Unleashing an Exceptional Customer Experience with Teamwork

Most businessowners understand the advantage of an exceptional customer experience—the crescendo of customer service, value, and convenience. And while knowing this is an important first step, finding your way to the apex of the customer-experience mountain requires action. The good news is that achieving the first part—the customer service—is a…
VIEW FULL POST

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…
VIEW FULL POST

Communication Is Key Part 3

In parts one and two of this series, we discussed the kinds of communication that happen between leadership and the rest of the company, from the top down to the bottom up. We explained why it’s so important for leadership to be transparent, clear, and concise in their message to…
VIEW FULL POST

Customer Service by Example

Leading by example is one of those philosophies that most of us know and firmly believe in, even if we sometimes joke, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Concepts like taking responsibility, being a good teammate, and always giving your all, seem so much more valid when the…
VIEW FULL POST

How to Manage Your Boss

Managing your own boss sounds oxymoronic, at first. We often think about management as being a downstream action, with someone above managing you, and you managing those further down the chain. As it turns out, the most effective leaders do both: they take the responsibility of making sure tasks get…
VIEW FULL POST

How to Challenge Authority Respectfully

Unless you’re the business owner, president, or chief executive of your company, you always have someone higher up to answer to. After all, employees by definition are employed by someone else. And regardless of the kind of job you’re working, you’ve almost certainly experienced moments when you’ve disagreed with managerial…
VIEW FULL POST

What Does a Leader Really Do?

When we think about the importance of designing a great customer experience, it’s easy to get hyper-focused on the frontline staff. This makes sense because these employees are the ones with whom the customers will be interacting the most, whether they are the servers at restaurants, cashiers at retail stores,…
VIEW FULL POST

Understanding Tough Customers

For anyone who has worked face-to-face with customers, you know there are just some people out there who—to put it delicately—are difficult. They’re seemingly impossible to please, expecting near perfection from you and your products. Not only are these interactions stressful, but they can go wrong in a flash. To…
VIEW FULL POST

Principles for Great Management

Last blog, we discussed the qualities of great leadership, the personality traits someone has to either possess or develop to be effective at managing others. Today, let’s add some principles to these qualities. For inspiration, we’ll refer to an article at RunningRestaurants.com, which is geared towards restaurant management. As always,…
VIEW FULL POST