Everyone aims to deliver proactive customer service. Whether you refer to it as cross-selling, up-selling, suggestive selling, or – as we like to say — “soft question” selling, a basic component of effective customer service is to offer your customers additional choices. Some customer service representatives might fear being perceived as pushy or assuming. No […]

Are you a customer? The answer is obvious, but you might not think about yourself and your colleagues as each other’s internal customers. That’s right. We are even customers within our organizations. So, great customer service not only helps you with the customers that pay the bills and keep the lights on, great customer service […]

The following is an excerpt from our RIO of Soft Skills White Paper. If you want to read the entire paper, complete this form and click “submit” for an immediate download. Communication can be simply defined as, “The act or process of using words, sounds, signs, or behaviors to express or exchange information or to express […]

As we interact with customers, it’s important to build an atmosphere of agreement. One effective way to do this is to master the skill of using “tie-downs” in our conversations. Tie-downs are short, quick, follow up questions which help get your prospect or client in the habit of agreeing with you. We invite you to […]

Introduction Since the inception of business, customer service has fallen into three categories: passive, average and proactive. Passive and average people wait for things to happen, and, in general, do the bare minimum. Proactive people make things happen and create positive situations. Proactive people are naturally inquisitive. They use their personality. They are friendly, warm […]

Email communication is a fundamental component of everyday business. Email is ubiquitous and we easily forget that it has only been with us since the mid-90s. Before email existed, customer service and business communication was dominated by telephone calls, letters, faxes or face to face interaction. In a relatively short time period, email soared in […]

You’ve probably heard the saying, “Life is a series of roles.” What does that mean exactly? It means we act and speak in different ways when we face different situations. We speak one way to our family and another way to our friends and still another way to our coworkers. We speak in yet another […]

Do you remember the old adage, “Actions speak louder than words”? That saying rings true, because it is. What we do tells our customers and our prospective customers a lot more about our company and values than anything we can ever say. In a great online article at Inc., Why the Best Companies Always Have […]

When you take the “friendly” out of Business Friendly, the only thing you have left is business – business as usual. And we all know that’s just not good enough. You may be asking yourself, “What exactly is Business Friendly customer service?” We define it as the middle ground between being too cold, impersonal and uncaring, and […]