A Great Customer Experience Begins with a Great Employee Experience

For small business owners and managers, delivering an exceptional customer experience should be a top priority. But what if we told you that the real secret to a truly remarkable experience actually lies in your team’s experience? While it’s common sense to focus on customer-facing strategies, a great customer experience…
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Balancing Customer Service and Self-Service

Our world seems to be getting more automated by the day, and so it’s natural that many small businesses find themselves grappling with the balance between providing hands-on customer service and offering the convenience of self-service options. Customers’ expectations continue to evolve with the times, with many placing a high…
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When the Fight’s Not Worth It

Many business owners and managers have fallen into the trap of believing that every customer is worth fighting for. The age-old adage that tells us the customer is always right has convinced many of us that we need to bend over backwards to satisfy every person who comes through the…
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The Role Mystery Shopper Serves in Continuous CX Improvement

Maintaining an exceptional customer experience is critical for long-term success. Perhaps the most effective strategy to ensure continuous improvement is through the use of a mystery shopping program, especially as it relates to employee training. But what does continuous improvement really entail, and how can mystery shopping benefit small businesses…
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Training is Never a Waste

Many industries see a high yearly turnover rate, but hospitality can seem downright like a revolving door, as high as 70% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s no wonder that many managers and business owners shy away from investing in employee training, as it just seems like a…
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Bring Back that Human Touch

For those of us born before the 1990s, so much of the digital world still seems a futuristic. Alan Kay, one of the fathers of modern computing, once remarked that “Technology is anything that was invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.” For most of us alive…
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The Power of Personalization

We all know that customer satisfaction is the make-or-break metric for all businesses, but small ones that don’t possess giant war chests to survive a string of bad press or ruinous policies. Personalizing your customer experience is how you keep that satisfaction high, as it makes those interactions about more…
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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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The Downgrade Apocalypse

Customer reward programs have been around a long time: in fact, the earliest example may well be Betty Crocker, which, in 1929, introduced the idea of using box-tops as coupons to encourage repeat purchases. Since then, just about every major company—and a great deal of small ones to boot—have made…
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