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Grow your business through employee training, improving company communication and morale and inspect what you expect through mystery shopping reviews.

Happy 2024!

We stand on the cusp of a new year, and we at The Brandt Group feel compelled to take this moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to each and every one of our clients who entrusted their business development to our consultancy in 2023. Together, we embarked on our thirty-first…
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Going Beyond What’s Expected

We’ve discussed the importance of not going over-the-top for customers so often that it leads to unreasonable expectations beyond what’s sustainable. Rather, we’ve encouraged our readers to strive to deliver a consistently great customer experience with only the occasional grand gesture for the special customer or unique circumstance. That’s all…
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Care Enough to Be Curious

Where competition is fierce and attention spans are short, businesses must grapple with the question of how to stand out from their peers. While flashy marketing and unique selling propositions certainly have their attention-grabbing merits, the best differentiator is the often-overlooked realm of employee-customer interactions. Let’s take a moment to…
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Using Value to Make Cost Irrelevant

Price has long been a sticking point for many consumers, regardless of the economic conditions. Whether we’re in a boom or a downturn, no one likes overpaying, right? But most of us also understand that cheaper experiences are usually inferior. Consequently, companies must often grapple with the challenge of offering…
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Sometimes the Customer Is Wrong

We’ve all heard that adage that the customer is always right. It’s a mantra that has shaped many of the interactions between businesses and their clientele. Upon closer inspection, however, most of us realize that this age-old saying is not always true. In fact, those of us who’ve worked in…
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Give Customer Service Agents a Break

We live in a world of instant gratification. Products can appear at your doorstep in a matter of hours through same-day delivery, food can show up from a restaurant in a matter of minutes, and information can be found online in seconds. So, no wonder fewer and fewer of us…
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Self-Checkout Woes: When ‘Convenience’ Hurts Your Experience

When self-checkout stands first became popular in the early 2000s, the promise was an attractive one: get in-and-out of the store faster by not having to wait in line for a checker. This worked especially well when you had just a few items—the regular checkout lines would handle the cartloads…
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Undercover: Mystery Shopping for The Brandt Group

Mystery shopping is a unique and intriguing side gig, as it provides an average consumer the opportunity to don the guise of an undercover agent. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to visit a variety of dinning and shopping establishments to experience the products they have to…
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Confidence Leads to Loyalty

High quality customer service remains the linchpin of success. More than any other aspect of the customer experience, it defines the kind of relationships your business maintains with its customers. Is it friendly and mutually beneficial? Or is it adversarial and frustrating? Even though we all hope our transactions will…
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The High Cost of Layoffs

Yesterday, October 19, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell admitted that “inflation is still too high.” This comes amid reports that many large banks (especially at Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs) are reducing their staffs in response. The financial sector is not the only group of industries cutting back, however, as…
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Building Trust Through Care

Pushing products and services onto customers is the wrong way to view sales. Instead, we should think of it as creating a meaningful connection and providing value. To promote these goals, we must recognize the distinction between what a customer wants and what a customer truly needs. This nuance is…
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Make Authenticity Part of Your Brand

Many customer experience blogs, including some of our own, will stress the importance of making every customer interaction personalized and engaged. Using the customer’s name, having knowledge of the purchase history, listening for empathy and comprehension, remembering to mention the current promotions or suggest the right add-ons—these are all critical.…
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