the best customer service blogs in 2016
TRANSCRIPT
The Best Customer Service Blogs in 2016
We think you’ll agree 2016 was a phenomenal year. Okay – maybe not in world politics, or obituaries, or zoo news. But fortunately, in customer service, we’ve enjoyed an inspiring year of content teaching us how to improve our skills.
As a result, we’ve curated a few of the best articles with links and excerpts. Please feel free to share and highlight your favourite authors!
Delivering Excellent Customer Service
Meghan Earley from Slack talks about the importance of empathy in providing genuine, human help.
“Most importantly, successful human responses come from the genuine desire to help people. If you don’t care that Matt is having a difficult experience while trying …”
Ruairi Galavan, Manager of Product Education at Intercom discusses why perfect customer service is a conversation, not a ticket.
“The days of accepting slow, disconnected and impersonal communication with customers as the norm have passed. So if you don’t consider how you can transition …”
Delivering Excellent Customer Service
Daniel Feeney gives us Buffer’s secret sauce to handling over 10,000 (!!!) conversations a month on social support.
“When you get to chat with a customer from first contact all the way through to the resolution, it’s a powerful, personal experience.”
Delivering Excellent Customer Service
HBR understands that the needs of customers are changing. And it gives us a step by step guide to revolutionising customer service.
“In conclusion, a better approach is to persuade employees to commit to a holistic definition of service. That is: creating value for others, outside and …”
Delivering Excellent Customer Service
Hiring and People Ops
Kristin Aardsma from 37signals shares how their support team changed from Hiring when it hurts to putting their team’s happiness first.
“Often, the work I do feels invisible. I don’t build a feature or design a website. I ensure that our support team (a sect of tech with an industry standard of high turnover) has the information …”
Mercer Smith-Looper talks about how you can ace your first 90 days a support manager on the Kayako blog.
“As a new manager, it falls to you to uncover and potentially expose areas where the company could be doing better. Do product features remain the same because …”
Hiring and People Ops
Hiring and People Ops
Sandeep Kaur from Kayako talks about how their team avoids burnout and keeps agents happy in a stressful job.
“Continually working under high pressure and with a heavy workload has been proven to lead to stress and burnout. And constantly working at maximum …”
Hiring and People Ops
From our own blog, we talk about how the top companies recruit the best customer service talent and provide some great job description examples you can use yourself.
“If you use an unstructured hiring format, you can only expect the results to explain future work performance of the hire 14% of the time. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to be 100% sure …”
Measurement and Data
Mat Patterson from HelpScout rounds up the experts and talks about how they track and measure customer service for Inc.com
“Since customer service metrics matter. Then what you choose to report and how you report it can make a real difference IN the level of service you provide. So don’t waste …”
Measurement and Data
Jake Peterson at Segment takes a deep look at measuring the ROI of support. Data lovers, get inspired!
“I also consider: How efficient is our team? Do hire quickly enough or maybe too fast? How can we make the support experience so magical that customers use Segment more and recommend us? Answering …”
Measurement and Data
Simon Ouderkirk from Automattic digs into how you can create value from the customer service data you already collect.
“Every support team answers customers. Great support teams use data to discover trends, make the business case for fixing big problems, and improve customer …”
Measurement and Data
Jeff Gardner, Director of Support at Intercom boils down the hundreds of metrics you could be tracking into the 5 customer service metrics that matter.
“A lot of startups use the ‘crystal ball’ approach to customer support metrics. They think that the answer to all their problems can be found buried in endless …”
Product and Customer Feedback
Andrea Saez thinks that too many people in customer service are looking for nice ways to say no and suggests ways to think differently about feature requests.
“At ProdPad, we don’t see customer requests as something to accept or deny. We don’t even use the word “no” with our customers. We process every request …”
Product and Customer Feedback
Chase Clemons from Support Ops and 37Signals talks about how good customer support is a feature, not a cost center.
“You’ve got to be better at customer support than the other teams behind products competing against yours. You’ve got to out-support the other …”
Product and Customer Feedback
Mirielle Pilloud talks to HelpScout about how the Support team at TED got a seat at the Adult Table and involved more in business decisions.
“It’s especially relevant to realise that the adult table is about reach and impact — making sure your team’s work is an integral part of your organisation’s …”
Product and Customer Feedback
Shared on the SupportDriven blog, Emily Chapman talks about the benefits of getting All Hands Support started at Trello.
“What originally started as a response to immediate needs for our retreat turned out to be an unexpectedly great way for our engineers, systems gurus, and managers …”
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We pick companies because of their products, but we often leave them because of
theirs service failures.
Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, Rick Delisi
THE EFFORTLESS EXPERIENCE
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