New opportunities for old and new customers
Meister Eckhart once said “Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.” A new year is symbolic of new beginnings. Thank you for making 2010 the most professionally successful ever for The Michelli Experience! May all of us start each day this year with the same spirit of new beginnings that we ascribed to…
Doing Good and Doing Well
Installment 6 of my holiday retrospective is a classic example of how businesses can create truly memorable experiences…. From my book The New Gold Standard … Salazar, age 12, was a champion figure skater who began noticing pain in her legs while preparing for a regional competition as a step toward the Olympics. While originally thinking…
Make it Their Own – Experiences that Connect
Installment 5 of this holiday retrospective, takes me back to my book The Starbucks Experience and the importance of not “doing the experience to your customers” but instead “doing it with them.” At Starbucks, customers must be able to customize their beverage order, with the handcrafted assistance of their barista (the Italian word for bartender…
5 Steps to Extraordinary Service Recovery
My third retrospective installment comes from my book The New Gold Standard and looks at Service Recovery at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company: Customers are all too often surprised when businesses accept responsibility for breakdowns, thus providing a strategic advantage for those businesses that their admit faults. John Fleming, Ph.D., Principal and Chief Scientist for Gallup…
What’s in a name? The Starbucks Experience
The second installment in my year end reflection brings me back to lessons learned from a Starbucks barista named Joy Wilson, as shared in my book The Starbucks Experience: Welcoming people by name and remembering them from visit to visit is a small thing, but it counts! The great Dale Carnegie recognized this in his…
A Personal McDonald’s Experience…Absurd?
I know this may seem un-American but I seldom eat at McDonald’s and almost never do so by dining-in. Recently, I was very early for a morning meeting and decided to grab a cup of coffee at a nearby McDonald’s. Past encounters predicted that I would get served quickly and that the product would be…
Customer Service ISN’T Customer Experience
As a customer experience design type, I definitely help companies deliver better service! But… Service improvements are just one component in elevating the experiences people have when they encounter your brand. Actually, my favorite definition of customer experience comes from my friend Doug Fleener of the Dynamic Experiences Group. Doug says…. “Customer experience is managing…
The Starbucks Experience is Back…or Is it?
As the author of The Starbucks Experience, I endured predictions of the brands demise from some very esteemed colleagues. With rounds of layoffs, a January 29th 2009 announcement that 3oo stores were closing, a cooling economy, and increased competition for the gourmet coffee market, it was looking like Starbucks was on the ropes! While other’s…
Send your customer away, it’s for the good of all!
I know this will sound crazy at first, but please bear me out. You SHOULD SEND YOUR CUSTOMER AWAY: 1) when it’s in the customer’s best interest 2) when it’s in your staff’s best interest A recent study cited in the book Service Economics suggests that when businesses truly act like “trusted advisors” (not just…
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The Starbucks Experience: Leadership Tips eBook
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