It’s Customer Service Week (if you don’t know already)

I suppose that whatever starts across the Pond tends to end up in the UK sooner rather than later. A good example is ‘Customer Service Week’ which over the past few years or so has become an integral part of the contact centre calendar albeit without, thankfully, the false cheesy ‘have a nice day’ attitude.

Whilst I applaud the fact that this dedicated week raises awareness of the importance of Customer Service, and rightly so, shouldn’t it be something which we promote each time we have contact with customers 52 weeks a year?

On this subject I am sure that you are aware that the CCMA recently launched their ‘Gold Standard’ to improve standards within Customer Service. As Ann-Marie Stagg, from the CCMA said at the launch “Effective customer service is vital to the success of every business. We are proud to be supporting the Gold Standard, which will help to improve standards within contact centres so that customers get the experience they are looking for and businesses can profit from the value an excellent customer contact centre can deliver.”

Perhaps we should still celebrate Customer Service Week for 1 week a year and put into practise the CCMA’s Gold Standard the other 51 weeks?

Website Update

Finally, contact-centres.com, like the aforementioned Jabra and Voice, are no different in respect that collectively we want to achieve domination in our particular field of expertise. Whilst it is easy for these companies to benchmark their success with the number of calls or volumes sold in our case it simply boils down to the traffic that we attract to the website.

I admit that I fall within the category of being a luddite – I was originally against the idea of redesign of the website simply on the basis that ‘if it aint broken don’t fix it’; after what at best can be defined as being ‘workplace harassment’ I agreed to the redesign and left the ‘Youngsters’ to go away with their company laptops and MacBook Pros and get on with it.

Credit where credit is due – Our website traffic has increased so much that we have had to abandon our previous Florida based server with a larger, dedicated UK based server; the visitors and hits that we normally used to get in one month we now get in one week and apparently, according to our resident office geek, we are heading up the Google rankings faster than Peter Andre attending a Champagne launch party.