About a year ago, I was listening to one of my favorite e-commerce podcasts and heard them briefly mention that Amazon has released call center software in passing. I was driving at the time but remember putting the name Amazon Connect into my phone for later research. Regular readers of this blog probably realize that I have a sadistic habit…
Before joining my current company I had never even heard of a PEO (Professional Employer Organization). I’ve now come to work closely with Insperity for years and thought I’d share what I’ve learned. The basic premise of a PEO is that you can be a small business, but by leveraging a PEO you can get benefits that rival those of…
I was once criticized by an employee that was quitting for running the customer service department meetings like a focus group. I had never thought of it like that, but it ultimately was a good comparison and one that I now use as guidance for my meetings. The reason behind this is that customer-facing employees are the best resource a…
Firing people sucks terribly. It’s a sign that you screwed up and the other person screwed up as well. Even worse is laying someone off, where they are not at fault at all, and sometimes it’s entirely because of you. I’ve frequently thought it would be useful to write a post on firing people, but I’ve always kicked the can…
It seems every year I have to try out a new phone system. In the past I’ve reviewed Vonage, Talkdesk, and Genesys. We’re now on 8×8 and I believe it’s the best yet for our purposes. While 8×8 boasts chat capabilities, after the demo I realized they were even less advanced than Genesys, so all I’m using is their phone…
Any CX professional worth their salt will tell you that inbound calls are generally decreasing in volume, while chat is on the rise. This is excellent news for us in eCommerce because chat is a substantially more efficient way to service a customer. A phone agent can speak with one person at a time whereas a chat agent can usually…
I’ve worked with many business owners that really couldn’t care less about the titles they give their employees. I can totally understand this sentiment from an entrepreneur’s perspective, what difference does a title make? The only thing that matters is what you can do, not what you’re called. For a long time I shared this sentiment, but over time I’ve…
This week I’ll be speaking at the Dallas Ecommerce Meetup. If you’re local come by and say hi! The name of the talk is “My Top 15 Ecommerce Tools” and I wanted to create a resource for everyone at the talk to access the links. It would be too long to write the whole thing up, especially since I’ve already…
It’s been an exciting few months here at JM Bullion! We’ve accomplished a few notable things, so I wanted to take a minute to brag on the company a bit in this brief post. JM Bullion was awarded bronze for the Customer Service Department of the Year Stevie Award! This award was in recognition of the monstrous growth the department…
I mentioned a while back that I went to the Genesys G-Force conference in Miami. It was a great conference, and one of the best parts of it was the discovery of a software company called ProcedureFlow. ProcedureFlow is a web based application that allows you to easily chart out, you guessed it, procedures in a logical and easy to…
