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A Customer-First Culture

The pressures of big-box stores, mega-chains, and online warehouses continues to squeeze small businesses everywhere. Add to this the complications of supply-chain disruption, a shrinking labor pool, and rising costs, and it’s no wonder the future is so uncertain. Navigating these challenges requires a dedication to providing a great customer…
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Great Customer Experience Means Consistency

At first blush, many of us think that delivering great customer experiences means going above and beyond for our customers. But delivering over-the-top experiences should be a rarity because they exhaust your business’s resources and the energies of your employees. In other words, businesses should only bend over backwards in…
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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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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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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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Demystifying Mystery Shops

Many small-business owners are new to the world of mystery shopping. They understand the gist in that that people are sent in to evaluate various aspects of their customer experience, but beyond that generalization, much of what companies like The Brandt Group do remains a mystery—forgive the pun. We value…
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