Online Customer Service

Blog World '09: Tips from Social Media Pros

Gregory Ferenstein — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:38:52 -0400

Las Vegas was host to Blog World '09, the nation's first and largest conference on blogging. While it may seem imprudent to put the shenanigans of Sin City nightlife under the microscope of the most public medium in human history, the city was actually a perfect venue for extracting tips from people who are their best in the AM. There were as many useful nuggets of information at late-night parties as there were during the talks.

Barneys and Friend

Arianne Cohen — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:46:27 -0400

As far as e-commerce has come, it still remains in its infancy. A glance in any spam folder is proof positive that online retailers haven't yet refined their customer tracking. To wit: My spam box currently features Petco.com advertisements for kitty litter (I'm a dog person), a Staples.com ad for Windows software (I'm a Mac girl), and four ads for Viagra (enough said).

Journal-ist: Freedom of Choice

James Kuczmarski — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:27:33 -0400

A) Worldwide e-commerce spending is expected to surpass $7 trillion this year. To determine why consumers increasingly prefer virtual storefronts to physical ones, Pui-lai To, writing in Technovation, distributed questionnaires about shopping motivation to 206 Taiwanese students and workers. Obvious answers surfaced, including convenience, cost, and selection. But To also uncovered two other, less-expected factors: a sense of adventure and the satisfaction of using technology effectively.

Fast Talk: Privacy Warrior

Cora Daniels — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:05:13 -0500

Dr. Deborah Peel

Founder and President, Patient Privacy Rights
Austin, Texas

Dr. Deborah Peel, 56, a practicing psychiatrist, founded Patient Privacy Rights, a consumer watchdog organization. She began fighting for medical privacy in 1993 after President Clinton proposed that every doctor-patient encounter be entered into a database.

Fast Talk: Bush's Record Collector

Cora Daniels — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:05:13 -0500

Dr. Robert Kolodner

National Coordinator for Health Information Technology
Department of Health and Human Services
Washington, D.C.

Dr. Robert Kolodner, 59, advises HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt on health IT initiatives and oversees the federal government's efforts to get doctors, hospitals, and medical providers nationwide to adopt electronic medical records by 2014.

Fast Talk: Bureaucracy Breaker

Cora Daniels — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:05:12 -0500

Colin Evans

President and CEO, Dossia
read more

Fast Talk: Clean-Up Hitter

Cora Daniels — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:05:12 -0500

Stanley Crosley

Chief Privacy Officer, Eli Lilly
Indianapolis, Indiana

Stanley Crosley, 45, installed an aggressive new system at Eli Lilly after the company suffered a privacy breach in 2001. Last year, the International Association of Privacy Professionals recognized Lilly's plan as one of the best.

Fast Talk: The Protector

Cora Daniels — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:05:11 -0500

Harriet Pearson

Chief Privacy Officer, IBM
Armonk, New York

Harriet Pearson, an attorney and former engineer, became the first major-company chief privacy officer in 2000.

Celebrity Blogs: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Aviva Yael — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:07:46 -0500

True confession: I ghost write a lifestyle blog for a celebrity CEO. I aim to make my boss' blog both interesting and fun, while enabling his fans to feel connected to him personally. He counts on me to promote his business by talking about his projects and ventures in a way that makes his readers feel like they're privy to his daily life. It may seem very impersonal, but in actuality, he's very hands on, just as he is with every aspect of his businesses. In fact, he uses his blog to build his brand and communicate with his readers (and competitors) in an informal and direct setting.

2006 Review of Business Innovation, Digital Media and Trends

Peter Hoy — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 09:25:35 -0500

Looking back on Fast Company's staff blog, some of the year's most interesting companies, products, and people have been written about, for better or worse, and sometimes more than once.

Crash Course: How to Dominate, Differentiate, and Meet the Market

Alan M. Webber — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 08:38:46 -0500

At the heart of The Myth of Excellence, the provocative new book by futurists Ryan Mathews and Fred Crawford, is a five-by-three matrix that consists of the attributes of businesses and the levels of performance businesses can achieve. Fast Company sat down with Mathews recently, and he gave us this crash course on that model.

Can you walk us through your core model?

New Rules: Why Values Beat Value

Alan M. Webber — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 08:38:44 -0500

Ryan Mathews is one of those rare individuals who, if he didn't already exist, we would need to invent him.

One is Silver and the Other's Gold...

Anni Layne — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 08:31:00 -0500

Inside boardrooms and over martinis, customer service pundits, analysts, and consultants toss around acronyms like beach balls in the bleacher section of Fenway Park. CRM (customer relationship management), it seems, has grown passé. eRM (eRelationship management) is perhaps too disposable or even myopic. And CMR (customer-managed relationship) looks a lot like Courtney Love -- new wardrobe, same woman.

Underlying all the gibberish, however, stands one principal and prevalent concern: how to design customer service now.

Born Again

Anni Layne — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 08:29:37 -0500

When Bowne & Co. first opened the doors of its printing enterprise, the Bank of the United States was still a glimmer in Alexander Hamilton's eye. In fact, so was the United States itself.

Help Yourself!

Anni Layne — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 08:29:14 -0500

Sicely, Alaska charmed America's sitcom devotees with a homegrown, low-tech spirit that briskly contradicted the "Zero Time" ethic of fast business in the New Economy. Once a week for five years, the cast of "Northern Exposure" exemplified the lure of lag and the charisma of care. Today, one cutting-edge software company is using the model of Sicely's general store -- the post office/grocery depot/advice booth manned by local truth-teller Ruth-Anne Miller -- to demonstrate the look and feel of customer service now.

Easy Money: Mint.com CEO Aaron Patzer is Merging Personal Finance with Web 2.0

Anya Kamenetz — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 08:26:25 -0500

Americans under 35 spend 16% more than they earn, on average. College graduates leave school with an average of $20,000 in student loans and almost $3,000 in credit-card debt. This demographic, in sum, is sorely in need of an easy-to-use solution to their ample money woes. "There's this dull throbbing sense of guilt that we should be doing something, but where do we start?" says recent Stanford grad Ramit Sethi, who draws more than 150,000 readers a month to his blog Iwillteachyoutoberich.com.

Sweating In the Hot Zone

Scott Kirsner — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 07:59:04 -0500

Patrick Martin opens a door marked "Response Lab" and enters what looks like a typical computer room, full of tall black racks, blinking lights, industrious system administrators, and the wash of white noise generated by whirring computer fans and intense air-conditioning.

Business Blogging for Beginners

Jory Des Jardins — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 07:56:01 -0500

1. Make Introductions.

A good host connects guests. Albrycht recommends spending 30 to 60 minutes a day scanning feeds from your favorite blogs. Maintain a blogroll, linking readers to blogs you recommend, and use the trackback function on most blog publishing programs to notify other bloggers by email when you cite them. Chances are, those grateful peers will return the favor.

Found Money?

Ted Smalley Bowen — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 07:44:42 -0500

Think of the economy as a couch. By one line of reasoning, we lost trillions of dollars between the cushions during the 1990s. Blame it on government productivity metrics -- which, this thinking goes, skewed gross domestic product figures downward by as much as 2%.

The Net/Net

Fast Company — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:50:13 -0500

Acura www.acura.com
Appleton Rum www.appletonrum.com
AT&T Business www.att.com/business
Brother Printers www.brother.com
Capella University www.capelladegrees.com
Country Inns & Suites by Carlson www.countryinns.com
Dymo Corporation www.dymo.com

How to Really Make a Revolution

Shoshana Zuboff — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:49:00 -0500

"The Internet was supposed to knock off established businesses," Bill Gates opined recently. But the real impact of the Internet revolution, he said, "is so much less than a lot of people think." Hey, Bill, we're there.

Fast Talk: Smart Shops

Fiona Haley — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:44:50 -0500

Elizabeth Spaulding

Vice president of customer satisfaction, L.L. Bean
Freeport, Maine

Our industry has been squeezing out costs from the service experience. We've taken a different approach by ensuring that customers can shop the way they want: in the store, by catalog, on the phone, or online. We serve our customers the way they want to be served, not in the way we want to serve them. It's been that way since L.L. Bean opened his store above the post office in Freeport. By 1951, it was open 24 hours.

How MapQuest Gets You From Here to There

Chuck Salter — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:43:53 -0500

In the tradition of Lewis and Clark, the team of Lynch and Clark is traveling west to explore uncharted territory--in this case, a recently expanded subdivision called Avalon Way, outside Baltimore.

" Please Stay on the Line"

Douglas McGray — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:36:48 -0500

We call them looking to get some information, some service, a little help. Instead, we get hold music, and much worse -- push-button hell, call-transfer purgatory, or simply a click . . . disconnected. And yet call centers are one of the country's fastest-growing industries: 3% of Americans now work for a call center, and Gartner Research predicts that the industry could nearly double in size by 2010. That could mean twice as many people to help you. Or twice as many opportunities to press 7 and pray that someone, someone vaguely competent even, will pick up.

How Google Searches Itself

Fara Warner — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:35:23 -0500

Most Fridays at Google, the search-engine company in Mountain View, California, Marissa Mayer and about 50 engineers and other employees sit down to do a search of their own. Mayer, an intense, fast-talking product manager, scribbles rapidly as the engineers race to explain and defend the new ideas that they've posted to an internal Web site. By the end of the hour-long meeting, six, seven, or sometimes even eight new ideas are fleshed out enough to take to the next level of development.