Great Customer Experience Means Consistency

At first blush, many of us think that delivering great customer experiences means going above and beyond for our customers. But delivering over-the-top experiences should be a rarity because they exhaust your business’s resources and the energies of your employees. In other words, businesses should only bend over backwards in…
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Overcoming Passive Aggressiveness

We’ve all dealt with passive aggressiveness—that is, a hostile attitude combined with the avoidance of direct communication, like when someone is upset about something but won’t admit to it. Honestly, most of us ourselves have been, at times, passive aggressive with others. And yet most of us would also agree…
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A Photogenic Experience

Have you ever heard the expression, “Do it for the ‘gram?” According to UrbanDictionary.com, a website devoted to cataloging modern slang, it is a saying that is “used by people, mainly teens, who use Instagram a lot.” That definition goes back to 2013, positively ancient history by Internet standards, but…
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Customize Your Customer Experience

When you dine at a restaurant, you want the staff to look at you as more than just someone who’s just hungry. When you buy a car, you hope the salesperson understands that you really do care more than just getting from point-a to point-b. And when you plan a…
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First and Last Impressions

Emotion plays a significant role in the relationship between a business and its customers, coloring every moment from when they walk through the door to when they use leave again. Happiness and satisfaction, frustration and disappointment: nothing impacts customer-retention rates more than these feelings. And good interactions lead to more…
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Why You Should Mystery Shop with The Brandt Group

As you doubtless know by now, mystery shopping is one of the most powerful tools a business can use to evaluate and improve its customer experience. Mystery shopping provides valuable insights into the quality of a business’s products and services, as well as the performance of its employees. But there…
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Customer Service vs Customer Experience

One of the more recent buzzwords in the field of hospitality is customer experience, often abbreviated as CX. These days, you can hardly escape the term; it is the saveur du jour of business consultants everywhere. But while it seems newfangled, its coinage is most often attributed to Lou Carbone,…
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Extinct by Instinct

As a counterpoint to last week’s blog on analysis paralysis, let’s talk about the other extreme end of the spectrum: extinct by instinct. This is the result of making a choice without due consideration. This kind of recklessness can result in an unforced error that can be detrimental (or even…
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Analysis Paralysis

We are sometimes our own worst enemies, the obstacles to our own success. We self-sabotage without even realizing it when we think we’re just being thorough. In the process of decision-making, be it in life or business, we can fall victim to something called analysis paralysis. What is that? You…
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