How These Call Center Training Techniques Can Increase Your Call-Center Conversions

As direct marketers, we spend a great deal of time and money developing programs to make the phone ring. But it’s the call-center agents that truly make the cash register sing.

Therefore, I spend a great deal of time training customer service reps (CSRs) to be powerful brand advocates with the ability to make a difference with all customers. Personally, I hate calling a company and hearing some disinterested rep deal with my order in a lackluster way. It tells me the company I’m dealing with doesn’t get that the people manning the phones are the voice of the company.

A simple CSR training program can solve the lackluster attitude and increase conversion.

What Multichannel, Direct and Ecommerce Marketers Can Learn From the Way Old-School Retailers Do Business

This week I want to tell you a story, and pay tribute to a local businessperson who recently passed away.
So Why Am I Telling You This?
Think about your company: Do you know your customers by name, or are you just a nameless, faceless entity that people buy product from? How about your staff. Are they, especially your customer service reps (CSRs), connected to your customers? Via how many touchpoints?

Your Call Center is Bleeding! – Connecting the Dots of Your Customer Touchpoints, Part 2

In part one of this series on customer touchpoints, I defined touchpoints as all the points of contact between your company and its prospects and customers. In part two, I look at one of the two main touchpoints: your call center. Before I start any discussion on call center and web results, I always tell clients, “Look [...]

Attention Marketers: Watch this episode of Undercover Boss now

This Sunday’s episode of Undercover Boss, focused on GSI Commerce and it’s CEO Michael Rubin. It’s all about direct marketing, customer service, call center training and shipping and fulfillment. Lots of great nuggets of info to learn from here.

How to Spread Exponential Customer Goodwill

Last week I sent out an email for a client to its recent past customers. The email’s goal was to reactivate those customers, and the copy was written as a message from the company’s CEO.

At the bottom of the email in a P.S., I added the opportunity for these customers to let the brand know why they weren’t ordering from it anymore.

So the email was sent, and the responses

The 9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing

“What can I expect from social media?”

“What kind of return on investment will I get?”

“I tried social media and got no customers!”

These are the kinds of questions and responses I hear daily in my conversations. From these conversations I’ve come up with a set of nine laws of social media to provide all marketers with proper expectations. 1. Brand…

We’re on a mission to create the best direct marketing education forum on Linkedin

3 weeks, 540 members strong. Join us: http://www.linkedin.com/e/vgh/2080726/ We have members from all area’s of direct marketing ready to share their expertise with you. We also have international members.
Want to know more about search, blogs, direct mail, telemarketing, lists, social media, and all direct marketing disciplines, then join us.
If you are an expert in direct marketing, please join us too.

Four Questions to Continually Ask About Your Customers, Products and Brand

You don’t have to operate any stores to always “mind the store.” For us in the catalog/direct/multichannel world, that means finding time in our 24/7, 365-days-a-year world to step back and ask ourselves a few questions. It’s not an easy task to pull back from our everyday happenings, especially in this insane and fear driven economy, but it’s still mission critical to stop and ask:

1. Are we the company…

Superior Product, Exceptional Customer Service: The keys to the success of Cloud 9 Adventures and Jam Cruise

In today’s social media age, it’s not enough to just build a brand and assume it’ll flourish. More than ever, companies need customers to be emotionally cemented to their brands via superior products and exceptional customer service.

For the past three years, I’ve been a customer of Cloud 9 Adventures, a company that exemplifies the spirit of customer centricity. Specifically, I’m a frequent passenger aboard its Jam Cruise line. … After each cruise, a large survey goes out to the passengers. This year’s contained 58 questions and arrived in my e-mail inbox one week after the cruise.

Know Me and Be Relevant: What I learned from Disney’s Keynote at NCDM

From its earliest days, relevance has been the goal for most direct and database marketers. Today however, relevance is not nearly enough. Today, we are closer than ever in actually realizing the power of 1:1 level relevant communications. Some might argue that the capability for 1:1 has been around for some time and that many companies are already successfully practicing it, but to some extent I have to disagree.