Customer Service Resources

Customer Service Terms
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Customer service related sites are owned by consulting firms, application or hardware developers, and government organizations. There are probably thousands of consulting firms specializing in customer service and performance measurement. Although many small businesses can't afford their services yet, quite a few of these consulting firms have Web sites to introduce their services to potential clients. In many cases, you can use these sites free of charge to find secrets about providing exceptional customer service.

American Productivity and Quality Center
A nonprofit education and research organization that helps a variety of businesses and industries improve both how they service the customer and how they run their business.

Bureau of Business Practice
Publishes payroll, human resources, sales, customer service, credit and collection, and other types of information. One of their Hot Topics categories includes the excellent article "Find Out How Your Customers Really Feel."

Cooper Research Group
They concentrate on high-tech industries. Their list of current projects shows that they provide services like developing customer satisfaction programs, designing measurement and survey strategies, and researching brand satisfaction.

IntelliQuest
A simple fact of life: Unhappy people tend to be dissatisfied and happy people tend to be satisfied. In short, you can't win everybody, but try to win most.  Their IQ Thinking area in the IQ Library contains over a dozen useful articles, including one on customer registration benefits and customer life cycle measurement.

International Management Technologies
Specializing in customer-oriented organizational change, customer satisfaction, and service quality.

J.D. Power and Associates
Is recognized for their annual automobile industry awards for such things as quality and reliability. Less well know is their involvement in reviews of airlines, computers, and telephone services. J.D. Power's Web site gives visitors access to all of their press releases.

Kaset International
Specializes in helping organizations improve overall customer service. Under the "Publications" area, Kaset offers a monthly "Customer Service Professional" newsletter on a subscription basis.

The Outsourcing Institute
Outsourcing has become the trend of the 90s. However, it's a good idea to know what to do before you outsource. The Outsourcing Institute is an association for objective information on outsourcing. Their Web page helps businesses determine why, how, and when to outsource.

Smarter Solutions
Specializing in process improvement and process measurement. From the main page, take the link to "better customer feedback with less effort" to read about how to evaluate a survey, how to read results, and how to survey more effectively.

Technology Management Associates
A consulting firm that provides clients with business information and resources. If you click on "Consulting" and then on "Beyond customer satisfaction" you reach a page that describes the occasional gap between customer expectations and what the customer really wants.

Customer Service Terms
There's a lot of unavoidable jargon associated with any field. This section describes some of the terms specific to customer service.

Abandon rate:
Refers to the percentage of customers who hang up, either because they spent too much time on hold or couldn't reach the person they needed to speak with. Most ACD systems (described next) can measure abandoned calls. Because abandoned calls translate directly into customers who have not been served, your goal should be to keep them to a minimum.
ACD:
Automatic Call Delivery. When a call comes into a customer service center, it might be placed on hold until a representative becomes available. An ACD automatically routes the call on hold to the next available representative when he or she become available.
Benchmarking:
Implies setting a standard. One of the buzzwords of the early 90s, "benchmarking" simply means looking at other businesses who do something well and designing your process after them. No company does everything better than everyone else. Benchmarking means breaking down the components of a business and look to other companies that are the "best of breed" in that area.
Call center:
A general term for an area primarily used for handing customer calls.
Call routing:
A system that determines which calls should go to what person.  These call routing systems are generally part of ACD systems and are very useful for maintaining service quality.
CTI:
Or computer telephony integration, means an application that can take voice (or touch tone) information and generate a response from a separate computer application.
IVR:
Short for interactive voice response system. Such systems help route customer calls. IVRs are similar to VRUs (voice response units, described next), but IVRs can go one step beyond and actually shed calls. Call shedding means giving customers the answers they need without having to talk to a live representative. For example, if the customer just wants to know how much shipping is, an IVR could provide a choice about shipping charges. More advanced IVRs can actually be tied into the billing system to let customers find out their balance without speaking to anyone.
VRU:
Voice Response Unit. We're all familiar with "push 1 to hear more about widgets," "push 2 to talk to a sales representative," and so on. VRUs can be a very useful means of directing calls to the proper person. From a customer's perspective however, VRUs can be extremely annoying if they're not structured properly.