The Secret Customer Service Uncovered: Fill & Download for Free

Feedback was an achilles heel in the Soviet system. Under a strict totalitarian hierarchy, regular communication channels are clogged by the torrents of information that cascades downwards, from rulers and bosses to their subjects, and leave little to go in the opposite direction. This happens because bureaucracy fully controls the channels and tries to cleanse them of any information that makes them look bad in front of their bosses.This is the case for all large bureaucratic systems, including corporate ones. However, in war and competitive economies this is rectified through neutral feedback channels. In wars, it’s battle attrition and lost territories. In business, sales stats, customer complaints and P&L data.Under totalitarianism, the sheer beauty of concentrating all resources on a single task mandated by the ruler also has a big downside. It constantly creates a huge Principal–Agent problem. Players at each rung of the state hierarchy appropriate a portion of power delegated to them by the ruler for their private benefit.There seems to be only one solution to that: spies everywhere. However, since spies are also subject to the “principal-agent” creep, sooner or later the top ruler simply goes deaf and blind without even realizing it. That’s what happened to the USSR in the end. Both Gorbachev and his Stalinist haters blamed “treason” for the fall of Soviet rule. Which is a standard excuse for rulers who have missed an obvious hit they were supposed to foresee and fend off.In 1982, when one of the most powerful KGB bosses Yuri Andropov became the Secretary General of the Communist Party, he publicly said: “We don’t know the society in which we live”. Let these words sink a bit and get amazed. A top-level secret service executive, for several decades tasked by the Party to be their ears and eyes everywhere, acknowledges that even hundreds of thousands of spies with the millions of their helpers, working across the country 24/7/365, had been unable to get the full picture of what the Soviet society truly looked like.Below, a Soviet-era cartoon showing a person obsessed with sending complaints to different government bodies. Beside covering the country with a dense network of spying and surveillance, and tasking propaganda workers with “uncovering errors and deficiencies”, Soviet rule also encouraged grass-root activism in form of written complaints. However, most of such complaints were not so much upstanding citizenry, but rather a way of settling private scores. The cartoon below ridicules these petty private wars.“Complainant: —Why isn’t it biting? I need to send in an anonymous complaint against it.” For petty complainants, we used an originally Polish word klyáuznik (from Klauza, “procedural clause”). “Good” complainants were called zayavítelj or zhálobshchik. The best of complaintants, for example those who revealed enemies of the people to the secret police, were called ávtory obrashchénii (“authors of addresses”) or podáteli signálov (“initiators of reports”).

I was on patrol for UTPD in a marked police car stopped at a traffic light on Cumberland avenue going west at the railroad underpass. A man opened my back door got in and slurred take me home. He was so drunk he thought I was a taxi. I took him to another bed and breakfast, the knox county jail.Stopped a car for swerving over the lines on Chapman Highway and suspected drunk driving. After arresting the driver I found a lot of computer equipment and about 20 Walmart credit cards along with walmert merchandise, shoes, clothes. Didnt know what was up but didnt seem right. After CID and the secret service got involved we uncovered a multi State Credit card fraud scheme. Waitress at restaurants would copy customers credit card by scanning them into a computer. The information was then converted to walmart cards and used to buy merchandise that was sold. There were several people involved across several states. The designer of the scheme got 10 years in federal prison after a plea deal.

We've curated a few of the best articles and blogs from 2016 to follow below with links and excerpts. Please feel free to share and highlight your favorite authors!If we've missed any and didn't include it, please let us know! We'd love to keep adding to the list with your highlights of customer support content in 2016.Delivering Excellent Customer ServiceMeghan Earley from Slack talks about the importance of empathy in providing genuine, human help.Most importantly, successful human responses come from the genuine desire to help people …Ruairi Galavan, Manager of Product Education at Intercom discusses why perfect customer service is a conversation, not a ticket.The days of accepting slow, disconnected and impersonal communication with customers as the norm have passed …Daniel Feeney gives us Buffer’s secret sauce to handling over 10,000 (!!!) conversations a month on social support.When you get to chat with a customer from first contact all the way through to the resolution, it’s a powerful, personal …HBR understands that the needs of customers are changing. And it gives us a step by step guide to revolutionizing customer service.In conclusion, a better approach is to persuade employees to commit to a holistic definition of service. That is: creating …Hiring and People OpsKristin Aardsma from 37signals shares how their support team changed from Hiring when it hurts to putting their team’s happiness first.Often, the work I do feels invisible. I don't build a feature or design a website. I ensure that our support …Mercer Smith-Looper talks about how you can ace your first 90 days a support manager on the Kayako blog.As a new manager, it falls to you to uncover and potentially expose areas where the company could be doing …Sandeep Kaur from Kayako talks about how their team avoids burnout and keeps agents happy in a stressful job.Continually working under high pressure and with a heavy workload has been proven to lead to stress and burnout …From our own blog, we talk about how the top companies recruit the best customer service talent and provide some great job description examples you can use yourself.If you use an unstructured hiring format, you can only expect the results to explain future work performance of the hire 14% …Measurement and DataMat Patterson from HelpScout rounds up the experts and talks about how they track and measure customer service for Inc.comSince customer service metrics matter. Then what you choose to report and how you report it can make a real difference …Jake Peterson at Segment takes a deep look at measuring the ROI of support. Data lovers, get inspired!I also consider: How efficient is our team? Do hire quickly enough or maybe too fast? How can we make the support …Simon Ouderkirk from Automattic digs into how you can create value from the customer service data you already collect.Every support team answers customers. Great support teams use data to discover trends, make the business ...Jeff Gardner, Director of Support at Intercom boils down the hundreds of metrics you could be tracking into the 5 customer service metrics that matter.A lot of startups use the “crystal ball” approach to customer support metrics. They think that the answer to all their …Product and Customer FeedbackAndrea Saez thinks that too many people in customer service are looking for nice ways to say no and suggests ways to think differently about feature requests.At ProdPad, we don’t see customer requests as something to accept or deny. We don’t even use the word “no” …Chase Clemons from Support Ops and 37Signals talks about how good customer support is a feature, not a cost center.You’ve got to be better at customer support than the other teams behind products competing against yours. You’ve got to …Mirielle Pilloud talks to HelpScout about how the Support team at TED got a seat at the Adult Table and involved more in business decisions.It's especially relevant to realize that the adult table is about reach and impact — making sure your team’s work is an integral …Shared on the SupportDriven blog, Emily Chapman talks about the benefits of getting All Hands Support started at TrelloWhat originally started as a response to immediate needs for our retreat turned out to be an unexpectedly great way …