Everybody’s A Critic

A scant few years ago, the only reviews a local business would get were from friends who had been there, or perhaps a newspaper if you were lucky. Nowadays, however, all your customers are critics, and they have tools like Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Google Reviews to put their opinions…
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The Importance of “Framing” the Customer Experience

“Yes we can”—not just the slogan of a former U.S. President—should be the positive mindset of every sales and customer service associate you employ. How important is this notion? U.S. News and World Report once found that nearly 70% of all customers who cancelled their relationship with a business did…
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How Pen-and-Paper Can Revolutionize Your Time Management

Everything has become abstract and intangible in our increasingly digital world. Your family photo albums are just zeros and ones now. Online bill pay has done the same to your checkbook. Even your time-management tools like your reminders and calendar are in the cloud. There are benefits to this, of…
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Identifying Leaders

You’ll have to delegate responsibility at some point, which means that you’ll likely need to place employees into management positions, which also means that you’ll need to know how to identify the right people to lead. There is a myriad of personality breakdowns out there that you can look at,…
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How to Advertise with Style

A couple of months ago, two major wireless carriers in the U.S. sent out post-card style mailers to promote whatever new deals were coming out, respectively. Imagine that one of them had a lot of detail on it that clearly laid out which scenarios qualified for savings, covering everything from…
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Careful What You Say

Susan C. Foster’s recent article “7 Things Great Leaders Never Say”, written for Success.com, dissects a number of business clichés and explains why these are not only useless but also potentially damaging. Here are the three we think are the most critical: “Don’t do anything without asking me first.” The problem with…
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The Employee Carousel

An employee carousel serves no one: not the employer, who ends up in an endless loop of hiring and training, and not the customer, who never seems to see the same person twice and is frustrated by the inconsistency in quality. Worse still, employee carousels tend to suffer the most…
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How Your Restaurant Can Escape Bad Word-of-Mouth

Earlier this month, Nancy Friedman wrote a wonderful piece for RunningRestaurants.com titled “Excellent Restaurant Customer Service Drives Loyalty”, which describes the importance of fixing bad experiences. As she explains, customers will tell many more people about a bad experience than they will about a good one: “Word-of-mouth and social media postings, good and…
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The Cycle of Service in Restaurants: Succeeding as a Team

Today’s blog is based on the fantastic learning library at Service That Sells. This trove of online training resources is one of the best places you can visit to help develop the service, sales, and management skills of you and your employees. Visit their site to learn more about the Cycle of…
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