10 IDEAS TO SAYING YES TO EXCELLENCE THIS CUSTOMER SERVICE WEEK

Every year, the first week of October is International Customer Service Week. Are you doing anything special?  Here are ten customer and employee focused ideas (and there are a lot more) that you can do during this very important week. 1. Call your best customers, just to say, “Hello and thank them for their business.”  (Or maybe all of your customers) 2. Call customers who haven’t bought from you in over a year. 3. Have...

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CELEBRATING CUSTOMER SERVICE WEEK 2014: SAY YES TO EXCELLENCE

Welcome to the Customer Service Week 2014! This is an annual event celebrated in the first full week in October in a number of countries including Nigeria. It's a time to beam the spotlight on customer service issues and appreciate those who serve customers. Ever since the International Customer Service Association (ICSA) came up with the idea of a customer service week, the celebration has gained acceptance across the globe. In 1992, the US Congress...

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BUILDING A CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE WHEN THE EXPERTS ARE YOUR CUSTOMERS (NOT YOU)

Do you remember the first day you realized that your customers knew more than you, that they had expert knowledge that you lacked? It was probably a humbling and, I hope, teachable moment (with you as the teachee), leading you to think about how to build a customer experience in our age of information. Auto dealers have had these encounters for years with obsessive gearheads who come armed with stats beyond anything a salesman has time to...

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MAINTAINING POSITIVE ATTITUDES AS CUSTOMER SERVICE AGENTS

More people now than ever before are working in the customer service industry, predominantly in telecommunications and other lines and programs of contact centre work. Some of these folks have worked in this industry for a while, while other people are newcomers and are still actively developing. The fact of the matter is this: your own company’s agents are the first impression, the first point of contact, and the start of the conversation that...

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Wakanow Leaves Hundreds of Nigerians Stranded in Sao Pauolo

The hope of over 600 Nigerians that they would watch the World Cup clash between the Super Eagles and Argentina was dashed Wednesday, when wakanow.com, official travel partners to the Nigeria Football Federation, NFF, failed to transport them to Porto Alegre, venue of the match. Wakanow had promised to move the fans from Sao Paulo to Porto Alegre Wednesday morning, in time for the kick-off, but the promise went unkept. “Most of us...

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CUSTOMER SERVICE LESSONS FROM LADY GAGA

With over 60 Million Facebook “Likes”, Lady Gaga gets Social Media. Her fans check the Facebook updates, follow the Twitter feeds, and watch the YouTube videos almost religiously. So how does she do it? Emotional Connection. Lady Gaga, even with her celebrity status, builds a direct relationship with her fans by sharing “real” stories about herself and her values. Fans can relate to her as a person. But that’s not all. She connects directly...

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6 CUSTOMER SERVICE LESSONS FROM THE WORLD CUP

Whether or not you’re a fan of soccer, chances are good that you’ve at least heard or seen a bit of the World Cup. The FIFA World Cup was first played back in 1930, and since then it has become the largest single-event sporting competition in the entire world. While the World Cup only rolls around once every four years, here are valuable customer service lessons that are to be learned from the game of soccer. There Is Always Competition and...

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CUSTOMER SERVICE TONE IN ACTION

Email copywriting has all of the hallmarks of classic direct response mailings. It’s the channel of choice for marketers who want to make sales, not #hashtags. It could be interesting, then, to test whether or not a “customer service tone” might work with a channel that usually allows fairly aggressive pitches and selling. That’s what Active Network, a large event management software provider, did in an exceptional case study posted...

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HOW ARIK AIR STEALS FROM US

This customer's service experience was culled from Premium Times Nigeria. Please read below and your comments and contributions will be highly appreciated. " Nwafor went on a short vacation to Johannesburg on October 24, 2013. She boarded the Abuja– Lagos-Johannesburg flight with the airline using its Boeing 737-800 plane for the W3103 international flight. Immediately she arrived Johannesburg and retrieved her briefcase from the luggage section,...

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CAN EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE BE DELIVERED THROUGH EMAIL?PART TWO

2. Zappos Knocks out a Customer Dilemma Zappos is a company well known for insanely good (and literally record breaking) customer service, but can the magic really last over a channel like email? The Zappos team apparently answers with a resounding, “Yes!” and in what is perhaps one of the most notorious customer service screenshots of all time (originally shared on Reddit), a Zappos support rep named Paul responds to a...

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CAN EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE BE DELIVERED THROUGH EMAIL?PART ONE

It's no secret that we as consumers love communicating through technology. As a result customer service has adapted, and with each passing year begins to rely more heavily on channels like email in order to solve customer dilemmas. Many might tell you that email is too impersonal to deliver the kind of quality service that customers remember—but is that really the case? In order to answer that question, I ventured out to see if...

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