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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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Survivorship Bias

Can a business get away with only using feedback surveys rather than investing the time and resources into a fully featured mystery shopping program? The temptation is understandable, since a manager might think he can just put a few questions into an online form and pass a hyperlink out to…
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The Sunk-Cost Fallacy

A common saying is that hindsight is 20/20, that it’s far easier to judge a decision in retrospect than it is before the outcome is known. We all make choices in our personal lives and in business without knowing all of the details; sometimes we decide with incomplete or even…
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