Guest Poster: Laura Click It is my pleasure to introduce Laura Click, who has been kind enough to babysit this blog while I am away at a conference. Laura is founder and chief innovator at Blue Kite Marketing, a Nashville-based marketing and social media strategy firm that’s passionate about helping small businesses reach new [...]
Help Me Create A Smokin’ Hot Customer Experience Blog Roundup
October 22, 2011 By 18 Comments
To the wonderful members of this community: I would like to enlist your help with a new project. I am starting a regular roundup post centered around this blog’s topics of customer experience and customer service. Based on my available personal bandwidth and the amount of content I have time to digest, I figured a [...]
Customer Service Training Video: Every Customer Has a Story
October 16, 2011 By 15 Comments
In April, I had the distinct pleasure of seeing John DiJulius, one of my favorite customer experience thought leaders, speak at the Multi-Unit Franchise conference. To begin, if you ever have the opportunity to see John DiJulius speak — do it! He has a great message, and his presentation is simply amazing. During the presentation, [...]
Steve Jobs’ Greatest Legacy: The Customer Experience
October 6, 2011 By 27 Comments
I am a recent Apple convert. I made the painful though glorious switch to Mac in May and moved from Android to iPhone at about the same time. I own an iPad, simultaneously the coolest piece of technology I own and the most expensive paper weight in my house, and I still use my iPod [...]
National Customer Service Week 2011: What’s Your Plan?
October 1, 2011 By 17 Comments
This week, October 3-9, marks National Customer Service Week (NCSW). NCSW was established by proclamation of President Bush (#41) in 1992. The beginning of the proclamation reads: In a thriving free enterprise system such as ours, which provides consumers with a wide range of goods and services from which to choose, the most successful businesses [...]
Customer Service Stories: Stop Subcontractors From Killing Your Customers
September 24, 2011 By 31 Comments
One of the trickier parts of delivering an exceptional customer experience is when you cede control of the experience to subcontractors. Maintaining service standards with the company’s team is challenging enough; maintaining those same levels of service through a subcontractor can border on the impossible. The experience we had when vacationing on the island of [...]
How Your Pride Is Losing You Customers
September 17, 2011 By 44 Comments
In customer service, pride is a double-edged sword. Pride in your organization can cause team members to go the extra mile. However, pride of the don’t-disprespect-me variety can cause team members to respond unfavorably to upset customers. When the personal reaction to an unhappy customer trumps the professional reaction, pride has won, and your organization [...]
What Is Excellent Customer Service?
September 6, 2011 By 42 Comments
Customer service is one of those topics where it is easy to speak in broad generalities. Sayings such as the customer is always right and service begins with a smile easily convey basic, unqualified principles that mask the fact that what defines excellent customer service will always be incredibly individual in nature. However, while superior [...]
The Definition of Customer Loyalty
August 27, 2011 By 17 Comments
I have been trying to find a good definition of customer loyalty in this wide world of the Internet, and I have come to the conclusion that 1) no one has figured out how to define customer loyalty or 2) I am really bad at finding information on the Internet. Do some searches yourself; you’ll [...]
Customer Service Stories: Getting to the Root of Customer Service
August 20, 2011 By 62 Comments
Guest Poster: Kaarina Dillabough It is my pleasure to introduce Kaarina Dillabough, former Olympic coach and current make-your-life-and-business-better coach, as our first guest poster. Kaarina is the perfect person to launch the Customer Service Stories series, because she has an engaging way of telling a story while still being able to analyze the systems [...]
Customer Service Stories: Introducing The New Series
August 19, 2011 By
Last Saturday, I wrote that this blog would be changing tack and focusing on the customer service experience. One of the most exciting aspects of this conversion is the launch of the Customer Service Stories series. The idea behind Customer Service Stories is to discuss the principles of superior customer service through the lens of [...]
6 Lessons I Learned in My First Six Months Blogging
August 17, 2011 By 33 Comments
I ventured into blogging, I thought, pretty well prepared for what it would entail. I read sites like ProBlogger and Copyblogger and thoroughly studied my previous niches of small business and franchising. However, the areas in which my research failed to adequately prepare me were not trivial ones! I underestimated a few key parts of [...]
This Blog Is Dead: I’m Starting Over
August 13, 2011 By 49 Comments
As of today, this blog no longer exists. Well, it exists, but it is morphing into something new – something more focused and markedly different than its current incarnation. While not a complete 180-degree shift, the new blog direction is a significant change, and I thought it best to write a post explaining the transformation. [...]
The State of Small Business Infographic
August 11, 2011 By 20 Comments
Like most businesses in the United States, small businesses have felt the impact of this volatile economy. Yet, small business continues to be one of the key employers and drivers of economic growth in the United States. Small business holds the key to our economic future. We enjoy infographics and love small business, so we [...]
Does Your Business Need a Customer Referral Program?
August 3, 2011 By 30 Comments
Customer referral programs are nothing new. As consumers, we have been inundated with offers for referral perks by everyone from our dentists to our auto mechanics. The reason is simple: customer referral programs work. Customer referral programs (CRPs) come in as many variations as there are businesses to create them. While a CRP is not [...]
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