Insights from Customer Service Experts

On September 17, 2014, we hosted an event in NYC called Illuminate: A Strategic Approach to Customer Engagement.

!We invited industry leaders to speak about their customer

service strategies and experiences. !

Heres what they had to say.

MANAGING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS

When I think about great [customer] service, its about how you take every interaction you have with a customer and use that as a

way to improve their perception of your organization.

JON HERSTEIN Box

Customer service is the product You need to make sure that you are making [your customers] feel valued, that they are getting

value from your company, that they have a reason to be loyal to you, that you are serving their needs.

MARYANN AMADO Adobe

Its the customer experience, but its also the agent experience and making sure we have happy agents who

understand our customers.

FARREL GOLDBERG Medidata

If you can take a customer thats had a bad experience and turn them around, youre going to have a customer for life.

MILTON PAPPAS Nine West

MAINTAINING CONSISTENCY ACROSS CHANNELS

People expect to be served anytime, anywhere, on almost any device Its really changing the way that people expect to be

served, and its allowing companies to empower their employees to meet that demand.

BERNARD GUTNICK Avaya

Consumers dont think of [a brand] as channels. From a customer perspective, it is one brand voice, one brand face, and

you need to be consistent across all these channels.

MILTON PAPPAS Nine West

GIVING CUSTOMERS A VOICE

We invite customers to come speak [about once a month] ... The more we can do that and remind people that this is what its

actually about, the better off we are as a company in terms of serving customers.

JON HERSTEIN Box

We have the responsibility to bring the voice of the customer into the organization and force the organization to respond to it.

JON HERSTEIN Box

If you dont have the anecdotes, if you dont have the people, if you dont put a face [or] voice to the customer and amplify that within the organization, then its just data and becomes meaningless.

MIKKEL SVANE Zendesk

CONTINUING TO INNOVATE

Were focusing on self-service and getting information to the users hands quickly and efficiently. One of the things weve been

trying to do differently is to guide our users to solutions We want to catch the issue and act as a shepherd to a solution.

RON STUCKEY Chicos

The natural thing for a Help Center is to become a dumping ground for information. At one point we had up to 200 articles we did a total revamp and took it down to 40 articles and found

that a lot more users were able to self-help after that.

AARON FRANKLIN Pinterest

People dont want to talk to us necessarily, they would rather serve themselves if they can. Were trying to innovate internally to

try to deliver ease of use externally.

KENT GALE Acquia

THINKING DIFFERENTLY

Your growth, your cost of service, and your loyalty are driven not necessarily by all those ads, but by how youre treating your

customers and how youre creating a unique experience for them.

ARNAUD KRAAIJVANGERGenesys

Dont think of customer service as a cost center We dont think about it primarily as how can we minimize how much we spend

on service, its how do we maximize the experience for customers.

JON HERSTEIN Box

Customer service is the new marketing, it is the new sales, and this is where we anchor the relationship with the customer.

MIKKEL SVANE Zendesk

Theres the old saying that the customer is always right, and thats true. But I think theres a corollary to that now, which is the

customer experience is always true. Listen to that truthful experience and adjust.

MARYANN AMADO Adobe

Watch a replay of the event