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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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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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Going Above and Beyond the Right Way

In previous blog posts, we’ve cautioned about the dangers of offering an above-and-beyond level of customer service. While that attitude can certainly delight your customers, the level of effort required becomes unsustainable; worse still, those customers may eventually take those efforts for granted. But there are situations when going above…
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Why You Should Become a Mystery Shopper

Have you heard about the gig economy? In recent years, more and more people have begun taking independent-contract work, offering on-demand services as a way to earn extra money in their spare time. Companies like Uber, GrubHub, Instacart, and many more have cropped up in the last fifteen years, and…
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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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