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Culture, Marketing Easy way to improve customer service
Improving customer service can be hard and expensive, because most companies start with things like six-sigma, re-training call-center employees, or improving CRM software.
But nearly everyone has plenty of opportunities right under their nose. Take for example, the classic email address: DoNotReply@CompanyName.com. Organizations that use this address for billing, ticketing, and notifications could just as easily use the same address they use for support email. They'd be rewarded with fewer phone calls and happier customers.
I can just imagine how this started: back in 1995 someone in IT at Time Warner discovered a huge pile of email sent to a billing REPLY-TO that everyone forgot about and decided to end the problem once an for-all. Now, some of the best companies do this without even thinking about it.
The point isn't that this email address is hostile to customers. The point is that getting back to basics by imagining things from your customer's standpoint is a cheap, quick, and powerful way to improve your company.
For fun (or depression), search your inbox for 'DoNotReply@*'.
Marketing Geeks Giving Presentations
Considering our past two entries, it should be no surprise to anyone that Innova hosted the Columbus Ohio Linux User’s Group last Saturday. The focus of the meeting was Rafeeq Rehman’s presentation on OpenID, which was very informative and an awesome introduction to OpenID, especially so if you’d never heard of it.
But, and no offense to Mr. Rehman meant, it lacked flair. I was interested enough in the material but I found myself sneaking off time and again to partake of the catered food or snap some pictures. This is a common problem when geeks give presentations (we’re not generally known for our communications skills), and if I were in the same situation it might have come out quite similarly.
As I was perusing programming.reddit.com this morning — keeping up with the field — I came across an awesome article entitled: How Not to Throw Up, which is an awesome article about how to handle giving presentations. It focuses on giving presentations in front of large groups of people, but the advice is usable when you’re standing in front of any number of people. Tidbits like: “Don’t cram each slide full of as much information as it can bear” and “watch the audience’s reaction and tailor the presentation to them” are pure gold.
Maybe those of us who are more comfortable in front of a debugger or a terminal window should take a read through — I certainly did — and keep in mind the finer points of performing in front of a group of people. Next time I have to present anything I’ll be darting back to this article for a refresher.