telephone skills

Language Engineering: Finding the right words to use with customers

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Language underlies almost all other components of the customer experience.  Yet, your company has probably given more thought to the language it uses in marketing campaigns than to the words employees use when having conversations face-to-face with customers. That’s a mistake, because customers don’t generally get their make-or-break impressions of your company from high-minded branding […]

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Self-Service: From Sketchy Backwater to the Mainstream of Customer Service–Or Not?

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 From keynote speaker – customer service speaker  Micah Solomon Richard Carlile, a British publisher, bookseller, and campaigner for press and voting rights, spent 1819 until 1823 in prison for distributing the banned works of radicals and reformists and exposés of officially sanctioned massacres. As soon as he was sprung from prison, Carlile tried to skirt

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New Customer Service toolkit podcast with Micah Solomon

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I think you’ll enjoy this 8 minute customer service radio and podcast interview Greg Corombus did with keynote speaker and bestselling customer service author Micah Solomon (yup, that’s me)  for his Business Owner’s Toolkit. My subject: “The Power of Exceptional Service.”  In the 8 minutes,  we cover whether service has recently gotten better, worse, or

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Consciously creating your corporate culture: Just a frill?

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              Consciously striving to create a positive corporate culture may sound like a fluffy, expensive frill.  But it brings hard-nosed, impossible-to-knock-off results.  Ask Southwest Airlines:  A host of low-cost, short-haul competitors  (Remember United’s “Ted” brand? What, you don’t?)  Those copycats are gone now: Southwest’s culture–a culture that’s impossible for

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Labor Day, customer service, and serving your employees

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Labor Day is a good time to remember: you’ll never achieve great customer service without great employees – treated in the manner they deserve. There’s no shortcut here, no way to “game” this.  The overlap between the “greatest companies to work for” and the companies with the highest-rated customer service is enormous.  Container Store, Costco,

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