Category Archives: Helpful Hints

Want to save $243?

A new study talks about the impact of crappy customer service.  Unlike any of the rants on that topic in this space, it quantifies the effect based on research.  Not that I have to worry about letting facts get in the way of my story, but I thought I’d share it with you.

Here are the headlines:

Consumers feel the most significant root causes of poor service are:

  • Repeating themselves
  • Being trapped in automated self-service
  • Forced to wait too long for service
  • Representatives don’t know my history and value
  • Cannot switch between communication channels easily

33% cite voice self-service  as the most challenging channel compared to only 1% who find it most satisfying. And 38% of consumers said it is critical to improve voice self-service to make it more intelligently integrated with human assisted service. Where they were trapped in an automated system, consumers spent, on average, more than 9.5 minutes trying to reach a human.

It goes on to say that the average value (in one year) of each customer relationship lost to a competitor or abandoned is $243.

You can read the summary here but you already knew all this since you’re a loyal reader.  Right?

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The Other Guy

Monitoring and Control project activities

Amazing things happen as deadlines approach.  Generally competent people begin to panic and that panic clouds their judgment, their communications skills and their ability to function.  Way back in psych class, we learned about how individuals are hyper vigilant to danger cues, remember those cues related to their fears, and will assign threatening interpretations to ambiguous cues.  In English, that means that everything bothers them and they stop functioning.  What they do a lot of is pointing fingers. Continue reading

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Filed under Helpful Hints, Thinking Aloud

Don’t Believe The Hype

MIAMI GARDENS - FEBRUARY 3: The Super Bowl XLI...

It’s nice that a lot of people watched the Super Bowl on Sunday.  In fact, there are a ton of reports out about how it was “the most watched event in TV history.”  I’m sure that’s true, or as true anything that comes out of the very imperfect system of TV ratings can be.  This piece from Media Post is typical of the reporting that’s out there.  Most of them would lead the typical reader to believe that this game set all kinds of viewing records.  Well, in terms of raw numbers of people viewing, it did.  But how about a little perspective as a good lesson in how you need to read carefully. Continue reading

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Filed under Helpful Hints, Reality checks, sports business