Planning Your Next Customer Service Move

Customer Service call centers are a dizzying array of old and new technologies. How should you plan to update your legacy infrastructure to keep up with customer demands? 

How can you orchestrate these systems to improve your customers’ experience? What role can SMART Service Desk play in this process?

Servicing your customer is a part of every purchase and interaction with internal and external business contacts. It can last a few seconds up to hours. So if we all do it and experience it everyday in almost everything we do, why isn’t great customer service the norm?

We all have stories about when we were treated exceptionally well or extremely poorly. We tend to share these extraordinary stories with others. We all know that word of mouth marketing can be the absolute best advantage, or the worst drawback for a company.

Warren Buffett may have said it best: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and just five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do customer service in a whole different way.”

The Basic Rule About Customer Service

Honesty is the Best Policy. Integrity – Be honest and own up to your mistakes. Communicate what you plan to do to change or prevent the same mistake from happening again. Don’t be fooled into believing that a regular ‘mea culpa’ will get you off the hook. At some point the plan to fix the problem must take effect!

Everyone in your company should really love your customers. Without them, you have no company. 

This doesn’t mean you won’t have difficult customers who will push the limits and try everyone’s patience. But if you don’t have a company philosophy to respect and appreciate your customers, the opposite tone will infect customer interactions from all departments. 

All departments, customer facing or not, should care about customer satisfaction as though their job depended on it. Since, in fact, it does.

Is your company looking for customer service solutions to help you deal with customer interaction? 

SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is your answer. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk
600 West Ray Road
Suite D-3
Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
info@smartservicedesk.com
http://smartservicedesk.com

SMART Service Desk: Talks Customer Relationship Management

SMART Customer relationship management (CRM) software, offered both on premise and cloud-based CRM, help businesses reduce costs and increase profitability by organizing and automating business processes to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty in the sales, marketing, and customer service fields.

With SMART CRM solutions we deliver ROI through automation in customer service, and sales force automation. We also offer mobile apps that allow you to manage your customer relationships on your mobile devices, and software integration adaptors that integrate data and reporting from social media directly into your CRM application.

Business Challenges

The challenge of effective IT Service management is to analyze to causes of incidents and permanently remove them by providing solution for recurring incidents. Lack of effective problem management techniques will cause high costs and low motivation for both users & Support staff, since similar incidents have to be resolved repeatedly without anyone able to provide permanent solution.

How SMART Problem Management Can Help Your Business

SMART Service Desk Problem Management extends Incident Management by providing workarounds and temporary fixes, until it has found the root cause of Incidents. Problem Management depends on reviewing all the accurate information of Incidents to enable reactive and pro-active analysis of the underlying root cause. SMART Problem Management allows IT Staff to become pro-active & helps them to get solely out of the fire-fighting mode, by identifying Problems & Known Errors before the Incidents occur.
SMART Service Desk Problem Management enables

Identify, register and classify the problem.
Perform investigation & diagnosis.
Provide workaround.
Identify known errors.
Resolve and close the problem

Is your company looking for customer service solutions to help you deal with customer interaction? SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is your answer. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk
600 West Ray Road
Suite D-3
Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
info@smartservicedesk.com
http://smartservicedesk.com

SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software

What is IT Service Management Software? Software that is a process-based and intended to align the delivery of information technology (IT) services with needs of the business, with emphasis on benefits to customers.

IT Service Management involves a paradigm shift from managing IT as stacks of individual hardware and software components to managing the delivery of support and customer retention services that help an organization achieve its marketing or information goals. The IT department in a large organization should create service level agreements so that services can be measured, justified and perhaps compared with those of third-party providers.

IT Service Management Software brings the benefits of cost savings, alignment with business, and operational efficiency and these benefits are encouraging more businesses to embrace ITIL service management practices. SMART Service Desk delivers IT service management (ITSM), business and workforce enablement with the goal of customer service excellence.

Increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. Our SMART Service Desk solutions can be adapted very quickly, easily and economically to meet your exact business needs. Achieve faster implementation, successful change management, and lower total cost of ownership with our 100% configurable, intuitive and affordable solutions.

SMART Service Desk - IT Service Management Suite is a flexible and robust solution that can be deployed via Purchased On-Premise, Subscription On-Premise and Cloud Subscription, with the portability to switch between different solutions. It is simple, yet comprehensive; highly configurable ITSM Suite developed in alignment with the ITIL best practice framework to manage the entire service life-cycle across. We offer an integrated and modular solution that is designed to support multiple languages.

It should come as no surprise that nearly 90% of today's customers will stop doing business with any company based solely on a single bad customer experience. News of these negative experiences will spread rapidly through social media.

The challenge of effective IT Service management is to analyze the causes of incidents and permanently remove them by providing solutions for recurring incidents. Lack of effective problem management techniques can cause high costs and low motivation for both users and support staff, since similar incidents have to be resolved repeatedly without anyone able to provide permanent solution.

In order to help you and your business we need to open a dialog we can best understand how SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software can be your businesses’ solution. We look forward to meeting your business needs and providing cost effective solutions.

SMART Service Desk
600 West Ray Road
Suite D-3
Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
info@smartservicedesk.com
http://smartservicedesk.com

SMART Service Desk: When Do You Put Employees First?

Richard Branson has built Virgin into a global powerhouse by focusing on two simple words. And those two very key words are… customer service.

From Virgin Atlantic to Virgin Mobile, each new Virgin venture has shared the brand's unrivaled commitment to their customers. In fact, the famed entrepreneur refused to place the Virgin brand on any company he acquired, until it had been brought up to the proper caliber of customer service.

Surprisingly, Branson recently revealed that Virgin does not put the customer first. In fact, Virgin employees are the company's top priority. That may sound counter to decades-old business wisdom, but it has worked so well for Virgin that Branson says he's surprised more companies haven't adopted an employee-centric management strategy.

To make sure his employees are well taken care of, the founder even goes so far as to collect feedback by walking around the cabin and talking directly to the staff during his Virgin flights. As Branson sees it, the formula is very simple: Happy employees equal happy customers. Similarly, an unhappy employee can ruin the brand experience for not just one, but numerous of the brands customers.

"If the person who works at your company is not appreciated, they are not going to do things with a smile," Branson says. By not treating employees well, companies risk losing customers over bad service. To this end, Branson says he has made sure that Virgin prioritizes employees first, customers second, and shareholders third.

"Effectively, in the end shareholders do well, the customers do better, and your staff remains happy," Branson says.

Becoming an employee-centric company isn’t easy. You have to believe that motivated staff make a difference, and you have to invest in them. You must change your entire approach to recruiting, training, compensation, motivation, strategy and culture. But the results can be worth it.

When your employees are well led, properly compensated and challenged to do their best, they’ll look after your customers – and then shareholder value will look after itself.

Is your company looking for customer service solutions to help you deal with customer interaction? SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is your answer. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk

600 West Ray Road

Suite D-3

Chandler Arizona 85225

602-235-0975

info@smartservicedesk.com

http://smartservicedesk.com

SMART Service Desk: Says Customers Must Come First

Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. 
~ Damon Richards

Is your company a monopoly? There are a few examples where an industry or product is so hard to get that good service from that business is not all that important.  Customers want it of course, but it’s best for the business to be efficient in getting the product sold and delivered so they can keep their costs down.  Utility companies have that sort of business environment, as do your typical television cable company.  But for the vast number of businesses out there are not selling natural gas or electricity, your customers’ needs to have the best possible experience dealing with your company.

Every organization’s customer experience could benefit from the type of analysis that just a few companies have clearly done on their organization. It starts with listening. The best advice I ever got was that I have been given is to remember that you have two ears and one mouth and you should use them in that ratio!

First, take exceptional care of your customers . . . via superior service and superior quality. Second, constantly innovate. That's it. 

What makes a Passion for Excellence work? Just that, apply your passion for your product or service in everything you do and every interaction with every customer. Most businessmen know these precepts, but remarkably few put them into practice.

Customer relations goes far beyond the sales force. It must include the accounting department, purchasing department, manufacturing, engineering, etc. There is no substitute for top executives listening to customers.

Laughter boosts social skills. Many scientist believe laughter allows humans to connect, bond and communicate with one another. Laughter is a universal means of communication. It’s a great way to connect with many cultures and is the reason “…when you laugh, the world laughs with you, but when you weep, you weep all by yourself.”

What are you doing to put your customers first?

Is your company looking for customer service solutions to help you deal with customer interaction? SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is your answer. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk
600 West Ray Road
Suite D-3
Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
info@smartservicedesk.com
http://smartservicedesk.com

Learn To Review Your Brand’s Customer Service

Your brand prides itself on your product and your customer service, right? But, perhaps more important is how your customers perceive your product and your customer service. What steps does your company take to insure the perception and the reality are in sync with each other?

Have you done a survey to see if your customer have a different story to tell you? How often does your business review and retrain your sales and customer service staff?

When most business publications talk about customer service skills, things like "being a people person" tend to take the spotlight. It's not that this trait is outright wrong, but it's so vague and generic that it is hardly a help to those looking to get involved in support positions within a company, and certainly doesn't help out entrepreneurs/founders who are looking for the right set of skills when hiring the all-important folks who will be taking care of their customers.

Make sure you're getting to the situation at hand quickly; customers don't need your business history or to hear about how your day is going. More importantly, you need to be cautious about how some of your communication habits translate to customers, and it's best to err on the side of caution whenever you find yourself questioning a situation.

The best customer relations employees in your company will work on having a deep knowledge of how your product works. It's not that every single team member should be able to build your product from scratch, but rather they should know the ins and outs of how your product works, just like a customer who uses it everyday would.

Learn to practice patience. Not only is patience important to customers, who often reach out to support when they are confused and frustrated, but it's also important to the business at large: we've shown you before that great service beats fast service every single time. Yet patience shouldn't be used as an excuse for slothful service either!

Despite the many research-backed rants on why you should spend more time with customers, the bottom line is that there is a limit, and you need to be concerned with getting customers what they want in an efficient manner. The trick here is that this should also be applied when realizing when you simply cannot help a customer. If you don't know the solution to a problem, the best kind of support member will get a customer over to someone who does.

Is your company looking for customer service solutions to help you deal with customer interaction? SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is your answer. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk
600 West Ray Road
Suite D-3
Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
info@smartservicedesk.com
http://smartservicedesk.com

SMART Service Desk Knows Customer Service

SMART Service Desk Knows you want happy, satisfied customers that will return to your business and refer their friends. You know you need to provide good customer service to achieve that. But do you know what it really takes to provide exceptional customer service?

The statistic that nearly 50% of new businesses fail within their first year is fairly well known. Scary, yes, but well known. And yet this gloomy statistic may encourage those who make it to day 366 to breathe a sigh of relief. But wait… It's kind of like a late-night infomercial; once you make it past the first round, then things really start to get interesting, because an alarming 95% of businesses fail within their first five years.

Yet 95% of businesses failing within their first five years compels us -- if nothing else -- to reevaluate our assumptions; because obviously, there's a flaw somewhere, and it starts here with the concept of soft skills.

Volumes of research and commentary has gone into this problem; and issues like lack of experience, poor location, and the rather ironic unexpected growth are just three of many reasons that give us some understanding here.

Yet the foundation of so many of these causes, if not directly beneath them then a few layers deeper, is a concept that businesses seem to overlook... until it's too late, and they become a failure statistic for some business guru to analyze. That concept is world class customer service.

SMART Service Desk knows you need to start to develop a service strategy by completing an assessment of your company’s service status and needs. You can get to know your customer by understanding what is important to their different customer segments and what their level of expectation is. Other organizations first evaluate their own performance. They may discover glaring shortcomings in their efforts to fulfill customer expectations.

Without a strategy it’s difficult to develop a concept of service that rallies employees … or arrests conflicts between corporate strategy and actual customer service … or to come up with ways to measure service performance and perceived quality.

Is your company looking for customer service solutions to help you deal with customer interaction? SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is your answer. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk
600 West Ray Road
Suite D-3
Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
info@smartservicedesk.com
http://smartservicedesk.com