This site uses cookies to improve your experience. To help us insure we adhere to various privacy regulations, please select your country/region of residence. If you do not select a country, we will assume you are from the United States. Select your Cookie Settings or view our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Used for the proper function of the website
Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Strictly Necessary: Used for the proper function of the website
Performance/Analytics: Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Being “customer-oriented” boils down to one idea: helping people. As simplistic as it sounds, this ethos is the key to making it work as an organization. While there are many skills you need to help customers effectively, there’s a more profound outlook that informs the daily actions of customer service all-stars. The core characteristics that make a company customer-oriented add up to the ability to fulfill the ultimate purpose of helping people, regardless of challenges along the way.
Every single one of us will bring our own version of the past year to work. Organizations need to thoughtfully consider this as they plan their re-entry strategies. What will it take to fill a languishing workforce with energy, drive, and enthusiasm?
Successful leaders challenge people. Jerk-holes are just pushy. But the opposite of pushy – being a push-over – isn’t an option for leaders. 7 fundamentals of assertive challenge: Rushing to challenge is pushy.
Photo by SHaHraM Anhari on Unsplash. This message is excerpted from the book Life Coaching for Successful Women: Powerful Questions, Practical Answ ers by Valorie Burton. Research shows that resilient people think differently. They have a set of skills – sometimes learned, other times innate – that allow them to persevere, manage stress, and triumph in the face of challenges.
Forget predictions, let’s focus on priorities for the year and explore how to supercharge your employee experience. Join Miriam Connaughton and Carolyn Clark as they discuss key HR trends for 2025—and how to turn them into actionable strategies for your organization. In this dynamic webinar, our esteemed speakers will share expert insights and practical tips to help your employee experience adapt and thrive.
Artificial intelligence (AI) shows incredible promise in 2021, but the experience of interacting with an AI chatbot is more like talking to a distracted toddler than it is to Tony Stark’s Jarvis. Still, using AI chatbots for customer service makes plenty of sense. Perhaps you’ve read about recent AI breakthroughs, seen a compelling demo, or heard that your competition is installing an AI system.
There are many excellent reasons to create and publish FAQ content for your product. First, 70% of customers prefer to use a company’s website to get answers on their own. Having a knowledge base full of how-to articles and answers to frequently asked questions empowers your customers to find their own solutions to the problems they’re encountering.
Your customer service culture is not what your fancy “Customer Guarantee” promises, and it’s not whatever you say it is in your new employee handbook. For proof, compare this 2014 customer promise from Comcast — “We are committed to providing Comcast customers with a consistently superior customer experience” — to this recording from the same year. Your culture is the set of beliefs held by your employees about your company: who and what it is for, what it values, and how they act in response to
Sometimes the customer service teams who are supposed to be solving problems somehow manage to make them so much worse instead. These are their stories — along with some tips to help you avoid ending up on this list next time we update it! 1. Running from responsibility The root of many terrible customer experiences is a company that is happy to collect money from a transaction but not to accept responsibility when things go wrong.
Your relationships with your customers have more in common with relationships in your personal life than you might think. Like the happiness that you derive from being around your friends and loved ones, customer happiness is a product of a lot of time, effort, and learning. It’s not just about a single action but the accumulation of activities over time.
It’s still yesterday for you. Statistically speaking, you (like most of my Help Scout colleagues) are probably somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Meanwhile, I cling to the bottom of the planet in Australia, probably in your tomorrow. That separation is about more than weather and the relative deadliness of the local wildlife. Remote vs. really remote.
Retaining top talent in 2025 means rethinking benefits. In a competitive job market, fertility benefits are more than just offerings - they are a commitment to your team’s well-being. Gain critical insights into the latest fertility benefits strategies that can help position your organization as an industry leader. Our expert will explore the unique advantages and challenges of each model, share success stories from top organizations, and offer practical strategies to make benefits decisions tha
With access to fewer resources and generally leaner teams, small businesses need to be more creative and tactful in their approach to customer service. That’s not to say they can’t provide a top-notch experience — they absolutely can. They just need to be a little more focused with their efforts. In this guide, we cover some common topics surrounding small business customer service and provide some insights gained from our years of working in support — as well as insights from small business lea
While the opportunity to hire the best people anywhere in the world is incredible, hiring for a remote team does have its unique challenges. Help Scout has been a fully remote company for over 10 years now — with 129 people across 80 cities around the world — so our hiring process has to be aligned with our remote culture. That means: Optimizing interviews for people in different time zones.
2024 has tested every organization, and 2025 promises no less - the warning signs are everywhere. If you’re relying on superficial approaches to diversity, you might find yourself scrambling to catch up. Thought diversity - the fuel for new ideas, fresh perspectives, and disruptive innovation - is more than a buzzword. It's a survival strategy. And if you’re not building it into your workplace culture right now , you’re heading for trouble.
We’ve all read those great customer experience stories that make us feel awed and admiring, but some of those stand-out examples can be misleading. While they certainly jerk at the emotions and evoke a sense of wonder for the brand, they usually end up drawing attention because they are so far outside of the norm. They aren’t the typical conditions under which the company does business.
Anyone who’s worked in customer support knows it’s best played as a team sport. Strong individual contributors matter, but the real magic happens when working together. In order to create an environment conducive to collaboration, you need the right tools — and one of the most important is a team inbox. What is a team inbox? A team inbox is a shared mailbox where multiple agents can manage and collaborate on customer conversations from a single email address (support@, help@, etc.).
Employee recognition has often been deemed a "feel-good" initiative, tied closely to rewards. While we understand its importance, we tend to associate recognition with intangible outcomes like engagement and sentiment, rather than direct impacts on retention and high performance. In today’s workplace, the true ROI of recognition lies in its ability to regenerate tangible, business-driven results.
For customer service teams, the support queue shapes their work lives, shifting from a trickle of questions to a raging torrent of customer confusion throughout the various seasons of a business. Understanding and managing the power of the queue is critical to a sustainable customer service organization. The art of the support queue. You might well ask, “Why do we need a whole article about dealing with a list of questions?
Every time I travel to Boston, I stay in the same hotel. It’s not fancy and the location isn’t great, but they know how to wow a customer. The way that I’m treated when I go there has always left an impression on me. The first time I stayed there, I arrived in the dead of winter. My face was chapped, and my hands were raw as I checked in. Ten minutes after I got to my room, guest services showed up at my door with some cookies and hot chocolate.
While I’m writing this in March of 2021, having just experienced a generational winter in my home state of Texas that created a source of stories I can use to bore my future grandchildren to death, I realize one nice thing about power outages is a return to books. I’ve always enjoyed reading, but I can’t say that it was a nightly affair for me like it has become during this stunning storm of 2021.
Just because a customer clicked a smiley face in your post-service feedback survey does not mean you gave them high-quality service. They might love the product, and your service is just okay enough not to make a difference. Or they might be very happy with an answer, not knowing you’ve given them incomplete or out-of-date information.
With a staggering 92% of CEOs prioritizing skill development, and 84% struggling with transformation, mastering upskilling is now more critical than ever. Drawing on extensive research and collaboration with hundreds of leading organizations, discover key hurdles and innovative best practices in workforce upskilling. You'll walk away with a deep understanding of how to build a culture of continuous learning, expert insights into assessing the current skills of your employees, and a strategic too
Great customer service delivers real business value. That’s a foundational belief at Help Scout, as outlined in our support-driven growth articles. Even so, it can be difficult for empathetic customer service staff to think about customers in terms of business revenue. It somehow feels more “fair” to treat every customer equally, being helpful and responsive without regard to the money involved.
Speaker: Tim Buteyn, President of ThinkingKap Learning Solutions
Join this brand new webinar with Tim Buteyn to learn how you can master the art of remote onboarding! By the end of this session, you'll understand how to: Craft a Tailored Onboarding Checklist 📝 Develop a comprehensive, customized checklist that ensures every new hire has a smooth transition into your company, no matter where they are in the world.
Since there are multiple, distinct steps in the customer journey , some companies choose to separate these steps and have them managed by separate roles: The sales team handles pre-sales. A customer onboarding specialist manages onboarding. A customer success specialist owns lifecycle management. If your company is splitting responsibilities in a similar way, this post will teach you how to write a customer onboarding specialist job description that attracts the most qualified candidates and get
When thinking about education, most of us tend to think only about teachers and other administrative staff — frontline workers, so to speak. It makes sense; frontline educators are incredibly important and often underappreciated. In reality, the education ecosystem is like an iceberg: What you see is just a small fraction of the whole. In order for frontline educators to do their jobs successfully, they need access to things like books, software, and various other supplies.
When starting a company, finding the right customer service tool isn’t always at the top of the priority list; you’re more focused on getting customers and proving out your idea. Then, one day, a customer sends you a question. Then another. And another after that. Eventually, you’re regularly fielding questions from customers and may find it challenging to manage all the incoming requests.
Implementing new tools or business processes in your organization? Lemon Learning put together a practical 3 part guide to prevent the pitfalls of change management. Drive a successful change management project from diagnosis through to measurement.
We organize all of the trending information in your field so you don't have to. Join 29,000+ users and stay up to date on the latest articles your peers are reading.
You know about us, now we want to get to know you!
Let's personalize your content
Let's get even more personalized
We recognize your account from another site in our network, please click 'Send Email' below to continue with verifying your account and setting a password.
363 
Let's personalize your content