When business owners flip the script on their customers' criticism...

When you’ve worked hard to build up your small business and have amassed a loyal following, the last thing you want to do is risk it all by putting prices up. But there comes a time during the life of any small businesses when — whether it’s due to

Customer loyalty can be difficult to win. But it's also easy to lose. Even if you manage to convince a customer to cut ties with a big brand and use your business instead, remaining their first choice for months and years to come can be tricky. With this in mind,

How many times have you asked a question or made a complaint to a business via one of its social media channels?  Marketing consultancy J.D. Power and Associates found in 2013 that almost 70% of the 23,000 consumers they surveyed said they had used social media

No one enjoys taking criticism — whether it's over the milkiness of a cup of tea you made for a colleague or your slightly adventurous choice of outfit at a family event. But criticism stings even more when it's your business that's in the firing line. That's why many business people

Businesses are made and broken by the quality of the customer support they offer. Whatever industry you're in, it's essential that you provide your customers with a quick and easy way to get in touch with you when they have questions, problems or complaints to make. For decades, phone support

Anyone who has spent even a couple of days in the Land of the Rising Sun will tell you that the Japanese are the kings of customer service. Whether you're buying a book, ordering a meal or checking in to a hotel, you can expect to be treated like

In a previous blog post, we looked at some interesting findings from the UK Customer Satisfaction Index. One of the points we covered related to multi-channel support - in particular, how many support channels you should aim to maintain. The answer, in short, was that you should have as many

Your knowledge base is an essential part of your support framework. It's often the first place your customers go to solve a problem, or to find out how to do something. However, as well as using your knowledge base for support purposes, you could use it to help customers maximise

When providing live chat or email support, you should think about how quickly you aim to reply to your customers. It may seem blindingly obvious to aim to provide the fastest support response possible no matter what the situation, but this isn't necessarily the case... At RotaCloud, we are proud

It's in the nature of customer support that you will sometimes experience 'dead zones' — times during the day when nobody gets in touch. Our live chat system includes a basic analytics package, so we pulled out some stats and discovered that our contact rate tends to dip significantly

At RotaCloud, online demos are crucial to our on-boarding process. Many potential clients would be put off by a piece of software if they didn't have the option of a demo. This means that your demo can often be the reason for a client to sign up (or not) for

Am I crazy? Possibly. But I felt good about it. Here's what happened. Someone contacted me about subscribing to our software. They explained their use case, and specified a particular need that we just can't fill. Yesterday, I might have tried my utmost to find workarounds for them or

Customer satisfaction is very important - you shouldn't need us to tell you that! Research has shown that higher levels of customer satisfaction yield better performance and higher market share. Furthermore, the companies with the highest levels of customer satisfaction have better loyalty and trust, and receive better recommendations. We

Your customers are important to you - or at least they should be! Without them, you wouldn't have a job. This is true whether you're a customer service rep, the CEO, a developer, or a marketer. Therefore, as with many other aspects of your business (such as your product or

We're very lucky at RotaCloud. We have an excellent product with very few bugs, and our software is also full-featured enough for most of our customers. Therefore, most of our support interactions are friendly and understanding from both sides. We rarely come across angry customers. However, it's still smart

The software industry is going through a radical change. Paid-for software is moving away from single-purchase products in favour of rolling subscription services. Even Apple’s App Store underwent a big change recently which saw it encourage a subscription-based model rather than single-fee packages. The difference for software providers is

Social media and mobile technology have turned customer service on its head. More and more customers are turning to social channels to pose their questions, report satisfaction and voice their complaints. This public platform presents a great challenge, but also a great opportunity, for retailers to address issues while increasing