The nominations have been tallied and now you need to vote for the top companies and agent. To vote go to
http://www.supportawards.org/Voting
The top companies will receive an award and the top agent with receive a Nintendo Wii.
Thank you to our Sponsors, SupportAwards wouldn’t be possible without you:
MindTouch: http://www.mindtouch.com
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The 2010 R.E.C.S.S. Awards are now open for nominations. You can nominate companies for outstanding support/service by going to the Nomination page. Help spread the word too to improve the companies’ chance of making it to the final voting round.
With August 1st approaching fast, I’m excited to give a little sneak peak of the changes coming up for the R.E.C.S.S. awards.
First, there are expanded categories now as follows:
I’ve also broken out the agent for each industry and instead have one nomination for an agent across all industries. The winning agent will win a New Nintendo Wii system.
Voting will be more transparent this year too so that voters can see the progress of their votes. There is more excitement to come and I’m anticipating a great year for recognizing outstanding support and service. Make sure you spread the word and subscribe to our twitter feed @supportawards or sign up for our email notification on the homepage.
Nominations will open for the R.E.C.S.S. (Recognition for Excellence in Customer Support and Service) Awards on August 1st . Leading up to this make sure you keep track of all of the outstanding companies and agents that you encounter so they can be recognized. Follow this blog or our Twitter account @supportawards to be updated on the awards.
When was the last time you got a compliment from a customer about outstanding support/service? Hopefully it wasn’t that long ago. When they gave you that feedback what did you say? Most likely if you work in a large call center it was something like: “Thank you, (insert company) likes to ensure that our customers are happy”. But did you ask the customer to tell their friends about the service? How about blog or tweet about it? Referrals are a critical part to any business on the sales side, but this is also true on the Customer support/service side. Good support/service needs to be recognized and spread.
The companies that have been marked as outstanding customer support and service definitely deserve it. They have dedication and a desire to ensure satisfaction within the customers. Although without an outstanding product great customer support and service can only go so far.
That is why it is critical for Customer service/support agents to be actively engaged in the development, testing, troubleshooting, and roadmap of the product. The customer support/service team engages with customers and prospects. This interaction allows them to find issues with the product easily and routinely. Make sure that your agents have a process in place for capturing this information and ensure it is put to use.
Customer service is all about the people on 2 fronts. The company needs to ensure that they deliver excellent service to their customers. They also need to ensure that the representatives that they hire actually care. It is really easy to become burnt out when working in Customer Service/Support but the true keepers are the ones that really want to help people and aren’t just there to collect a paycheck or read a script. Those employees may get worn out from time to time, but their internal drive to help will always give them a good disposition.
While dealing with some customer service frustrations with an unnamed ISP, I realized the benefit of having a dedicated customer service rep. While the technology is in place for other customer service reps to look up past history along with seeing notes from other reps, nothing will ever beat the experience of dealing with the same person. A dedicated rep is more intimately aware of your issues, past and present, along with the mood of the customer related to those issues. When an angry customer encounters multiple customer service reps for the same issue, then that tends to aggravate the situation more.
This observation assumes that the dedicated rep in question provides excellent support and the customer enjoys engaging with them.
Nothing is worse then needing help and receiving an automated response. Whether the response was actually automatically sent by a system or selected by an agent, it lacks a human touch. When I engage with people on the customer support side I write out all responses in a professional, but very conversational way. If you engage with your customers like you would in person, then you will build relationships along with loyalty. A lot of larger support departments/call centers can argue the efficiency and effectiveness of canned responses through metrics and cost analysis, but in the end a canned response is leaving a certain impression on your customers that while lasting isn’t favorable.
Today the R.E.C.S.S. Award blog was launched. This blog will be dedicated to announcements related to the R.E.C.S.S. (Recognition for Excellence in Customer Support and Service) annual awards along with recognizing outstanding customer support and service throughout the year. We’ll also have periodic posts about best practices for Support and Service departments along with posts that will encourage readers to comment. Please stay tuned for more posts.
R.E.C.S.S. Feed