Mystery Shopping Forever

As a business owner, you might wonder whether mystery shopping in the long term makes sense for your business. Perhaps you’ve thought that at some point, your employees are going to be as well-trained as they can be and that the utility of mystery shopping them will diminish in time.…
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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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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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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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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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How Loyal Are Your Customers?

Most business operators understand that customer loyalty is a key component of long-term success. Even in the simplest terms, we know loyal customers are repeat customers, so the more loyal ones we have, the more recurring revenue we’re guaranteed. But customer loyalty encompasses more than just the likelihood that they’ll…
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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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Stay on Offense

We’re in the middle of the NFL playoffs, so the timing seems appropriate to talk about the importance of offense. Not football offense, of course, but business. And like a playoff, your business is playing for the right to play again next week. Win or go home. Succeed or go…
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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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