Blog |
Featured Partner Archive |
News |
Newsletter
Do you ever get that feeling of being run over by a new trend or acronym that seems to have come out of nowhere? Welcome to CEM (Customer Experience Management). In the last few months not only has this new buzzword gained ever increasing levels of hype but it is being applied to everything, everyone and all products and services being sold today. So here we are in another hype curve at the moment. This feels a bit like when “CRM” came on in the late 90’s. Anyone remember “360 degree view of the customer” or “Customer Intimacy?” We heard all those promises and visions of turning the contact center into a profit center while simultaneously increasing ROI, reducing churn and delivering customer nirvana. Read More...
During internal meetings last week, we got side-tracked on the subject of “the customer satisfaction silver bullet.” As we all know, there is no such silver bullet. A lot of folks talk like they have the only answer. But at the end of the day, it takes a great deal of coordination, information and determination to manage and improve the technology, people and processes that influence customer satisfaction. Read More...
Telecom is in my blood
When it comes to telecom, I’m more than a little abnormal – it’s in my blood. My dad retired from AT&T Long Lines after 42 years (he had one of those “Ma Bell is a Cheap Mother!” shirts during one of the CWA strikes), and my mother was one of those ladies on roller skates working the cordboards back in the 40s. My first real job was Co-Op Engineer for GTE AE Labs in beautiful Northlake IL – when I told my dad he said something like “Haven’t you been paying attention? All the nights & weekends I had to work? Knowing how to answer the phone at night? I thought you were smarter than that – and not only do you go to work for a phone company, you go to work for THAT phone company!?!?!?!” Read More...
So what if IT won!
So what if IT won…it still has to work, right?
Remember Datamation’s voice & data are like oil & water cover from Spring of ‘86? What a difference a quarter of a century makes. Just ask Nortel or AT&T or even Cisco! Where am I going with this? Technological schizophrenia.
Datacomm and data networks are truly wonderful things. They remind me of the analog computers of my misspent youth in the subbasement of Tech - all those wires (think patch cords) going all over the place. But I digress.
Read More...
What’s on Your Roadmap this Week?
Just for fun, I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the exciting trends we’re seeing in the industry. If you work for a company that owns, supports, services or sells to contact centers, you no doubt have a similar list of your own. You’ve probably got a roadmap that identifies the trends appropriate to your market and how you can best leverage and evolve your product or service to meet tomorrow’s customer requirements. Read More...
The Canoe Approach…Priceless
Over the past four decades, I’ve worked with customers who purchase products and services from communication companies. One of the most important things I’ve learned from working with these companies and customers is what I call the “canoe approach” to customer service. It isn’t just a cute saying. It is a solid approach that takes the customer relationship to a deeper level. It works well when followed by a single employee. But the real value of this approach hits home when any entire company lives by it. The canoe approach gives everyone in the vendor company – even sales and marketing – a way to put some muscle behind the hype. It presumes that to have a really good customer relationship, your customers need to know you’re there with them when they’re working on tough problems and trying to resolve their company issues. You are really in the canoe with them. Read More...
Being a Small Business: Part 1
The other day, an Account Executive and I were talking with a prospect about testing their voice systems. The customer asked an interesting question. Why should my company do business with a small company like IQ Services? Of course, we’ve heard this question before and we have a response (which we’ll share in an upcoming blog post) that usually allays any concerns our prospects might have. But what I find most interesting about this question is that we – IQ Services employees and management alike – don’t think of ourselves as a small company. Yes, we fit the definition in terms of employee count and in terms of the many hats you get to wear when you work for a small company. But it doesn’t feel that way. It got me thinking about why. Read More...
Being a Small Business: Part 2
One of the great things about being a small business is that you are never too far from your customers.
When we started our company, we committed ourselves to delivering the best possible customer service. Sounds like many small companies, doesn’t it? We knew we could make it by always focusing on the customer’s need. For IQ Services, it was the customer’s need to have confidence in the end-to-end performance of their contact center and communications business solutions. It seemed to come easy for us because of our collective experience in implementing telecommunications, contact center and IVR solution. We were naturally sympathetic to our customers. We’d walked in their shoes. We instinctively understood the need for a highly adaptable testing platform and related methods to meet very unique architectures, applications and business requirements. Read More...
Positive customer experiences
One of the things that’s really cool about working for IQ Services is the customer experience we get.
Because we test systems remotely – from the outside in, just like your customers use them – we very rarely go on-site. Not that we haven’t. But the vast majority of the time we just don’t do it because we don’t have to. The upside to this methodology is our customers don’t have to do anything to their systems for us to be able to test or monitor. They don’t have to get us security credentials to be onsite. And because travel & shipping aren’t required, it’s all very cost-effective. Read More...
Customer/Partner Team
A few weeks ago, I blogged about the “canoe approach” to serving customers. When it gets down to it, the crux of the canoe approach is as simple (and complex) as taking a team approach to working with customers. We’re fortunate at IQ Services because we really get to think of ourselves as a member of the customer team. Because our services fit a niche and many of our customers do not have anyone on staff to do what we do, we become their testing expert. Read More...
Poll Results & Filling the Gap between Internal Metrics & Customer Experience
Last week I had the opportunity to present a webinar called “Internal Monitoring Isn’t Enough.” It was an opportunity for me to educate attendees about a critical gap many companies haven’t bridged between internal performance stats and the true picture of how their contact center and communications solutions are performing – in other words, the customer experience. The simple method (or in our case, the cost-effective service) we discussed for filling this gap is Remote Availability & Performance Monitoring (RAPM)*. As you all know, polls in webinars are good, so we included several in our webinar to get a sense of the make-up and experiences of our audience. Not surprisingly, more than 60% of the attendees identified themselves as IT or service providers. Read More...
You’re Taking It Out of Context
Living with a writer for the last 36 years, one of my favorite books has become “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”
The cover of the book shows two pandas, the vegetarian whiting out the comma, and the NRA member walking to the right brandishing a handgun.
The point is, of course, that punctuation matters. Why? Because punctuation establishes a context for words and thereby turns them into a thought & gives them meaning. Of course it’s not just about punctuation – content has to be coherent for there to be identifiable meaning – but context certainly matters. Read More...
Communication Mishaps
We all know business is about generating revenue. In today’s era of social media, instant gratification and self-service, customer communications have a dramatic impact on revenue (just ask Toyota). Arguably, communication is the key to happy customers and a thriving business. And communication mishaps can ruin customer relationships!
It is Customer Service Week!
So IQ Services would like to take a moment to honor and thank our clients who care as much about their customers as we care about ours. As experts in the contact center and communications solutions industries, customer service is at the very core of our clients' businesses and careers. It may sound sappy, but their efforts to improve the business practices, technologies, methodologies and services surrounding customer communications make the world a little better every day.
Where does customer experience start and end?
The folks here at IQ Services live in a world of contact centers, communications technologies and business solutions. When we think about customer experience, our brains jump to images of the good but harried people who install contact center solutions and our desire to make them more successful. Visions of IVR performance spreadsheets, speech analytics dashboards, agent training programs and more dance in our heads. We don't often think about marketing. It isn't natural for this Midwest company to think that anything beyond hard work and good customer service matters much. Many of us were raised to believe that you don't talk about your good work...you just do it...you just make the customer happy. We forget or don't recognize that good customer service and good customer experiences start with the trust a company's brand holds. We forget that a brand is a promise and that a good customer experience means our customers liked the promise and we delivered on it. Read More...
The Experience Matters
Don't you love it when something that seems like it should be intuitively obvious to the casual observer turns out to be right on the money? Literally?
13 years ago, IQ Services was started by a couple of guys that had a really cool idea - if you could only figure out how good the user experience was going to be before you put a new contact center into production you could tune it before it went into production instead of 3 days later after it dropped to its knees the first time it was hit with full load. Read More...
|
