Insights from Customer Service Experts
On September 17, 2014, we hosted an event in NYC called “Illuminate: A Strategic Approach to Customer Engagement.”
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We invited industry leaders to speak about their customer service strategies and experiences.
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Here’s what they had to say.
MANAGING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS
“When I think about great [customer] service, it’s 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
“It’s the customer experience, but it’s also the agent experience and making sure we have happy agents who
understand our customers.”
FARREL GOLDBERG Medidata
“If you can take a customer that’s had a bad experience and turn them around, you’re 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 … It’s really changing the way that people expect to be
served, and it’s allowing companies to empower their employees to meet that demand.”
BERNARD GUTNICK Avaya
“Consumers don’t 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 it’s
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 don’t have the anecdotes, if you don’t have the people, if you don’t put a face [or] voice to the customer and amplify that within the organization, then it’s just data and becomes meaningless.”
MIKKEL SVANE Zendesk
CONTINUING TO INNOVATE
“We’re focusing on self-service and getting information to the user’s hands quickly and efficiently. One of the things we’ve 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 Chico’s
“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 don’t want to talk to us necessarily, they would rather serve themselves if they can. We’re 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 you’re treating your
customers and how you’re creating a unique experience for them.”
ARNAUD KRAAIJVANGERGenesys
“Don’t think of customer service as a cost center … We don’t think about it primarily as how can we minimize how much we spend
on service, it’s 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
“There’s the old saying that ‘the customer is always right,’ and that’s true. But I think there’s a corollary to that now, which is ‘the
customer experience is always true.’ … Listen to that truthful experience and adjust.”
MARYANN AMADO Adobe
