Author Archives: Ben Kepes

Enroll in CloudCamp, Feb. 2

CloudCamp is not a conference. It is a place where attendees can exchange ideas, knowledge and information in a creative and supportive environment, advancing the current state of cloud computing and related technologies. As an informal, member-supported gathering, we rely entirely on volunteers to help with meeting content, speakers, meeting locations, equipment, and membership recruitment.

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Responding to Nightmare Customers

A recent NPR article about a good Samaritan taking his mugger out to dinner got us thinking about angry customers. Yeah, the correlation might not be immediate, but check this out. Julio Diaz, a social worker, was recently mugged in the Bronx. After being robbed, Diaz offered his assailant, a teenager, his jacket and ended up buying

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More About Groupon’s Millionth Ticket (and Why It Rocks)

A couple of weeks ago, we celebrated the millionth support ticket processed by Groupon’s customer support team. To us, the milestone was so significant, we thought it warranted a flight out to the company’s corporate headquarters in Chicago so we could deliver a giant green cake. When a company can offer that kind of customer support, it

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Critique Your Support Team (Without Pissing Them Off)

Managing poor employee performance is a fraught area. As an employer, the least desirable part of my role is when it comes to disciplining staff members whose performance really hasn’t come up to standard. It’s a situation that causes anguish, anger, and negativity in the workplace. But all of those attributes pale in comparison to

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Spoiler Alert: TSA Fails in Customer Service

For anyone who has spent the last few weeks living under a rock and not reading or watching the news, it may come as a surprise to hear that the TSA has caused something of a controversy with its introduction of new machines, so-called backscatter units, that give the operator a full and intimate view

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Paul Carr Lives up to His Curmudgeonly Accent

There’s just something about Brits. Even when they’re being upbeat they sound like grumpy old farts. Paul Carr, former journalist and now TechCrunch staffer is no exception – he gets away with being grumpy because his writing is…. awesome. As a journalist there are people who’s writing, for whatever reason, just resonates with me –

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Aisle vs. Window: The Power of Choice

Over on the Hunch blog, the results of 32,000 survey responses regarding peoples preferences for window or aisle seats on flights have been dissected. From a seemingly simple question, Hunch was able to draw conclusions about the socio-economic factors that come into play when determining preference with regards airplane seating – to summarize the findings,

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Social Media? Yes. Social Media Gurus? Hell no.

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of posts discussing training employees to handle the social media role within an organization. The theory goes that if someone is going to be the “face” of a business, they need to be carefully instructed how to actually portray that business, articulate corporate messages and, even further, need to

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5 Customer Retention Lessons from Buick

Recently, HBR posted an article entitled Why Is it So Hard to Be Kind? It’s one of those obvious posts that tells an almost apocryphal tale of a customer service situation that is so mind-numbingly obvious and so clearly wrong, that the real question might be about the sanity of some people. It happened like

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Would You Pay for Good Customer Service?

Ok, let’s just go there. There are lots of different ways to think about customer service, but at the end of the day, we all know what people really and truly care about: getting the job done as quickly and painlessly as possible. So, what if customers had the option to pay cold hard cash

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