Staff Training—Our half-day and full-day training sessions give your customer care team valuable skills they can use to recognize and properly respond to potentially explosive situations.

Executive Education—In our Management Briefing, we teach cooperative engagement strategies aimed at leveraging your customer care investment in ways that will significantly benefit product development and marketing. Your PR team will also learn best practices to manage the new generation of consumer reporters, bloggers and activists.

Corporate Ethics & Accountability—The need to balance bottom-line economic demands with responsibilities to customers, communities and investors can often lead to ethical dilemmas and difficult decisions. Our half-day program is based on the Harvard Business School's Executive Education syllabus. Attendees learn how to create an ethics checklist and accountability work-flow for executives tasked with critical decision-making, policy design and customer relationship management.

Location—All of our training sessions and briefings can be presented at your site or in our Eugene, Oregon headquarters facility.

Quick and decisive intervention in problem situations can mean the difference between a customer with restored loyalty versus your company being lampooned in the national media. 

Customers who have already exited your support environment are, by definition, choosing not to communicate with employees of your company.  And, whether deserved or not, trust is rarely abundant.

In most cases, the odds of a successful resolution are greatly enhanced if mediated by a skilled and mutually trusted third party.

With our team of consumer advocates and veteran mediators, Brushfire Consulting has the expertise to step-in and defuse critical customer conflicts. We reestablish broken lines of communication and, in most cases, are able to craft a resolution in which the customer finds satisfaction and the company is protected.

If you are currently engaged in a problem situation, please limit additional contact with the customer and call us as soon as possible.

The most important element in keeping your customers within your support environment is understanding what drives them away in the first place. Every time one of your customers posts a negative comment on Amazon.com, Rip-off Report or Yelp!, you lose business and the value of your brand is diminished.  

The obvious, but difficult, truth is that something went wrong in the way that customer was handled by your company.  And, it will happen again unless efforts are made to fully understand what went on and why.

Our experience with more than 10,000 customer-to-media contacts gives us unparalleled ability to diagnose and assess the aggravating factors that sparked a particular incident.

In our Post-Incident Analysis, we examine the entire customer record—from marketing contact to customer care interactions. We conduct one-on-one interviews with customers and staff, not looking to point fingers, but rather to understand cause-and-effect, and to recommend policy and training modifications that may be needed to prevent recurrence.

Outdated and unnecessarily complicated customer service policies are the most common reasons customers choose to exit the support environment. Very often these policies were designed for maximum legal protection in a era when the impact of customer interactions social media and the Internet were not a major consideration.

Brushfire Consulting helps you keep your customers at the table by working with your management and legal team to identify and redraft arcane, unneeded or missing elements in your customer care framework.

Our policy reviews are designed to help you maintain your legal protections while creating a positive atmosphere that encourages customers to work with your support staff rather than looking to more contentious and less effective external alternatives.

Our policy design team is available to assist in the design of new customer care programs or revision of your current programs and policies. We will work with your support staff, legal advisors and senior management to create a customer care structure that is responsive, effective, and protective of your reputation and brand.

Our Lookout Web Monitoring service provides early warning of customers that may be looking to try their cases in the court of public opinion, giving you a second chance to intervene and resolve. 

Lookout also provides a useful 'barometric' reading of customer satisfaction with real-time and historical charting of company and product references throughout the Internet. 

Every five minutes Lookout scans more than 100,000 websites, blogs, video services and social network services, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube. Lookout also monitors domain registrations for new listings that may indicate dissatisfaction with your company, products or services. 

Scan algorithms and focus sites are customized for each client.  This targeted approach gives us the ability to identify problems and respond within minutes. However, just in case we miss something during the targeted scan, the entire web—more than 100-million sites—is queried every four hours. Lookout reporting is configurable, allowing Brushfire clients to customize the level and frequency of Lookout reports and alerts.