March 2016: Top 5 Customer Service and Communication Insights

Here are some great lessons and takeaways I came across in March 2016.

Every week, I pour through communication, customer service experience and leadership content to find articles that I find valuable and want to pass on to you, either through Twitter, Facebook or my email journal. There’s a lot of great material out there, but there’s also a lot of noise to sift through to get to the good stuff. So, I’d like to start collecting a month end “Top 5” of the posts I’ve come across that really resonated with me and I hope you find helpful.

1. by Judy Mottl for Retail Customer Experience – getting customers is one thing, keeping them is another. It’s vital to have a strategy in place to build and retain the relationships that will keep your company thriving, even in tough economic times.
2. The 5 Biggest Mistakes in Customer Experience – and How to Fix Them by Anita Bruzzese for The Fast Track Blog – doing any one of these five mistakes will communicate to others (employees or customers) that your mission is results-focused and not people-focused. There needs to be a balance to be successful.
3. Why Communication In Companies Is So Poor (And How To Get It Right) by Conor Neill, a senior lecturer at IESE Business School, for Forbes – there always seems to be a much larger focus on external communication rather than internal engagement. Both are equally important, and I’d argue that any great brand communication starts with an engaged and well connected workforce.
4. How a Decade of Twitter Schooled Brands in Immediate Customer Service by Daniel Farey-Jones for Marketing Magazine – the “micro blogging” platform has just celebrated its 10th birthday and, more so than its social media siblings, Twitter has really been embraced by customers as a tool to engage with companies. We wish we could say the same for a lot of organizations in engaging with customers.
5. 10 Reasons Organizations Fail To Deliver Great Customer Service by Shep Hyken for Forbes – As Shep states, surveys and studies are showing companies are pouring more funding than ever before into the customer service experience but the results don’t seem to match. Here are the ways businesses are failing on that investment.

Thanks to Shep, Daniel, Conor, Anita and Judy for putting their thoughts and insights out there. If you’ve come across any customer communication articles you think is worth sharing, please post below.