Customer Service Skills Knowledge Base - Main Page - General Customer Service And Customer Experience Questions

The Customer Service Skills Knowledge base is a collection of questions and answers aimed at helping companies or individual employees deal more effectively with customers.

You'll find hints, tips, and customer service related advice categorized by topic. To navigate simply use the customer service navigation box to the left.

One this page, you'll find customer service of general interest covered.

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What is system thinking and what does it have to do with customer service?

One reason it seems companies are unable to improve customer service is that they look only at the pieces, and not the whole. Here's a solution: systems thinking.

Do customers have higher customer service expectations now as compared to twenty years ago?

The short answer is yes. However, after reading this, make sure you read the next item on The Customer Expectation Paradox!

What is "The Customer Expectation Paradox?"

In customer service there's a tendency to think about customers and how to best please them in overly simplistic terms. Here's a thought provoker to help you think more deeply about customers and how they behave.

Has technology improved the customer experience in most companies?

This might be one of those overly simplistic questions that doesn't have a real answer, but it's interesting that over the last years, when technology has exploded as a tool to communicate with customers, customers have been saying, in surveys, that overall customer service is worse. I many ways, technology has made the process of customer-company interactions colder, and less efficient.

Is It Possible To Measure or Assess Excellent Customer Service?

Unfortunately, the more accurate you want your measurements to be, and the more useful, the more expensive it is to collect and interpret data. That's why so much of the data collected by customer service "research companies" is almost useless. The collect information they can get at cheaply, rather than information that is costly, but informative.

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What Metrics Are Used to Measure the Quality of Customer Service?

What Common Mistakes Are Made When Choosing Customer Service Metrics?

Actually the most common mistake is choosing metrics that are absolutely useless in terms of guiding business strategy and actions, while not realizing the conclusions drawn from these wrong metrics can cost millions of dollars.

Who Coined the Phrase "The Customer Is Always Right"?

Hint: It's too late to find him and beat him up.