I am a Salesforce and Systems Administrator available for piecemeal and contract work. I enjoy working with finance and insurance companies, energy and utility companies, non-profits, manufacturers, and more. Find out more about me.
I have a passion for cost savings. I promote the TAO of systems administration: Transparency, Accountability, and Ownership.
L12 Solutions is my consultancy that helps businesses and organizations take advantage of Salesforce, CRMs, modern help desk software, CRMs, data and systems integrations, and transforming support and sales operations. Learn more about my services.
“…able to onboard the existing team and deploy radical changes in a very short period…” More testimonials…
Companies often assume Support is a fixed-cost that rises linearly with the growth of their customer base. This is a fallacy, but one that can persist operationally at companies for many years.
It’s doubly tragic because those in budgeting and operations are often unaware that this is not so. Instead, they regularly approve the hiring of new support personnel when faced with the fact that the customer base grew ten percent.
Here is a basic outline of an organization’s customer support goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics. Use this as a template to refine your message and to deliver the right results at the right time. Your finished product here should be 3-4 pages.*
GOAL Our Goal at _______ is to help grow our business, increase its revenue, and create and develop a well-seasoned customer base that evangelizes and promotes our brand as an excellent solution for our projects/services/products.
If you have read through some of my favorite sayings, one might stand out to you: “Our Daily Ticket Goal is Zero”.
This usually raises eyebrows. Often instead you’ll hear ‘goals’ of “less tickets”, or “let’s reduce tickets in half”.
Recall that goals should be S.M.A.R.T: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
When it comes to Help Desks, allow me to demonstrate that Zero is the only reasonable goal to put in place.
Below are some of my favorite sayings. These are all mine, but I have been inspired by many others. If they work for you and your department, feel free to use them.
Your Knowledge Base is your Best Worker. Think about it. It never sleeps, never takes a day off, doesn’t get injured, doesn’t complain, and is always in the right spirit and mood to help your customers. So, promote it and pay it a lot of money.
See end of this post to get a free PDF poster for your call center, contact center, or desktop wallpaper to help remind your customer service agents what phrases they should avoid before they get too deep in the weeds.
When writing to clients or customers, avoid these phrases to better enhance their experience and reduce pushback. Note that some of these also apply to knowledge bases. Check your KB frequently for soft and ambiguous wording.
Pushback Defined Pushback is when a customer replies to our answers with questions or comments which indicate they do not believe our solution will work for them, that they have little faith in our process, or that someone else did not give them the correct help.
There is a difference between pushback and mere clarification questions:
Pushback is avoidable. Pushback unnecessarily prolongs a solution. Pushback is often antagonistic, combative, debating, or challenging.
When replying to customers by email, chat, or speaking with them on the phone, always utilize these four principles in terms of your tone and style.
The tone and style of words convey knowledge, intent, understanding (empathy), and standing. All four work together to quickly help customers resolve concerns, while also curtailing unnecessary pushback from customers.
Knowledge: Do we appear knowledgeable about our products and services, as well as our processes?
LinkedIn and the Fortune 500 world are abounding in webinars. Watch them. Sign up for them. They are almost all free.
Who are they for?
The more I think about them, the more I feel that webinars aren’t really for the viewers. They are for the creators.
We already know that webinars are touted as a “powerful” way to capture leads. In meetings, the idea of doing webinars (or doing more of them) are often promoted as a way to create more leads.
A Customer Success consultant recently wrote that it’s a common belief that Customer Success Managers should be trusted advisors to customers.
However, CSMs should be trusted advisors for customers.
Else we conflate Customer Success with Account Management, or even Customer Service. This is not uncommon in organizations.
The first idea—being advisors to customers—is common in our industry today. Being an advisor to a customer is, in effect, helping them to understand us (and our products and services).
“Know your Customer” is intrinsically tied to “Know your Product/Service”.
When a team says they need to know their customers better (usually at the behest of using a new tool, reshuffling team structure, or outside consultants), the bigger problem could be a lack of understanding of the company’s own product.
To test this, I run staff through the wringer on product knowledge.
Example: how many staff have gone through every sign-up option (for SaaS) all the way to full onboarding?