Walmart, Amazon, Carnival Splendor – A Week of Customer Experience Lessons
What a week it was! With so much in the news touching upon customer service and consumer loyalty, I’m addressing a few tidbits as “teachable moments” or “food for thought.” Wal-mart announced that, for the Christmas season, it would be offering “free shipping” on most online item purchases (irrespective of order value). This announcement sent…
What’s more important employee or customer care?
I was asked great questions yesterday by two very different audiences (one a diverse group of business leaders and the other a convocation of students at the Monfort School of Business). I’ll pass along one of those questions as well as my answer and then turn that question back to you? What is more important…
5 Ways Customer Service Should NOT be like Politics
As we come to the end of yet another vicious campaign cycle, I couldn’t help thinking about how “would-be public servants” demonstrate the worst of servant leadership. Service should not be like politics, in that service is: 1) about people not power 2) emphasize those being served not the one serving 3) occurs without making…
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…
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…
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…
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…
How to Deliver Service plus Chocolate!
Having recently consulted or spoken in 6 countries in less than 30 days (ranging from Bolivia to Hong Kong), I keep facing questions that center around the distinction between operationally consistent service and emotionally-engaging customer experiences. While I’m not convinced that these two service approaches need to be mutually exclusive, I do know that without…
Customer Connections by the Facts Not by Total Nonsense
While researching the book I just completed about elevating the “patient experience” in healthcare, I encountered a powerful quote about the “lemming mentality” of business leadership. In their book entitled “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense,” Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton note, “Business decisions, as many of our colleagues in business and your own…
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