Make Authenticity Part of Your Brand

Many customer experience blogs, including some of our own, will stress the importance of making every customer interaction personalized and engaged. Using the customer’s name, having knowledge of the purchase history, listening for empathy and comprehension, remembering to mention the current promotions or suggest the right add-ons—these are all critical.…
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Bad Service Says More about Managers than Employees

Customer service reigns supreme, as we all know. It’s the core tenant of offering a great customer experience—the combination of all the interactions your customers have with your company. As such, it plays a crucial role in defining your brand’s overall perception. When we experience subpar customer service, our first…
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The Whole Experience

Shep Hyken’s recent article titled, “We All Know What CX Means, But What about EX, WX, DX, UX, and More?,” is a tongue-in-cheek look at how customer service experts like to label everything as some kind of experience to manage. On this blog, we usually discuss the Customer Experience (abbreviated…
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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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3 Steps to Simplify Business Operations

Running a small business can be both rewarding and challenging. As the captain of the ship, you’re responsible for navigating through daily operations amid the seas of nonstop competition. Keeping those operations as simple as possible can lead to increased efficiency, reduced stress, and improved customer satisfaction. Let’s explore three…
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Expertise and Empathy

Delivering a superior customer experience is a non-negotiable requirement for your business’s success. There are simply too many alternatives out there for a small business to survive regularly disappointing its customers, especially given the pervasive reach of Internet-based competitors. In many areas of the country, just about any consumer product…
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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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