The Art of Compromise

Commerce is an intricate dance, one where both customers and businesses form partnerships toward mutual benefit. A customer wants a good or service, and the business is willling to provide it. The dance happens in the negotiation, but this often involves far more than simple haggling. Instead, so much of…
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Expertise and Empathy

Delivering a superior customer experience is a non-negotiable requirement for your business’s success. There are simply too many alternatives out there for a small business to survive regularly disappointing its customers, especially given the pervasive reach of Internet-based competitors. In many areas of the country, just about any consumer product…
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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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Cheap Is an Illusion

We all love a good bargain, so when advertisements offer the allure of cheap or even free products or services, many of us find the temptation hard to resist. But as in all things in life, the bill eventually comes due, and there is always a catch. Let’s take a…
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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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Endurance with Grace

According to Wikipedia, the “Customer experience, sometimes abbreviated CX, is the totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral consumer responses during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase stages.” Put more succinctly by Zendesk, the “Customer experience (CX) is the relationship between a company and its…
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The Great Retention?

One of the great challenges in the pandemic and post-pandemic business landscape has been the so-called Great Resignation, the ballooning trend that saw millions of Americans leave their current jobs in search of something else. Some retired altogether, some pursued new jobs, and some even caught the entrepreneurship bug and…
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Courting and Keeping Your Customers

New customer acquisition is usually the most expensive component of a business’s relationship with its clientele. Broadly, it includes everything from the salaries paid to marketers and salespeople to the advertising. Consequently, acquisition is far costlier than retention, as the Harvard Business Review reports: “Depending on which study you believe,…
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