In a competitive environment, things like poor response should be eliminated on their own. But those of us who’ve been on hold with a company for 30 minutes or more know that’s not always the case.

What Brazil regulated is interesting — maximum time allowed to wait on the phone, mandatory response times, timely handling cancellations, etc. Since this happened a couple years ago, it would be interesting to see the business and economic affects today.

Nope, you didn’t miss the mark with your answer. I think my question may have been poorly stated though. I wasn’t referring to an automated system that notifies/communicates with your customers, although I think that can be part of a great system in high volume situations.

Just wondering what type of system you’re using to track all those deliverables…sticky notes, spreadsheets, some web app? A newsletter and/or email is part of that system too.

Maybe you can expand on actionable ways to routinely communicate with your customers in a future blog post?

For ongoing projects I merely track my deliverable and remain mindful of expectations I’ve set for status reports and updates. I’ve built routine communication as a discipline in my work habits. Mostly, I track deliverables and routinely communicate on their status.

For customers, I email and call them on a schedule of sort.

The best advice I can give is create habits and routines of communicating periodically with your customer-base — newsletters and email are easiest. For prospects and customers whose work is underway, remind yourself of work and dates you’ve committed to and notify people immediately when you discover a date promised is too aggressive.

Let me know if I “missed the mark” in my answer.

Keeping our customers in the loop (and giving them multiple ways to do so) has always improved customer satisfaction for us.

I’d love to hear some advice on systems you use to enforce and automate this concept.

The principle of “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” could well apply. Talk to any web developer and it would not be long before they start complaining that Google sets the specifications for SEO to suit itself (then keeps them secret) and makes everyone else’s job that much harder

Their motto “don’t be evil” for me lacks a definition of what Google considers to be “evil” because right now we’re all just guessing

Hey, thanks for taking on the significant task of tracking customer service jobs. That is going to be very interesting to follow! I’m definitely going to stay glued to see if the statistics bear out Ayers’ prediction.

+ we would extend the warranty of the product by one month or weeks. this should be enough to be remarkable.(must not be apply to all customer equally)

+ for restaurant, the “tipping back” after the customer left their table might be ” a small bag of the house coolie, cake or small special desert by the chief packed it away conveniently for the customer”
what do you think about it, and share me your “tipping back” (at least three)..thank you so much.
i’m a college student and i am very very interesting about business.
thank for all your “tips”

I placed an online order from Abecrombie online. The package worth about 100 bucks got lost by the carrier and it was never delivered. I contacted Abercrombie and was impressed by their bad service. All of their representatives claimed they are not going to help since I had a previous shipping issue one year ago. They were trying to blame me on their fault. They claimed it was their company policy. While being asked why this policy was not posted on the website, they said’We dont have to tell the customers’ Then they disconnected me. All of them ended with the same sentence: ‘As we told you before, we are not going to do anything further.I will not answer you any questions from now.’

This is the worest customer service I have ever seen. I am not buying this brand any more.

It is wonderful – and unfortunately, rare – to hear such great customer care stories.

An interesting survey by Customer Care Measurement & Consulting found that 62 percent of respondents to the survey just wanted to vent and tell their side of the story to a customer service representative.

The largest group – 82% – wanted (no surprise) their product repaired or a service problem fixed. 59% wanted an apology.

Imagine if every customer that walked in the door had a sign abound their neck saying “Make me feel important”.

Same effect.