Tag Archives: Concerns

Following Up Turns the Tables


Turning the Tables

A friend of mine recently catered a home party for a regular client and received a gratuity that was not as generous as in the past. As part of his regular practice he  placed a follow up call to the client the next day. When asked about the service and food quality the client replied ” I didn’t want to say anything, but one of your employees was not very professional in the way he interacted with my guests. ” “He spent too much time in causal conversation and not enough time clearing dishes.”

My friend thanked the client for making him aware of the issue. He apologized and said he would pay closer attention to supervising his staff and speak to the employee about the incident to ensure it would not happen again.

A few days later in the mail my friend received a check from the client to compensate for the gratuity and a request to cater an upcoming party. The same client made recommendations to her friends regarding his catering service and he was awarded several future catering jobs.

Following up is an opportunity to turn around a bad experiences,  strengthen relationships and turn customers into evangelists.

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With the onslaught of self service portals is the CSR extinct?

IGN Entertainment just signed up Parature for support. Prior to the agreement with Parature, IGN was having to dedicate staff to answer every question via email.  Additionally,  there was wasted effort with about 95% of the questions being redundant. Parature was chosen because of it’s easy to use interface, self-service features and multi-language capabilities.  IGN says it resolves 57% of tickets by utilizing Parature’s auto-responders. Chris Anderson, Senior Manager of Customer Service at IGN says “Parature is 50 percent of my work force. With Parature, I am able to use fewer CSRs, keeping my staffing budget low.”

In my opinion, there will always be a need for the Human Touch, while frequently asked questions and general inquires work well with self-service portals customers concerns of more complex and technical in nature will need a highly skilled customer service representative to insure a customer has the best experience in getting their problem resolved.

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