Tag Archives: Customer Service
Gummy Worms and Customer Experience Excellence!
July 15th was National Gummy Worm day and while that might not be the type of information you would expect from this blog, it turns out to have significance in our office. Specifically, National Gummy Worm day served as an opportunity to “surprise and delight” many of our clients and business partners. Additionally, it allowed [...]
Do you want return calls from sales prospects? Focus on the personal!
I’ve long championed a simple truth “all business is personal.” That’s why I believe customer experience is as much about relationship building as it is about product and transactional excellence. A recent study conducted by Reachable powerfully demonstrates the criticality of relationship building when it comes to gaining access to make sales. Here’s the big payoff [...]
Customer Experience – Art or Science? The answer is YES
Crafting engaging customer experiences requires a blend of art and science. The science often hinges on effective use of empirical data concerning consumer need states, use patterns, and changing trends. To that end, I offer some recent results from Bitly’s research’s on viral social media content. As you probably know, Bitly is a service that [...]
Customer Experience Limbo – How low can it go?
Dive in – the data is fine! If you want to get a quick pulse on the state of service experiences globally, look no farther than the recently published American Express Global Customer Service Barometer. Beyond painting a woeful picture of tragically dissatisfying service levels, the American Express study shows that much service deteriorates to [...]
Giraffes are ESSENTIAL to your customer experience!
I ran across a very interesting video blog by Chris Hurn, the CEO and co-founder of Mercantile Capital, so I had my Social Media and IT director, Andrew, post it on our Facebook page. Since I wrote a book about service excellence at the Ritz-Carlton, Chris’ blog post, “Joshie at the Ritz-Carlton: An Extraordinary Customer [...]
A swing and a miss – wait it’s a home run?
Would you believe me if I told you that a company which experienced a data breach affecting twenty-four million customers was later determined to be one of America’s most highly rated on-line retailers? Well consider yourself told! The story is that of Zappos -the albeit unconventional but world class customer experience provider profiled in my [...]
Should You Ask for Complaints? Yes, No, Maybe?
During a consulting visit with one of my clients, a senior level leader stated “we don’t hear much negative from our customers.” He then asked an interestingly odd question, “should we be asking for complaints?” Like most questions of this nature, there are no easy answers! However, here were just a few of the highlights [...]
Giving Back – More than a Marketing Strategy
I’m fairly simple minded when it comes to business. I believe justice ultimately prevails and inevitably companies reap what they sow. So when people insert hidden fees, fail to be transparent in their pricing, or grab for more than what they deserve I assume those behaviors will ultimately be their undoing. Similarly, I contend that [...]
Service Excellence – A matter of Equality AND Inequality
While George Orwell’s 1945 book Animal Farm was intended to be an allegorical critique of Stalinism, one of the commandments which evolves during the book’s journey has always intrigued me from the perspective of client service and customer experience. That commandment reads as follows: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” [...]
