The customer service experience

11 February 2019

Using Google Tag Manager with Analytics to track Tableau visualisations

Who's looking at your Tableau Public visualisations?

Customer insight, and understanding our customers' behaviour, is an essential 'behind the scenes' activity for any organisation. This blog takes a technical detour from my usual business focus, to help people using Tableau set up their dashboards to allow tracking with Google Analytics, using Google's Tag Manager.

This post builds on an excellent blog post by Tableau Zen Master Jeffrey Shaffer's January 2017 article "Google analytics on Tableau public visualisations" by addressing changes required to use Google Tag Manager.

If you're not interested in the technical stuff and came here for some customer service talk, why not head over to my Tableau Public page and take a look at some analysis of complaints performance in the UK Public sector, UK Energy sector, New Zealand Official Information Act requests. Or you can see how UK MPs have been voting in Parliament during the Brexit debates.

If you'd like to find out more about setting up analytics for Tableau dashboards though, read on!

6 March 2015

Raising the standard for complaints - what's new in ISO 10002:2014?

"Standards, Jason; standards.” That phrase is permanently emblazoned in my sub-conscious thanks to my mother and I’ll wager there’s a fair few readers out there with similar parental advice at the forefront of their mind now that I’ve mentioned it.

From the day we’re old enough to understand that a knife and fork aren’t for decoration on the dinner table, we’re taught the difference that setting and achieving high standards makes in all aspects of life.

Granted, if you suffer from the same mildly obsessive-compulsive twitch as I do when faced with an incorrectly placed apostrophe, this can sometimes seem like more of a curse than a blessing.

However, in business – and especially in customer service – standards mean everything. We’re always hearing about the latest in ‘best practice’ and I’ve never been to a corporate event that featured “Striving for mediocrity” as a motivational slogan.

So how do standards – and in particular the newly revised International Standard for Complaints Management, ISO 10002 - help those responsible for delivering excellence in customer service?

17 July 2013

Customer experience is a top priority - but are we doing enough?

Earlier this year, we opened a survey on several LinkedIn groups and customer service Twitter feeds about business priorities and challenges for 2013-14. This article publishes the results of that survey and raises some questions that managers involved with customer service delivery may wish to consider in their own organisations.

We offer this discussion of the results as a prompt for you to think about your own organisation’s position and the progress you’re making in the areas of our survey.

These results come with a heavy caveat, as the number of responses we received was small at 26. Whilst this means these results cannot be relied upon for a statistical extrapolation of “the state of the industry”, they did include responses from large organisations in the public and private sector in New Zealand and the UK.

The results from our group of respondents indicated their three top priorities as:

Customer experience
Business leadership
Business efficiency

13 March 2013

In a previous article, I talked about the need for flexibility and humanity in customer service over adherence to corporate process. The example came from JetStar’s headline news appearance in New Zealand over its treatment of the grieving mother of a shark attack victim.

Less than two weeks later and the UK’s Virgin Atlantic and their security contractor G4S provide another case study of how not to deliver front line customer service.

In this incident, gate staff refused to allow Petty Officer Nicky Howse - a serving engineer in the British Royal Navy returning to duty from a family funeral - to wear her uniform on a flight, despite this explicitly being allowed by Virgin’s company policies.

The story highlights the stark reality of how the actions of individual employees at the front line can rapidly turn a company’s reputation into a very public bad news story.

21 February 2013

Are you prepared for the business and customer priorities of 2013-14?

With the start of a new calendar year just behind us, it’s a good time to reflect on the challenges facing us in 2013, and how well prepared we all are.

With the huge economic changes of recent years - and the rapid emergence of technologies like social media - is 2013 going to be a turning point for business performance and customer service?

Or, will we be so distracted by the ‘shiny and new’ syndrome of technology, that we fail to deliver on the basics of running an efficient operation that meets the needs of our customers?

After all, you can put lipstick on the pig, but it’s still a pig.

I’ve started the year by studying two key analyst reports and launching a new survey to find out more about the headline issues they've highlighted.

Google Tag Manager activation code

30 September 2019

18 July 2019

11 February 2019

Who's looking at your Tableau Public visualisations?

8 November 2018

24 November 2017

26 September 2017

22 February 2017

9 July 2015

13 June 2015

26 March 2015

6 March 2015

29 January 2015

17 November 2014

17 July 2013

13 March 2013

1 March 2013

21 February 2013

16 November 2012

8 October 2012

15 August 2012