The Here and Now

Many of our blogs talk about taking the right steps to ensure lasting customer loyalty as a way to spur long-term success. After all, loyal customers are the ones who keep coming back and spreading positive word-of-mouth to their friends, family, and greater social network. That’s the essence of having…
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Cheap Is an Illusion

We all love a good bargain, so when advertisements offer the allure of cheap or even free products or services, many of us find the temptation hard to resist. But as in all things in life, the bill eventually comes due, and there is always a catch. Let’s take a…
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Enhancing Your Business Through Engagement

By now, we should all know that fostering a superior customer experience is critical for distinguishing a small business from both its direct competitors, as well as the much larger companies that attract a broad audience (think big-box stores, supercenters, and the like). Many of those businesses out there offer…
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Endurance with Grace

According to Wikipedia, the “Customer experience, sometimes abbreviated CX, is the totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral consumer responses during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase stages.” Put more succinctly by Zendesk, the “Customer experience (CX) is the relationship between a company and its…
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The Great Retention?

One of the great challenges in the pandemic and post-pandemic business landscape has been the so-called Great Resignation, the ballooning trend that saw millions of Americans leave their current jobs in search of something else. Some retired altogether, some pursued new jobs, and some even caught the entrepreneurship bug and…
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When a Problem Spirals Out of Control

One of the chief advantages of offering a superior customer experience is that you have far fewer customer service problems to combat. That said, there’s no way to entirely eliminate them because mistakes can and do happen, and some problems are completely external to your business. We must therefore admit…
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Courting and Keeping Your Customers

New customer acquisition is usually the most expensive component of a business’s relationship with its clientele. Broadly, it includes everything from the salaries paid to marketers and salespeople to the advertising. Consequently, acquisition is far costlier than retention, as the Harvard Business Review reports: “Depending on which study you believe,…
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The Downgrade Apocalypse

Customer reward programs have been around a long time: in fact, the earliest example may well be Betty Crocker, which, in 1929, introduced the idea of using box-tops as coupons to encourage repeat purchases. Since then, just about every major company—and a great deal of small ones to boot—have made…
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Going Above and Beyond the Right Way

In previous blog posts, we’ve cautioned about the dangers of offering an above-and-beyond level of customer service. While that attitude can certainly delight your customers, the level of effort required becomes unsustainable; worse still, those customers may eventually take those efforts for granted. But there are situations when going above…
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