Are You Losing Customers to Bad Customer Service?

The customer experience is the most crucial aspect of your business, beating out even your products and service offerings in the hierarchy of whether customers choose to shop with you or with a competitor. This was confirmed again by Shep Hyken, who recently put out a “special report on customer…
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Selling in the Age of COVID-19

Salespeople didn’t know how easy we had it before March 2020. In those days, we mainly had to focus on asking open-ended questions, explaining how our products and services could meet the customers’ needs, overcoming their objections, and closing the sale. Throw in some follow-ups and referral requests, and you…
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Empower Employees to Feel Safe

We’ve long stressed the importance of empowering employees to be the best representatives of your company as possible. Historically, this has meant allowing them to make decisions on the frontline for the sake of efficiency and timeliness—huge boons for your customer experience, as well as your employees’ own job satisfaction.…
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Pivoting to Take-Out and Delivery

Some states are reopening, others are reclosing, and still others are stuck someplace in between. Restauranteurs have it especially tough during this global pandemic because their businesses need volume in order to make up for already thin margins. Most restaurant managers even have a magic number of tables in their…
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Is Now Really a Good Time to Mystery Shop?

Unless you’ve just returned from a sabbatical in the Alaskan interior, you’ve probably noticed that these are unusually intense times we’re living in: the headline of every newspaper and the highlight of every cable news segment is singularly focused on just how perilous it is to even go outside. Hyperbole…
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What’s the Difference Between a Mystery Shop and a Feedback Survey?

When we’re first approached by prospective new clients, we often hear that they’ve already tried conducting feedback surveys in the hopes of understanding their customers’ viewpoint. This is actually great since it demonstrates the natural interest we should show for the quality of the customer experience, especially as we hope…
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Leveraging Online Reviews

Everything has been moving towards the web for many years now, displacing everything from business directories, like the Yellow Pages, to actual in-person commerce. Included in that shuffle is how word-of-mouth—one of the most critical ways your business’s reputation is measured—is spread. While chat around the office cooler or in…
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Mystery Shopping for Survival

Earlier this year, back before the start of the lockdowns and the social distancing, we posted an article about the importance of Mystery Shopping for Compliance. In it, we described how critical it is for businesses to ensure their employees are obeying the laws governing the sale of age-restricted products…
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Mystery Shopping Under Lockdown

Amid social-distancing recommendations, stay-at-home pleas, and shelter-in-place orders, businesses everywhere are trying to find ways to remain open—even if in a limited capacity—to serve their communities and keep their staff members employed. Restaurants are closing their dining rooms but switching to pick-up and delivery, retailers are shuttering their showrooms but…
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