As part of the customer service sector, you must have read the classic books on customer service, Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and more.
However, with the rise of the digital medium influencing our lives and becoming an inseparable part of it, wisdom is in abundance.
Thanks to the rise of TED Talks, one can find great resources on the company’s YouTube channel, imparting some of the practical field and planning knowledge from prominent figures in each sector.
Similarly, in the field of customer service, which is heavily influenced by one good or bad review, the need for motivation is never in short supply.
In this write-up, we have selected 11 videos that have garnered praise for their knowledge on customer relationships and deepened the understanding of how to provide a better customer experience. We hope that as you progress, you will find some key takeaways that enhance your process and help your business strive towards customer excellence.
1. Customer Service: Why people and AI make good business partners – Shervin Khodabandeh
Why You Should Tune In: Gartner predicted that by 2027, 25% of organizations will start implementing chatbots as their primary customer service channel. The talk show focuses on the key aspects of implementing a chatbot while maintaining a human touch.
Key Point Spotlight:
In “Why people and AI make good business partners”, Shervin Khodabandeh, an AI and business strategy expert, highlights how AI transforms customer service by blending technology’s efficiency with human creativity.
Khodabandeh further explains how AI can handle repetitive tasks, analyze vast amounts of data, and provide predictive insights that empower human agents to focus on more complex, high-value customer interactions. This collaboration leads to faster resolutions, improved customer satisfaction, and enhanced loyalty.
The talk also emphasizes how businesses can adopt AI thoughtfully, ensuring it complements human ingenuity rather than replacing it. On how it works in tandem towards an objective, rather than displacing the human agents.
“AI isn’t just a tool; it’s a partnership that enables people to do their jobs better and improve the customer journey,” says Khodabandeh.
This insightful talk is a must-watch for organizations looking to embrace AI while maintaining a personal touch in their customer interactions.
2. Employees first, customers second – Vineet Nayar
Why You Should Tune In: Customer satisfaction often begins with employees’ happiness. In this compelling presentation, Vineet Nayar emphasizes how prioritizing employee well-being directly translates to improved company performance and exceptional service levels.
It’s a narrative that is also backed by a statistic, which shows that highly engaged employees drive 23% better profitability.
Key Point Spotlight:
Vineet Nayar’s riveting talk, often highlighted as one of the best TED videos about customer service, outlines his “Employees first, Customers second” way of thinking.
Nayar, the former CEO of HCL Technologies, an IT services company, begins by asking the audience why employees feel good about voluntarily attending church on a Sunday, but dread going to work the following Monday.
His answer?
Churches have a vision and purpose for their members. Companies more often don’t.
When companies hire employees who truly share the company’s vision, and then inspire and support them as they strive to meet this vision, magic happens.
Nayar outlines how treating employees as assets with continuous recognition and the thought of giving them ownership makes them feel valued, seeing them as a unique value proposition. Therefore, managers should be enthusiastic, encouraging, and enabling employees.
“Employee-first is the leap of faith that every employee deserves from every single manager in the world,” says Nayar.’
3. Creating guest evangelists through customer service –
Tom Costello
Why You Should Tune In: According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, 83% of users recommend a brand that they trust. A sentiment echoed by speaker Tom Costello, who highlights a few practical tips from his own experience.
Key Point Spotlight:
In “Creating Guest Evangelists through Customer Service”, hospitality industry expert and speaker Tom Costello shares a few of his models for standout service.
The first is a pyramid with your company’s core values at the base, going up to your ability to engage with guests and fellow employees, solve problems, and deliver excellent customer service.
The point of this pyramid, he says, is that if you live your core values and if everyone makes decisions based on them, you’ll create both a great work environment and a company for your customers. It’s a simple philosophy that focuses on strong foundational values, leading to better results.
Costello also discusses how meeting unrecognized needs creates brand evangelists, meeting desires creates commitment, and meeting expectations creates satisfaction. And since the hospitality sector succeeds in surpassing user expectations, our speaker’s lived-in experience makes the learning all the more worthwhile.
4. Customer loyalty programmes…why bother! – Lance Walker
Why You Should Tune In: Customer loyalty programmes build exclusivity. A phenomenon that has seen successful results with McKinsey finding that members of paid loyalty programs are 60% more likely to spend more with a brand they are affiliated with.
Key Point Spotlight:
A deep understanding of customer needs and consistently delivering on those needs is the key, says loyalty expert Lance Walker.
The CEO of Loyalty NZ, the company that runs Fly Buys, New Zealand’s most extensive loyalty program, Walker says loyalty programs encourage repeat purchases and provide a way for companies to track data on customers’ spending habits.
In his talk, “Customer Loyalty Programmes… Why Bother!” Walker predicts that in the near future, loyalty programs will need to go mobile, provide real-time experiences and incentives, and become gamified. In the process, making loyalty programmes more immersive and thus rewarding.
But amidst all the marketing hooks, Walker consistently emphasizes the importance of ensuring your customers love your products. This will drive loyalty more than rewards programs.
5. Why we need to treat our employees as thoughtfully as our customers – Diana Dosik
Why You Should Tune In: For a company to outperform its competitors, it has to focus on its employees. It’s an investment that delivers excellent results. A study by Deloitte highlights that companies with top employee experience achieve twice the innovation, double the customer satisfaction metric, and 2.5 times the profits compared to other organizations. No wonder Diana Dosik echoed the notion in this terrific show.
Key Point Spotlight:
Companies spend trillions of dollars to understand, track, and influence customers in their product journeys, says Diana Dosik.
“In Why We Need to Treat Our Employees as Thoughtfully as Our Customers”, the BCG Henderson Institute principal says companies spend far less on understanding the journey of their employees.
When asked what their customers need, marketers and business owners can respond immediately. But they can’t pinpoint what their employees need and want, and don’t understand what drives their workers’ behaviors.
Dosik encourages companies to identify pain points in employees’ journeys.
Sometimes it’s less about innovation and more about refining the existing process. Addressing pain points may require some uncomfortable conversations about workplace inefficiencies, but they’re worth the payoff in increased productivity and employee satisfaction.
6. Closing the loop on feedback – M. Daniel Suwyn
Why You Should Tune In: According to a PwC report, 59% of customers tend to walk away from a brand they love after experiencing several bad experiences, while 17% switch at just one. M. Daniel Suwyn emphasizes that one such way to ensure customer retention is through focusing on the internal feedback mechanism.
Focusing on what the employees actually think of the company’s offerings and its standing in the market.
Key Point Spotlight:
Many companies are missing the mark with their feedback, says M. Daniel Suwyn, partner at WorkplaceDynamics.
“In Closing the Loop on Feedback”, Suwyn says most feedback (90 percent) has no impact on employees’ performance because our brains are hardwired to prioritize positive feedback over negative feedback.
By focusing on the internal feedback process and paying attention to areas for improvement, a company can work its way towards achieving constructive performance.
Millennials, in particular, thrive on positive feedback (which drives Boomers crazy). Therefore, it’s time for companies to reassess their approach to feedback.
Instead of annual reviews where managers tell employees they need to do their jobs better, regular sessions should be held to ask employees what they think they should improve.
The objective remains the same; however, the approach becomes much more contextual, owing to the employees’ age groups and new-age communication style.
7. Applied happiness – Jenn Lim
Why You Should Tune In: Happy Customer=Happy Workplace.
Many companies are well-versed in this equation, but how many, in actuality, are implementing the notion for a successful outcome?
Key Point Spotlight:
“We’re hardwired to find happiness in life, but why are we so bad at it?” asks Jenn Lim, CEO and chief happiness officer of Delivering Happiness (a company co-founded with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh).
In her video, Lim describes the three types of happiness: pleasure, passion, and higher purpose and meaning.
She highlighted how Zappos made delivering happiness its higher purpose, both in its company culture and in its dealings with customers. Every customer support member is encouraged to spend as much time as needed talking to customers to establish a relationship with them.
Inspiring interactions and better customer conversations
8. Meaningful micro-engagements – Jeannie Walters
Why You Should Tune In: Customers love familiarity. They recognize when the brand has provided them with a terrific experience. According to a finding by Accenture, 91% of customers are more likely to shop with a brand that recognizes and remembers them, which suggests that a human touch is essential for maintaining user loyalty over time.
Key Point Spotlight:
The first thing you take away from consultant Jeannie Walters’ TED talk, “Meaningful Micro-engagements,” is to think about how your company can be more human and personal in all its interactions.
This is especially true in customer support, which directly influences a brand’s impression day in and day out.
Walters draws parallels with real-life incidents that a user comes across. Like when encountering an ATM machine with an error message that read, “We are dealing with your request.”, the sentiment doesn’t usually come across. While this message was probably written without malicious intent, someone reading it could react negatively to its passive-aggressive tone.
Poor error messages and unhelpful self-service documents can alienate potential brand advocates, as they create frustration and fail to help customers find solutions.
Through this session, Jeannie Walters persuades companies to consider the small, positive interactions that can make a customer’s day.
“If we don’t think about these micro-interactions and moments in technology and engagements, these things can happen,” she says. “The little things add up.”
9. The customer revolution in customer service – David Bequette
Why You Should Tune In: It’s all in the domino effect. You treat your staff right, and your staff deals with customer with a smile on their face. This practical advice from speaker David Bequette is not without merit, as 73% of users have reported that friendly customer service makes them more loyal to a brand.
Key Point Spotlight:
David Bequette, Chief Financial Officer of FruitsMax, a dietary supplement company, delivered a TED talk titled “The Customer Revolution in Customer Service” in Armenia, where the company exports its products.
Drawing on his own experiences, he begins by discussing how service jobs are often viewed negatively in non-Western countries, such as Armenia, before describing how entrepreneurs like Chase Manhattan banker Charles Agemian and futures trader Richard Davoud Donchian launched their careers in service.
Bequette then calls on businesses and entrepreneurs to think of the “waiter rule”. If someone goes out to dinner and talks down to the waiter, they clearly believe someone from the service industry is inferior to them.
The speaker continues to highlight the perils of this mindset and how it is present across all sectors, emphasizing the importance of treating everyone with respect.
When applied to businesses, it means treating your service staff, customer support members, HR personnel, and others with dignity. If you acknowledge your service-focused employees as part of your income generation strategy and support them, they will, in turn, treat your customers with respect. Each one is a vital cog contributing in its own way to an economy, with no cog less important than the other.
10. 10 ways to have a better conversation – Celeste Headlee
Why You Should Tune In: Great customer service begins with humble beginnings. And having a great conversation with your customer is the first step. This may be why 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs beforehand, making it all the more crucial to have effective ways to engage in meaningful conversations.
Key Point Spotlight:
In the age of smartphones and emails, many people have lost the ability to carry on a good conversation. With ideas and long conversations paving the way for taps on the phone screen, a balance between talking and listening needs to be restored.
With people now lacking the ability to strike a balance between the two when interacting with someone, the session by broadcaster and radio host Celeste Headlee is a must for the customer service industry.
Here are 10 key takeaways from her session for having a better conversation:
11. The most important language you will ever learn – Poet Ali
Why You Should Tune In: Speaker Poet Ali defines his contribution as the ‘Catalyst of human connectivity’. His themes of reaching out to people depend on employing different mediums, which elevate into a memorable experience. A trait that just might serve the customer service industry well.
Key Point Spotlight:
“Everything we do is a portal to another language,” says motivational speaker, actor, rapper, and writer Poet Ali, “And the more languages we speak, the more we can learn.”
In his TED talk, “The Most Important Language You Will EVER Learn,” Ali begins by asking the audience if they recognize different languages, as he converses with them in English, Farsi, modern-day SMS text messages, and more.
But, according to Ali, the most profound and essential language we speak is that of experience.
Shared experiences, ranging from music to vacations, and feelings help us relate to one another. It is what makes us humans, finding reason in the history of familiarity.
In both professional and personal interactions, Ali believes that going the extra mile can be the key. We should be asking:
- What experiences do we share?
- And if we don’t share any, what could we share?
- And if you couldn’t share any, what could you learn from that person?
A conversation that finds common ground in shared experiences registers a strong connection.
If and when you tune into any of these TED talks, we’re sure that you’ll find something valuable to take away. With themes ranging from building an authentic customer experience to focusing on employees’ experience, the listicle charts out a simple yet effective framework of keeping your customer service framework a happy place!