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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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Why You Should Mystery Shop with The Brandt Group

As you doubtless know by now, mystery shopping is one of the most powerful tools a business can use to evaluate and improve its customer experience. Mystery shopping provides valuable insights into the quality of a business’s products and services, as well as the performance of its employees. But there…
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Customer Service vs Customer Experience

One of the more recent buzzwords in the field of hospitality is customer experience, often abbreviated as CX. These days, you can hardly escape the term; it is the saveur du jour of business consultants everywhere. But while it seems newfangled, its coinage is most often attributed to Lou Carbone,…
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Extinct by Instinct

As a counterpoint to last week’s blog on analysis paralysis, let’s talk about the other extreme end of the spectrum: extinct by instinct. This is the result of making a choice without due consideration. This kind of recklessness can result in an unforced error that can be detrimental (or even…
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Analysis Paralysis

We are sometimes our own worst enemies, the obstacles to our own success. We self-sabotage without even realizing it when we think we’re just being thorough. In the process of decision-making, be it in life or business, we can fall victim to something called analysis paralysis. What is that? You…
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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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Prioritize People Over Processes

Procedures, processes, workflows. They’re an important part of designing how your business operates, from how customers make purchases, to how your support staff handles problems. At The Brandt Group, we often advocate for something like our GUEST model, which stands for Greet-Understand-Explain-Secure-Thank; this model describes a process for making sure…
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Lessons from the Fall of Blockbuster Video

One of the great business anecdotes regarding the perils of shortsightedness is the fall of Blockbuster Video, especially in light of how that company had multiple opportunities to buy Netflix but declined to do so. Of course, we all know today that Netflix is a behemoth in the world of…
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