Share what you know with millions of people

Focus is the best place to turn what you know into remarkable content

×

Tim Giebelhaus

Follow Following Unfollow

President, Giebelhaus Consulting

128 points

Proven skills providing leadership in technical support, IT, training and consulting organizations. Excellent problem solving, communication, and technical skills allowing me to add value both strategically and tactically. Experience providing high quality international technical support with a distributed team. Works ...

Proven skills providing leadership in technical support, IT, training and consulting organizations. Excellent problem solving, communication, and technical skills allowing me to add value both strategically and tactically. Experience providing high quality international technical support with a distributed team. Works comfortably in cross-functional environment with QA, engineering, consulting, sales, and marketing. Able to develop strong and positive working relationships with partners and customers. Demonstrated agility in adjusting business plans to support changing corporate goals. Able to accomplish a wide variety of tasks simultaneously. A passion for providing the best support.

» read more » read less

May 14, 2012

Tim Giebelhaus and 1 other person answered this question

Online chat rooms - What are your service excellence best practices? What are your petpeeves?

To Debbie Laskey's response, I would add that manning the chat is a full time activity. Carrying on multiple conversations is all the multitasking a person can handle. You also want to be careful how many chat sessions you allow a person to take on. ... more

Customer Service

March 29, 2012

Gabe Wahhab selected a best answer for

What is the best way to communicate to clients that you are raising your rates?

I am about to raise our rates and I am wondering if anyone can lend some advice to do's, don'ts, best practices or any other techniques that might be handy.
Additionally I have a few clients that I give a discounted rate to that are ... more

Customer Service

Jan. 9, 2012

Tim Giebelhaus and 6 other people answered this question

What action do you take when employees resist change?

Using an example, the biggest resistance to change in technical support I have seen is the use of the knowledge base. I give them the industry studies that show how much more productive it makes support and talk about those studies. I talk about my ... more

Customer Service

Human Resources

Change Management

Employee Evaluation

Dec. 21, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 10 other people answered this question

What hiring approaches can improve customer service long term?

The most important information I am after in the interview of a customer service position is if they like helping people. I like to see some form of a service job in their history, even if it is just a waiter/waitress. I ask about their ... more

Human Resources

Customer Experience Management

Customer Loyalty

Dec. 15, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 8 other people answered this question

Does a dress code necessarily need to apply to back office personnel, not seen by the public?

I've found some dress code is eventually necessary. It is desirable to have people wearing clean clothes in a reasonable condition and not very provocative. I've found that customers do get into the back office. They don't expect the software engineers to be wearing suits, ... more

Customer Service

General Management

Human Resources

Company Culture

Dec. 12, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 2 other people answered this question

When is the best time to collaborate with your customers?

The earlier the better.
With large customers under NDA, you can get some feedback from people who would actually be using the feature and find a potential issue. The customer will appreciate the chance to give feedback and you will further build a partnership relationship ... more

Customer Service

Community Management

Customer Community

Customer Feedback

Nov. 9, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 1 other person answered this question

Do you have a customer that makes you shed your stomach lining?

There are couple things I do to combat the situation of people looking for extreme discounts.
The first is to create a "Basic" product with little service offered. That gives the person an option and even if they don't like that option, they don't feel hostage ... more

Customer Service

Oct. 28, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 1 other person answered this question

Do you find call center employees avoid calls?

Support employees are generally a very bright group. They can find many inventive ways to avoid calls. The way I avoid that kind of behavior is to measure the number of calls taken and the level of customer satisfaction. If one person on the front ... more

Contact Centers

Oct. 17, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 8 other people answered this question

With the retirement of the 'Baby Boomers', is face to face customer service dying?

While there are more options to communicate with the customer, there is no replacement for face to face communication. Face to face service may decline some as other communications are used, but I firmly believe it will not die. more

Customer Service

Face to Face Customer Service

Sept. 20, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 3 other people answered this question

For a small business with 5 CSRs, is it better to divide them by territory or work as a team?

For small teams, I've always found higher satisfaction by using the first available CSR instead of territories. The main difficulty is when two issues come in at the same time for the same person. It may take quite some time to resolve the first issue ... more

Customer Service

Customer Experience Management

Customer Service Management

Sept. 13, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 3 other people answered this question

Is ignoring a Twitter complaint like hanging up the phone on your customers?

Ignoring a Twitter complaint is not like hanging up on a customer, but a decision which channels to monitor. Ideally, we would like to address every issue completely, no matter what channel the issue came to us. In reality, there is a cost/benefit decision.
Google ... more

Customer Service

Social Customer Care

Sept. 6, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 1 other person answered this question

When (or do you) fire customers?

This post might help: “When is it time to walk away from a customer and stop doing business with them?” http://www.focus.com/questions/when-it-time-walk-away-customer-and-stop-doing... more

Customer Service

General Management

Business Development

Sept. 1, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 30 other people answered this question at this roundtable

#TChat Radio: The Realities of Business Heresy [8/31 @ 4 pm]

When is it OK to say no to a customer?

Also see the post: “When is it time to walk away from a customer and stop doing business with them?” http://www.focus.com/questions/when-it-time-walk-away-customer-and-stop-doing... more

Customer Service

General Management

Human Resources

Aug. 1, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 4 other people answered this question

Net Promoter Scores: truly effective or a waste of time?

NPS is quite controversial. The consensus among my peers I have heard is that it is not the ONE question. My own experience is that it tracks with other satisfaction questions. Here are a couple links to articles that further evaluate the Net Promoter Score:
http://www.greatbrook.com/net_promoter_score.htm
http://www.greatbrook.com/net_promoter_score_criticism.htm
What ... more

Customer Service

Customer Loyalty

Data Collection

July 25, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 2 other people answered this question

What is the role of knowledge management in customer service?

The role of the knowledge system in customer service is traditionally twofold:
1. Used by the customer service representatives to answer the customer's questions
2. Used directly by the customer to answer their own questions through a web portal
I have also found it useful for the ... more

Customer Service

Knowledge Management

July 1, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 7 other people answered this question

Can empathy be scripted or can it only come naturally?

Having real empathy is better. Customers can often tell if the empathy is not genuine and it hurts the trust relationship, which is extremely important in support, if the customer believes the empathy is not what the support engineer is actually feeling. Some people are ... more

Customer Service

Emotional Intelligence

June 29, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus asked a question

When is an issue no longer a technical support issue, but a professional services or training issue?

Customer Service

June 1, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 8 other people answered this question

Who should "own" social CRM? Sales? Customer Service? Someone else?

The most success I have had with this is when IT owned the system. Many different departments want to make improvements in the system and IT could work all of those together. IT had on staff a person to customize the system and that person ... more

Customer Service

May 24, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus answered this question

How did you determine which CRM software was right for your organization?

There are books on this topic, but to boil it way down, I start with finding what sales requires. If support and sales can use the same tool, that can save integration difficulties, though it always comes at a price. The tool that best meets ... more

Customer Service

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

May 16, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 6 other people answered this question

When is it time to walk away from a customer and stop doing business with them?

To the points already made, I would add if it is a personality issue, the majority of time that can be corrected. If the product does not meet the needs and no plans are in place for it to be able to meet the business ... more

Customer Service

Customer Advocacy; Customer Loss; Customer Experience

Sales & Business Development

May 6, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 8 other people answered this question

How do you define what a customer need is?

Customer need is often defined as one of the following two:
- What is the customer willing to pay for?
- What is required to reach customer satisfaction?
To measure these, it is either judging human nature if you have no baseline data or measuring changes to what ... more

Customer Service

Customer Experience

Innovation & Design

April 19, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 5 other people answered this question

What Are The Key Steps To Client Retention?

Everyone has good comments above. I would like to add the perspective that it is a partnership. We work together with our customers. The customers pay our salaries and we provide value. As with any long term relationship, I believe honesty and respect are very ... more

Customer Service

Customer Retention

March 18, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus answered this question

What is the best approach for training outsourced contact center agents?

The best way is to treat them as if they were not outsourced, but part of your organization. I would start with all of the standard training for any agent. It is like starting up a new remote location. Depending on your available training resources, ... more

Customer Service

Human Resources

Contact Center Agents

March 3, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 4 other people answered this question

Customer Service costs: Up-sell or Baked in?

To ensure success of the customer, you want to include awesome support with the sale of the product. If the customer has to go back to their management for more money after the sale, that will likely be difficult for them. Their ability to use ... more

Customer Service

Feb. 25, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 1 other person answered this question

What simple steps can CSR's follow, when delivering bad news to a customer?

The linked article is very good. I would add to it that often there is a better solution to reach the customer's goals. Understand the overall goal of the customer so the best possible solution can be offered. The customer may forget all about the ... more

Customer Service

Feb. 15, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 1 other person answered this question

Is pay for being on standby still a common practice for professionals in IT and Customer Service

Yes, I still find it done a vast majority of the time in technical support. You may want to offer some additional compensation especially if the people in the group are newly being asked to provide the extra hours. They will perceive they are being ... more

Human Resources

Feb. 1, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 11 other people answered this question

How to get my CSR's be more compassionate?

There are many good methods for having compassion for the customer above. I'd like to add two:
Remind the CSRs about the service they have received and encourage them to always give the kind of service they would like to receive. This is especially true ... more

Customer Service

Coaching & Training

Customer Loyalty

Training Techniques

Jan. 3, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 3 other people answered this question

How can organizations make automation feel to customers like it was designed primarily for them?

The customers will recognize an automation system that is making them more efficient and allows them to work in the manner they would like to, though change is not easy and they will often need some incentive to use the new systems. Once they start ... more

Jan. 3, 2011

Tim Giebelhaus and 14 other people answered this question

Customer service is crucial to success, so why do so many companies fail to provide quality service?

I've never known a company that didn't want happy customers. It generally comes down to the trade-off between the desire for customer satisfaction and the budget available for achieving customer satisfaction. I have seen three situations that lead to the difficulty.
The most straightforward one is ... more

Customer Service

Contact Centers

Following 2 Topics

Customer Service

Information Technology

Following 0 People

Followed by 16 People

Knowledgeable in 25 Topics

Customer Service

#38 of 785

#320 of 2156

#510 of 2984

General Management

#361 of 1194

#38 of 133

Public Relations

#65 of 155

Market Research

#55 of 206

#186 of 341

#177 of 419

Human Resources

#626 of 1481

#18 of 52

#33 of 116

#320 of 749

#13 of 27

Data Collection

#36 of 39

Business Development

#35 of 41

Customer Retention

#22 of 43

Customer Satisfaction

#31 of 45

#36 of 60

Customer Loyalty

#58 of 120

#66 of 130

#126 of 194

Contact Centers

#78 of 206

#153 of 290

Sales Management

#334 of 522