• In a Tough Economy, Go to Battle for Your Customers by J. Mark Carr, Karl Gustafson
  Decision-makers who are worried over the stability of their company's finances should remember one simple truth: The source of your business's cash flow is your customer base. What all of this boils down to is the need to make smart, informed ...
  More articles on Segmentation
• How Your Business Can Benefit From Using Twitter: Four Proven Strategies by Mack Collier
  Business are flocking to Twitter, but many still aren't sure how to leverage the tool to grow their business. Here's how Comcast, Dell, The Home Depot and others are using Twitter to reach their customers and nurture their businesses, and ...
  More articles on Twitter
• Soothing the Savaged Consumer Soul: 11 Ways to Show Love When Times Are Tough by Jeanne Bliss
  If you are in the business of serving customers, right now is the time to seek out the intangible opportunities to soothe the savaged consumer soul. Here are 11 ideas that will bring you dividends by soothing the frayed nerves ...
  More articles on Feedback
• Three Uncustomary Customer Service Mindsets That Deliver by Gary Levitt, Rich Baker
  You've wolfed down lunch in record time and have seven minutes before your next meeting—time enough to Google "customer service tips," which brings up terabytes of platitudes on friendliness, knowledge, going the extra mile, blah, blah, blah. You know these cookie-cutter ...
  More articles on Marketing Tips
• Four Lessons for Fostering Employee Brand Ambassadors by Elaine Fogel
  Marketers spend gazillions on branding. But what is often missing is a focus on the people who carry the brand around every day: The front line folks who answer phones, sales reps who follow leads, the custodians.... Every word they ...
  More articles on Customer Service
• The State of Customer Focus Around the World: 2007 in Review by Jeanne Bliss
  The Net Promoter concept and idea has taken hold the world over. The simplicity of one "ultimate" question is compelling. And it gives CEOs something to easily grasp and point to regarding a customer target. Those who have started to ...
  More articles on Net Promoter
• MarketingProfs 'Classic Truths': How Do I Love Thee? Building a B2B Relationship to Last a Lifetime by Allen Weiss
  With the emphasis recently on customer relationship management (CRM), it seems there's a customer love-fest in the making. It's an orgy, almost: Every company wants a close relationship with me, and they want one with you, too. They want close ...
  More articles on Customer Service
• Repackage, Rebrand & Relaunch? Or Do We Need to Dig Deeper? by Ted Mininni
  Leading consumer-products companies are looking to rebrand, repackage and relaunch... often too frequently. Sometimes, the effort is merely putting a bandage on a deeper sore. It's far less painful to assess lagging sales in a superficial manner than it is ...
  More articles on Customer Service
• Seven Actions to Regain Customer Trust When Things Go Wrong by Jeanne Bliss
  At some point, your business will suffer a failure that disappoints customers. The measure of a company is taken at such moments. Customers see your true colors at these times more than at any other. How you explain, react, remove the ...
  More articles on Marketing Tips
• How to Deal With Crisis—and Defend the Brand by David Lemley
  How companies deal with negative experiences is just as important as creating positive experiences. In light of the recent pet-food poisoning cases, several companies have taken the lead in reassuring pet owners that they are being proactive in responding to concerns. ...
  More articles on Writing
• How to Make Customers a True Priority: Align With Your Company Power Core by Jeanne Bliss
  Customers are having a harder time than ever getting service from the companies they do business with, regardless of how much they spend, how long they've been a customer, or how profitable they are for the company. There is a ...
  More articles on Word of Mouth
• Three Ways to Keep Your Customers Happy When You Screw Up by Elaine Fogel
  Glitches happen and setbacks occur when we deal with customers -- they're as inevitable as death and taxes. The key to retaining these customers when an error occurs is handling them right from the start. Whether your company or organization ...
  More articles on Marketing Inspiration
• A Mickey Mouse Approach to Customer Service by Paige Booth
  What does Mickey Mouse have to do with higher education? Several administrators from St. Edward's University found themselves pondering that unusual question several years ago as they filed into a classroom at the Disney Institute. They came to Orlando, with a ...
  More articles on Marketing Inspiration
• Brand Loyalty—How to Build It, How to Keep It by Ted Mininni
  What does it really take to cement brand loyalty? In addition to time, patience, commitment, and sound brand management, what else can marketing executives do to build and maintain brand loyalty? Especially in an age when the consumer has so ...
  More articles on Customer Service
• Three Keys to Delivering World-Class Service by Jay Lipe
  Milton Hershey once said that quality was the best kind of advertising in the world. For your company to be successful, the service provided must be of the highest quality possible. Focus on delivering world-class service first, then (and only ...
  More articles on Print Collateral
• Five Simple Ways to Improve Your Telephone Customer Service by Elaine Fogel
  It isn't the most high-tech tool in the office, and it may not have fancy bells and whistles, but for many companies and organizations the telephone is often the first line of customer service communication. And many are using it ...
  More articles on Testing
• Face the Customers or Face the Music by Linda Popky
  Most companies have a policy that puts the customer first, but too often that policy isn't implemented by the people on the front lines. Why is that?
  More articles on Word of Mouth
• Innovative Ways to Attract Female Consumers by Gerry Myers
  If your company isn't looking at the latest trends in marketing to women, focusing a significant amount of your resources on this market, and generating innovative marketing ideas, you are missing out on a substantial amount of revenue. Women have ...
  More articles on Women
• How Multichannel Marketing Is a Lot Like the County Fair by Kevin Hillstrom
  Today's multichannel catalog/online environment is a lot like the summer county fair. In fact, there are some surprisingly apt comparisons.
  More articles on Online Marketing
• Avoiding Customer Efforts That Crash and Burn: Straight Talk From 'Chief Customer Officer' by Michael Perla
  Why do customer efforts crash and burn? Are you wrestling with customer leadership? What are you doing to match the commitment to the customer to the actions of the organization? And, is the Chief Customer Officer the solution? Such questions ...
  More articles on Referrals

See all 78 marketing articles related to Customer Service

• So, the Recession Is a Good Thing?
  While acknowledging the damage this recession has done to the personal and professional lives of so many people, Freddie Laker also argues that our dark economic cloud has brought with ...
  More articles on Recession
• Lessons Learned From a Backpack
  "Let's imagine it's this afternoon, and I suddenly have cause to fly to West Virginia," writes Peter Hartlaub in a post at The Poop blog. "Airline X has a non-stop ...
  More articles on Marketing Inspiration
• Oh, No, Not Her Again!
  "Eighty-seven-year-old Gladys has a reputation among her fellow retirement community members," write Marilyn Shuttle and Lori Jo Vest in the first chapter of Who's Your Gladys? "She's known as a ...
  More articles on Word of Mouth
• Spooky, Yes, but It Works
  In a recent post at ClearAction's Customer Experience Optimization blog, Lynn Hunsaker cites a troubling stat from Accenture's Delivering on the Promise study. Though 75% of surveyed executives viewed their ...
  More articles on Surveys
• Industry Reputations Take a Beating
  The reputations of several industries—car manufacturers and banks prominent among them—plummeted in the last year.
  More articles on Surveys
• You Broke It, You Fix It
  "While Dave Carroll was flying from Nova Scotia to Nebraska he had his Taylor guitar ruined," says the Huffington Post. "After a protracted attempt to get United to pay for ...
  More articles on YouTube
• Tweet Like You Mean It
  Lots of companies are scrambling to see how they can use Twitter to promote their products and services. But a few good tweets can also provide great customer service. Glenn ...
  More articles on Twitter
• A-Poaching We Will Go
  Every once in a while you'll have one of those terrific retail experiences when an employee wows you with exceptional customer service. If you're impressed enough to wish she worked ...
  More articles on Marketing Inspiration
• Get Lost
  June is a hectic month for bike shops, says Seth Godin in a post at his blog. "If you bring your bike in for a tune up, it will cost ...
  More articles on Small Business
• Barry Schwartz: Practical Wisdom as a Business Tool
  At the MarketingProfs B2B Forum earlier this month, keynote Barry Schwartz, a psychologist and author, explained the concept of Practical Wisdom: the idea that individuals can (and should) hone their ...
  More articles on YouTube
• No, It's Our Fault. Really.
  It's a bit of a craze these days: "Oops!" email subject lines that purport to apologize for a mistake, when they're really nothing more than tricks to get you to ...
  More articles on Email Subject Lines
• Marketing Addictionary: 'Mobsmacked'
  Mobsmacked: (adjective) That stunned feeling you get when your marketing efforts worked TOO well, and you can't keep up with customer demand.
  More articles on Writing
• The Inside Scoop
  There are lots of good frozen-yogurt shops in Simon Glickman's Pasadena, California, neighborhood. But one—21 Choices—seems to enjoy bigger crowds than the rest, and he explains in his Editorial Emergency ...
  More articles on Small Business
• Now That's Good Feedback
  You're having a casual conversation with someone from your customer-service department when he makes an offhand statement: "Oh, you should hear how much customers love [fill in employee name/company product]." ...
  More articles on Small Business
• Y U Trippin'?
  There's no question that the advent of online communication has lowered our expectations for proper grammar and spelling—in the casual environments of instant messages, email and blogs, we forgive the ...
  More articles on Writing
• Show Me Your Sense of Urgency
  In a post at her Conversation Agent blog, Valeria Maltoni recounts how a Skype call to her family in Italy went horribly wrong on Christmas day. "My account is set ...
  More articles on Twitter
• I Resolve to Treat You Right
  Cost-effective, and just plain effective, email communications are quite possibly the one sure thing to cling to in the current downturn. So, are you treating them—and your subscribers—right? In a ...
  More articles on Email Marketing
• Returns and Exchanges? Take It Easy.
  In a post at GrokDotCom, Jeff Sexton puts the winter-holiday quandary in blunt terms: "[Y]ou won't keep profit margins healthy unless you actively take business away from someone—either from direct ...
  More articles on Marketing Inspiration
• Surprise: You've Been Upgraded!
  Let's say you've been working around the clock on an improvement for your product, service or online interface. Because you know all about your upgrade, why it's needed and how ...
  More articles on Small Business
• A Bad Trip
  In a post at Emergence Marketing, Francois Gossieaux tells the story of making reservations with Air France for a trip to Belgium, where his father—who had been diagnosed with a ...
  More articles on Small Business

See all 27 marketing Daily Posts related to Customer Service

Customer Service case studies, deconstructing real life examples and illustrating lessons learned

• How Twitter Helped Save Ford From a PR Disasterby Ford Motor Company
  CASE STUDY: When US Airways flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River, Twitter users broke the news, 15 minutes ahead of mainstream media. The same channel and its immediacy also helped Ford Motor Company's head of social media quell a different kind of disaster--of the PR variety.
  More case studies on Twitter
• How MyFax Upped Customer Engagement, Achieved a 79% NetPromoter Scoreby MyFax
  Internt fax service provider MyFax wanted to tap into the power of word-of-mouth referrals by improving the customer experience and maintaining highly personalized customer interactions. But as an online company, it faced the issue of how to individually engage customers to ensure long-term relationships. Here's what it did.
  More case studies on Word of Mouth
• How a Rental Car Firm Upped New York Revenue 24%, Improved Customer Serviceby Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group
  In late 2006, Dollar's business was slowing at New York's LaGuardia airport. With some outside help, the local marketing manager developed an email survey, then used the answers to pinpoint Dollar's weaknesses. The resulting efficiencies helped Dollar grow its parking-related business by 24%.
  More case studies on Surveys
• How a Manufacturer's Sales Team Found the Secret to Efficiently Service a Low-Tech Customer Baseby Fabcon
  The manufacturing sector is more traditional than most. Many of its customers aren't high tech—some don't even have Internet access. Fabcon, a Minnesota builder of precast wall panels, struggled with marrying its desire for high-tech operational efficiency and its need to service customers in the method that they preferred.
  More case studies on Customer Service
• How an ISP Used Online Chat to Lower Customer Service Costs and Achieve an 80% Customer Satisfaction Rateby Earthlink, Inc.
  Earthlink, one of the country's smaller Internet service providers, serves just over 5 million customers. To differentiate itself, it has decided to provide superior customer service. An early adopter of chat technology, it has sought to actively offer efficient online customer service via chat—both shifting customer support away from the less-efficient phone channel and increasing customer satisfaction while dramatically reducing expenses.
  More case studies on Social Media
• How a Web Services Firm Used 'Fanatical' Customer Care to Increase Sales 60% Year Over Yearby Rackspace
  With Web hosting fast becoming a commodity, Web hosting firm Rackspace realized it needed to stand out from the pack. Its founders decided they would stake a claim to "fanatical" commitment to customer service. Rackspace wove the concept into its very business structure, even trademarking the term "Fanatical Support." And it worked: Revenues grew more than 60% from 2005 to 2006, and the number of employees more than doubled.
  More case studies on Sales
• How a Fast Food Franchise Helped Consumers Speed Through the Drive-Thru—and Drove up Salesby Miami Management
  Fast food consumers are rarely loyal—if they see a shorter line across the street, that's usually where they'll go. Accordingly, Miami Management—which owns 16 Wendy's franchises in Kentucky—implemented new technology that changes the drive-thru process by adding multiple lanes and a remote order center. The long-term payoff: quicker, more accurate service for customers and increased sales for the restaurants. First, however, franchise owners had to encourage customers to try the new system.
  More case studies on Sales

See all Case Studies in our library

Customer Service marketing downloads for the busy professional

• Benchmark Survey: Marketing to Hispanics
  Link directly to the raw (aggregate) data in this 2006 survey of the ways companies are targeting their marketing efforts, and adjusting their business processes, for the lucrative Spanish-speaking segment. With access to the raw data, you can view the results, and even filter them to see how a subset of companies in your country or industry answered. In this way, you can interpret the data in the most meaningful way for your business.
  More tools on Website Design

See all Tools and Downloads in our library