Support and Customer Success are communication fields. We talk with customers. We bridge cultural misunderstandings. We often serve as intermediaries between internal stakeholders and customers. So today I thought I would add to our collective bookshelf a scientific exploration …
I like to think of support as a bicycle. On a bicycle, the back wheel provides the thrust forward and the front wheel provides direction. In support, our technical skills propel us and our customer skills guide us. I …
Another summer reading installment! Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most is a wonderful business book that masquerades as a self-help book. I find it particularly helpful for conversations with escalated customers, and conversations between managers and direct reports. The …
It’s awfully difficult to break the world into two parts, and while the author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World would very much like us to believe that there are two types of culture in …
Tight vs. Loose Cultures: Why it Matters for Support Read more »
Sales and Customer Success can be invincible allies–or deadly enemies. Here are 5 tips to foster the former. Clarify As with any other collaboration, clarity helps. Since customer success is a new field, its boundaries are fluid, making for lots …
In its January-February issue, The Harvard Business Review reports on a survey of customer service reps that destroys the idea that high-empathy reps are the best. In fact, the most effective reps are the ones who take charge, direct the customer …
I am delighted to have been asked to present on three different topics at the upcoming TSW conference in San Diego in May. Two presentations will be with customers: one with OSIsoft called Blurring the Lines: Recruiting and Training Services Staff Members …
Planning Ahead: 3 (!) Presentations at TSW San Diego 2017 Read more »
I like to point out the many parallels between medicine and support, since they both involve a patient/customer and a physician/support engineer and they both require a combination of technical skill and soft skills. And this is also true of the …
Patient Compliance: a big headache for physicians, with lessons for support Read more »
After 18 years, hundreds of workshops, thousands of participants, and a towering stack of accolades, I am retiring the Managing Customers workshop and replacing it with a brand-new soft-skills workshop for support engineers with a new architecture that emphasizes the critical components …
This is the title of an article in the September 2015 issue of The Harvard Business Review, which focuses on entire organizations apologizing for serious issues such as manipulating user feeds (Facebook), failing to recall dangerous cars (GM), or oil …
