that try to tackle their category
structure often get overwhelmed by the process, tangled in political
battles, or just plain frustrated. |
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A Winning Customer Survey Strategy
By Julie Mohr |
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Providing high-quality customer service in the help desk requires much
more than just technical troubleshooting skills. Employees must have
excellent listening and communication skills, telephone skills, writing
skills and they must be able to solve and prevent problems in the help
desk. In addition, the ability to handle difficult customers and
minimize stress during the workday also increases the level of customer
service they provide. These "soft" skills are often more important in
ensuring a high level of customer satisfaction than an employee's
technical knowledge. |
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Business Excellence Framework for IT Self-Assessment & Action Plan
By Fatima Cabral, Gerry Geddes, David Ratcliffe |
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This assessment and action plan is based upon the Business Excellence
Framework for IT, which is a version of the generic EFQM (European
Foundation for Quality Management) Excellence Model. |
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Combating conflicts with our craziest customers
By
Joanne L. Smikle, Smiklespeaks.com |
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T hey are the customers who try us at every turn . They are the ones who
force us to over- exercise our smile muscles and exhaust our customer
service competencies. This is a tongue in cheek look at the customers
who cause the most consternation, the ones who plague us with problems
and tempt us to lose our cool. Perhaps they are more common among you r
customers with “mom and pop” operations, or among those who buy a lot of
consumables from your dealership. Whatever the case, there are four of
these loathsome urchins, and I’ll bet many of you have met them all. |
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Creating the Service Mindset: Where Does it Start?
By
Joanne L. Smikle, Smiklespeaks.com |
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As I impatiently waited for the gate agent to finish her personal call
so that I could be checked in for my flight, I remembered why I seldom
fly this airline (which shall remain nameless) and so often fly
Southwest instead. While I may hate Southwest’s cattle call boarding
system, I sure love the company’s commitment (in word and deed) to
service. No, no, no, this is not a commercial for Southwest Airlines. It
is, however, an examination of the Service Mindset. |
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IT Service Management Tools: Compatibility Considerations
By Troy DuMoulin |
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Lessons Learned: The Organizational Impact of an ERP Implementation
By Doug Whittle |
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ERP systems implementations are a watershed event for most
organizations, beyond just the technical impact. Since these systems can
change the way the entire company operates, it is critical to help
people adjust to the change through communications, training and
support. The paper focuses on the overall project benefits, lessons
learned with an emphasis on organizational change and training, and keys
to success for process owners and team members. |
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The Art of Performance Management
By Char LaBounty
LaBounty & Associates |
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Every business seeks to
improve its productivity, its customer service levels, and ultimately,
its bottom line. This is obvious, but perhaps less obvious are the
implications of the word "improve:" you must have measured your baseline
and your current state in order to tell whether or not you're improving.
The concept of improvement has, at its heart, the act of measurement.
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Outsourcing: The Convergence of Software and Service
By Oracle |
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Software management is often expensive,
mundane and not a core competency for most companies, unfortunately
software and services have typically been viewed as completely discrete
functions, which often leads to wasted time and money for both the
customer and the software vendor. Outsourcing offers several
compelling reasons to look at software in a completely different light.
In addition to saving money and focusing resources on strategic
priorities, outsourcing offers a dramatic improvement in service. The
outsourcer can maintain a direct connection into their customers'
systems, eliminating the time-consuming task of replicating a problem.
They can also proactively prevent outages by applying experiences from
one customer to the rest of the customer based If the company that
develops the software is also the one managing it, they can shorten the
distance between the customer and development and also build the
experiences of their customers back into the development process. |
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Eat Stress For Breakfast
By Fire “Captain Bob” |
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What I hear most as I travel nationwide speaking about stress is that
people have the feeling of being overwhelmed. They don’t know when
they’ll catch up or where it will end. I hate to be the bearer of bad
news, but the train has already left the station. We’re all on board.
The train’s not going back. The problem is that nobody knows where the
train is going - and there’s no brake. |
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