Customer service ideas for the call center.

Several examples come to mind. First, as we are a traveling family, we frequent sites that allow us as consumers to post our thoughts and reviews on a specific hotel, restaurant or other venue. If you are not familiar with these, try Trip Advisor and Epinions to start off with. These sites allow customers such as myself to congregate around the “virtual hot tub” and post our good and bad experiences. This type of feedback now allows myself and others to see what kind of experiences people have had – are the rooms clean, were the rides broken down, was the staff friendly. I have noticed that some companies monitor these boards and when there is an issue, they step in and respond, trying to contact the customer directly as well to remedy the issue.

*Note – they can’t remove the post, but they can respond.

Recently, I have noted a similar surge in reviews with sites such as Travelocity and other similar booking engines. In fact, Travelocity starts off with this introduction….Travelocity’s Traveler Reviews gives you the space to spread the love, warn fellow travelers, and get the scoop from others.

Evidently, they are learning from their competition. While my work is providing internal support, my wife’s business is strictly online and as suchm she does frequent the discussion boards that are catering to her industry. This allows her to find out what trends, likes and dislikes are out there.

For myself, we drop by and visit our customers in their native habitat – their office. While we also hold formal meetings with them, I find that visiting them where they work is as close to the “hot tub” as we can get – and it works! We have been invited to join in potlucks they they are having, been welcomed into meetings and otherwise learned things that don’t come up via just a survey.

Great post, Becky and tahnks for stimulating the noggin!

This was a great post! Very inspiring and great to think about! To me, this would be a great business in itself – consulting firms on where to find their customers and how to interact with them. Thanks for the great post.

jv