Scaling Your Customer Service Team
As your business grows, it will eventually be time to scale your customer service activities. This article highlights the customer service challenges a large organization will face, along with some final tips.
Customer Service: The Basics
Customer Service, while simple in theory, is quite complex. Keeping customers happy so they can continue to doing business with you is becoming increasingly more difficult in the digital age of rapid information-sharing. In this 1st article of our Customer Service Best Practice series, Diane Pierson walks through a primer of what Customer Service is, how it’s changed, and why it’s important.
Establishing a Customer Service Department
Whether you’re new to running customer service or at a growing company that is just building out a formal customer service department, preparing a customer service plan for your company should start with what you already know. Like any journey, the secret to creating an effective Customer Service department is starting with a compass and a map – and refining as you move forward. In this 2nd article of our Customer Service Best Practice series, Diane Pierson walks through the basics of setting up your own customer service department.
Outsourcing Customer Service
When you’re ready to implement customer service activities, you’ll have to decide whether to hire direct employees or to leverage an outsourced call center. Companies just starting out often leverage a virtual receptionist to make sure the phones get answered, and as they grow they may outsource all aspects of customer service while others choose to keep all activities in-house. In this 3rd article of our Customer Service Best Practice series, Diane Pierson walks through the difference between an inside team versus an outsourced team and 17 questions to ask potential customer service vendors.
Your First Customer Service Hire
Your first customer service hire is a key role within your organization, regardless of whether the position is full or part-time. This article explores what you need to consider when you’re ready to make your first dedicated customer service hire.
Handling Common Customer Service Questions
One of the best foundations for good customer service is preparing for the common questions that frequently come up. It’s imperative to identify inquiries that your customer service representatives may receive, prepare standard ways to respond to those inquiries and know when to escalate an inquiry to someone else.
Building Customer-Focused Products: Customer Surveys Done Right
Customer surveys are fast and cheap and are extremely effective for gathering market research, if you follow some easy tips. There is a dark side, however, it’s also VERY easy to create a bad survey that delivers low-quality information with misguided direction and insight about your product or business.Diane Pierson walks through the dos and don’ts of creating an effective survey for your subscription business.
Building Customer-Focused Products: How to Prioritize Actions Based on Research
Building Customer-Focused Products: An Insiders Guide to Market Research,is a series compiled by product owners with decades of experience in creating and launching successful subscription products. In How to Prioritize Actions Based on Research, Diane Pierson, Subscription Insider Guide to Building Subscription Products outlines our Readiness Model for prioritizing what product opportunities you should target.
Building Customer-Focused Products: Market Segmentation
Building Customer-Focused Products: An Insiders Guide to Market Research,is a series compiled by product owners with decades of experience in creating and launching successful subscription products. In this part of the series, Diane Pierson walks through a primer on market segmentation.
The Definitive Guide to Secondary Market Research Sources
Starting your search for research and data to support your business plan, product research, customer segmentation or data for your next presentation to investors, employees or conference? Beyond any primary research you will be doing, you will need access to third party data for segmentation, validation and an understanding of your market. Subscription Insider’s Definitive List of Secondary Market Research Sources lists literally hundreds of data sets for your research. Our definitive list includes business, consumer and government data. Use it for marketing, competitive research, market data and more. It includes easy-to-use data and not so easy-to-use data accessible via APIs.
