Resources Gourmet Customer Service
Gourmet Customer Service
A Scientific Approach to Improving the Caller Experience
There are many reasons testing is often inadequate in a call center, and this book is intended to help companies understand both the "why" and the "how" of measuring the quality of customer service. Gourmet Customer Service is about using data gathering, experimentation, and scientific methodology to provide your customers with the best and most cost-effective service possible.
We focus on how, when and what types of testing are needed to achieve that goal. Techniques used in measuring and improving customer service quality are the ingredients, which get combined into recipes for different situations you may face. And just as a chef will combine different dishes to make anything from a casual picnic lunch to an eight-course meal, we end the book with a discussion of how to deploy testing throughout the technology lifecycle in your call center to ensure that all your customers get the level of service they deserve.
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Table of Contents
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Preview the book
- Download Chapter 1: Educating the Customer Service Palate
- Download Appendix A: Nobody Reads an Appendix on Statistics
Table of Contents
Part 1: What is Gourmet Customer Service?
1. Educating the Customer Service Palate
2. A Scientific Approach to Gourmet Customer Service
Part 2: Know Your Ingredients
3. Statistics
4. Setting Test Goals
5. Prototyping
6. Rules of Thumb, aka Heuristics
7. Controlled Testing (Including Usability Testing)
8. Surveying Past Callers
9. End-of-Call Surveys
10. Friends and Family (& Employee) Testing
11. Agent Feedback
12. Call Recording and Monitoring
13. Automated Load Testing
14. Traversal Testing
15. Call Logs and Call Stats
Part 3: Testing Recipes
16. Customer Service Auditing
17. Benchmarking
18. Competitive Analysis
19. Acceptance Testing
20. Modifying an Existing Automated System
21. Tune-Up
22. Exploratory Testing
Gourmet Meal Planning: The Life of an Automated System
Appendices
Appendix A: Nobody Reads an Appendix on Statistics
Appendix B: Usability Testing and Agile Software Development
A Glossary of Call Center Terms
For Further Reading
Index
About the Authors
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Gourmet Customer Service is available for sale directly from Vocalabs or through Amazon.com.
The price is $22.95 plus shipping to purchase directly from Vocalabs.
"This book will have a significant impact on the call center industry by explaining how testing—often an afterthought—can be integrated with the design and operation of call centers and customer service automation, yielding a much improved call experience and reduced costs."
Jim Larson, Ph. D.
Manager, Advanced Human I/O
Intel Corp.
"The book starts with the premise that callers don't care about your productivity targets, they only care about resolving their problems. It's a simple enough truth, but one that's been pushed aside far too often in the last few years in the face of corporate cost-cutting directives. But the book isn't a harangue about the importance of customer service. It is, instead, a guidebook that provides a systematic approach to simultaneously improving call center quality and efficiency."
Allan Rosenberg
CommWeb"Too often both vendors and customers have little experience with the kind of testing that is essential to successfully deploying a call center application. This book makes a real contribution to understanding how to deploy self-service applications. The breezy, highly readable style is especially welcome in an industry that is overloaded with jargon and cant. This is an easy guide to pick up as a general introduction to measuring call center performance, or as a refresher before beginning a new project."Richard Rosinski, Ph. D.
Vice President, Professional Services, VoiceGenie Technologies