For the past five years, during the first weekend in August, I have participated in a fund raiser (the Pan Mass Challenge) where approximately 5,000 cyclists pedal a 192 miles over two days and raise $34M for cancer research. As a resident of New England, USA, August is the perfect time for long bike rides [...]

Some questions for customer service and customer experience managers to think about… What if: your agents could follow the right process, just as you had designed it? your agents didn’t have to ALT_TAB through 15 applications on their desktop? your agents didn’t have to use Post-it notes or index cards or refer to training manuals? [...]

A few months ago I wrote about ‘People Power’ and how it’s people that make companies successful. Now, years ago, I used to get pulled up by my bosses for being ‘too friendly’ and was told it was ‘unprofessional’ to be on first name terms with vendors or clients. I was supposed to be more [...]

I was traveling abroad with my family recently and was prepared with the two different languages of the three different countries we were traveling through. I had my English to German and English to Italian books along with the CDs of common phrases. My wife and I religiously played those CDs every time we were [...]

In my last blog post I talked about my new weekly commute between Southern and Northern California. As an established homeowner for so long I had all but forgotten what it was like to deal with a range of consumer service providers as I re-established myself in Sunnyvale. And what a long week that first [...]

I’ve always thought that a referee had one of the hardest jobs – you’re never right and someone is always upset with you. When I was younger, I would umpire my brother’s little league games (these kids were 11 & 12 years old) and their parents would get so upset at every strike/ball call as [...]

In the race for most over-used and abused Marketing-speak, ‘agile’ is gaining rapidly on smart/smarter/intelligent. How can we make Agile customer service real, rather than just facile jargon? Our answer: insure that KANA SEM is Agile, rather than just another technology fluttering aimlessly towards the abstract idea of ‘agility’. To that end, Service Experience Management (SEM) is designed [...]

I recently sat next to a first-class contact center agent, watching her struggle gamely to make her knowledge base deliver useful content. Her heroic efforts to overcome search engine stupidity triggered the KANA KM crew to inventory all the common ways we’ve seen that Agents compensate for the weakness, poor tuning and insufficiencies of their [...]

“Life’s a game that one plays according to the rules”, said J.D. Salinger. Nowadays, games are a big part of our life. Five million games are downloaded every day from the AppStore. Twelve million people subscribe to World of Warcraft. The social gaming boom is happening for a simple reason: online games deliver a compelling/addictive [...]