Month: October 2010

Frightful to Connected

Many businesses are frightfully uninvolved with their customers except when the customer is contemplating a sale or when the client makes a purchase.  Here are three tips for moving to a more solid connection with customers that will make your competition irrelevant.  The first two suggestions apply best  in the business-to-business space or where high-value…

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What would Drucker Do?

Peter Drucker, undoubtedly one of the world’s most influential management consultants, would have been 100 years old next month.  Drucker died 5 years ago but his advise is much needed today. Drucker’s body of work spans 39 books and as such is impossible to capture in a short blog but at it’s core his message…

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Is your service visionary or just your hallucination?

My friend Terry Paulson, author of the Optimism Advantage, says the difference between a vision and a hallucination “is how many people see it.”  In order for service to be “real,” leaders need to create a roadmap for its delivery.  At the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company that vision starts with a”credo” which is placed on a “credo…

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Rude and Slow – The plight of service

RightNow’s Customer Experience Impact 2010 report shows that 82 percent of consumers in the U.S. said they’ve stopped doing business with a company because of a poor customer service experience. The main reason for that defection in 73 percent of cases was rude staff and in 55 percent of situations it was the company’s failure…

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Profiting or Perishing through People

Every year the findings from research conducted by Accenture come out the same – 50% customers who defect from a business do so, not because of inferior products, but because of bad service.  While working on my new book about Zappos, to be released in the fall of 2011 entitled The Zappos Experience, Tony Hsieh…

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Starbucks and the Alcohol Experience

I just finished an interview to be released soon in QSR magazine.  The central question essentially was  “has leadership at Starbucks lost their collective minds to introduce alcohol as part of the Starbucks Experience in select markets for the afternoon/evening crowd?” Unlike others who were interviewed for the article, I took the position that this…

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Quality Toilet Paper

I am interrupting my usual blog to playfully participate in Bathroom Blog Fest 2010.  To keep with the theme of blogging about “bathrooms” and given my customer experience focus, here is an archived blog…. Quality Toilet Paper They could save a small fortune if only they would buy single ply toilet paper …. But single…

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FREE RESOURCES

The Starbucks Experience: Leadership Tips eBook
Elevating Care in Healthcare: Lessons from the UCLA Health System eBook
How to Win Every Customer, Every Time, No Excuses! Article