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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Is Tipping Getting Out of Hand?

When many new servers first start waiting on tables, they believe that in order to earn larger tips, they have to deliver an exceptional customer experience. The longer they work in the dining room, however, the more they come to realize that most guests have a specific tipping percentage in…
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When a Problem Becomes an Opportunity

When we make the customer experience our number one priority—that is, when we offer high quality products, convenience, and consistently great customer service—the number of customer complaints falls to near zero. Near zero, mind you. Admittedly, we will never reach a state of zero problems because we are all human,…
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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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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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Transforming Problems Into Opportunities

You hope all of your customer interactions go smoothly and with little trouble. You’ve wisely trained your employees, tested them, and retrained them again and again to develop a consistent customer experience, one that is unimpeded by needless bureaucracy, surprises, or other nuisances. And you use customer feedback tools, including…
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Customer Service Starts with Company Culture

While we should hope that every business wants to deliver a top-shelf customer experience, complete with great products, convenience, and a well-trained staff, far too many fall short of these lofty standards. Worse still, there are many companies that seem to have accepted their shortcomings as being necessary, especially in…
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Solve Frustration with Communication

With staff shortages and supply-chain interruptions, every industry is marred by mounting delays: car dealerships, book publishers, healthcare, retail, restaurants, and more. We’ve all experienced it one way or another, from empty shelves at our grocers to longer waits at understaffed restaurants. Economically speaking, long-term staff shortages and supply-chain issues…
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