Social Social everywhere – but Customer Service is nowhere

When you read the survey that says 71% of customer complaints sent via Twitter meet with no response, you realize that for many companies, having a Twitter account is more about lip service then any actual service. Of course, ‘no response’ doesn’t have to equate with ‘no reaction’ but with half of the surveyed group expecting [...]

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The thin line separating GREAT from SUCKS…

Saw Jerry Seinfeld live in beautiful downtown Fresno recently. In classic form, he did a five minute riff on the idea that, nowadays, life experiences are either Great or they Suck, and there is a mighty thin line separating the one from the other. This is primo wisdom for Customer Service Managers. Your customers have [...]

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Your Product is an Experience

All businesses sell products. Whatever they might be—a laptop, a phone, groceries, a trip to the Bahamas, dinner in a restaurant—anything that someone pays money for is a product. Or so we all thought. I am about to argue that your product is not a product. Your product is, in fact, an experience. Think about [...]

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Citizens. Consumers. One and the same in Customer Service!

Recently I was at a conference  where former New Labour spin-doctor Alistair Campbell was speaking. He stated that the “citizen and the consumer had merged” and that people want “private sector standards and public sector values”.  I pondered on this and decided it meant that people want the efficiency of the private sector and the [...]

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Remembering is caring…

‘I don’t remember forgetting I don’t seem to recall If I neglected to show you I love you I don’t remember at all.’ Ricky Skaggs Anyone who’s been in a relationship for more than, oh, a fortnight has learned the link between memory and caring. Forget to call: you clearly don’t care. Don’t remember that [...]

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Siri – Call me an ambulance

Over the last few weeks, a screenshot of an iPhone Siri conversation has been circulating the internet: This scenario has definitely been worth a few laughs online, but it also highlights how we still have a long way to go in the field of natural language processing. Decades of work have produced numerous highly touted [...]

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Van Gogh your brand…

“I wish they would only take me as I am” – Vincent Van Gogh Personas are essential to Customer Experience Management. It’s a given that good design begins with understanding the design target. A Persona nets-out as a “word portrait” of a customer type, distilling the essential elements of a market segment. The richer and more [...]

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Is BIG PROCESS the newest ‘big’ thing in technology?

There’s a term trending on Twitter at the moment that makes me shake my head and smile a little. Why didn’t I see that coming? It’s ‘Big Process’  (#bigprocess) and I find the tweets by Clay Richardson really interesting. Now, I had no clue what this could mean, so my mind was running in all [...]

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An interview with KANA Chief Marketing Officer, James Norwood

Hi James, thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for our blog readers. Q.1 Running Marketing for a company like KANA must be a diverse job and I’m sure many people would love to know what it involves. What does a typical day consist of? Answer: There are no typical days! The [...]

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Getting Lean – Part 2 – Queues

Confession: I believe in superstar Engineers. Nowadays, given the Agile emphasis on Team, reliance on Superstars seems to be roughly as fashionable as fat ties. Embracing inequality of production can also be perceived as naïve by the folks paying their salaries (why pay the big dollars in the Silicon Valley when engineers can be had [...]

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