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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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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Bad Service Says More about Managers than Employees

Customer service reigns supreme, as we all know. It’s the core tenant of offering a great customer experience—the combination of all the interactions your customers have with your company. As such, it plays a crucial role in defining your brand’s overall perception. When we experience subpar customer service, our first…
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The Whole Experience

Shep Hyken’s recent article titled, “We All Know What CX Means, But What about EX, WX, DX, UX, and More?,” is a tongue-in-cheek look at how customer service experts like to label everything as some kind of experience to manage. On this blog, we usually discuss the Customer Experience (abbreviated…
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Overcoming Passive Aggressiveness

We’ve all dealt with passive aggressiveness—that is, a hostile attitude combined with the avoidance of direct communication, like when someone is upset about something but won’t admit to it. Honestly, most of us ourselves have been, at times, passive aggressive with others. And yet most of us would also agree…
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Customize Your Customer Experience

When you dine at a restaurant, you want the staff to look at you as more than just someone who’s just hungry. When you buy a car, you hope the salesperson understands that you really do care more than just getting from point-a to point-b. And when you plan a…
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