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.
Duke
University's Help Desk
A FAQ about how to manage and staff a help desk, including tips on hours
of operation, automation, and staffing. Although the site is geared towards
computer support help desks, many of the resources can be used for any
customer support activity.
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.
Success
Series-Small Business Administration
A service of the Small Business Administration, this file talks about the
customer service imperatives of the 90s. It covers the three golden rules of
customer service: put the customer first, stay close to the customer, and pay
attention to details.
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.
Teknekron
Provides integrated voice and data solutions for call centers, and has now
branched out into hardware independent applications (call center management
tools that do not require a specific vendor's equipment).
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.