Making it Right: Turning Breakdown Experiences into Forever Customers
It happens from time to time, despite your best efforts. Your business dutifully prepares for seemingly every contingency and investigates each process fault point. Yet, once in awhile, something still manages to fall apart when trying to serve a customer. The work of researchers like Amy Smith and Ruth Bolton published in the Journal of…
How to Speed-Train Seasonal Employees
Tis the season for…seasonal employees. This time of year temporary employees swell payroll rosters, even if only for a matter of weeks. When time is of the essence (or is nonexistent), how does your business train these new recruits to be an effective extension of your brand during the boom of commerce that engulfs November…
They Want to Talk – Do You Want to Listen? How to Learn from Customers
Does your business have a mechanism for collecting and considering customers’ insights? A good, old fashioned suggestion box or perhaps something more sophisticated? What do you do with customer input that comes your way? Principle 5 in my latest book, Leading the Starbucks Way, challenges businesses to both cherish and challenge their legacy. Honoring the…
Five Points for Perfecting Customer Interactions
Recently I sent an email inquiry to two organizations of varying sizes from which I had an interest in their services. Both responded to my emails in a timely manner. The message from one organization was personal, robust with information, and warm. It was written by a specific individual, or perhaps generated to look like…
Get your Zappos Experience in time for Christmas!
Thank you for your patience with my less frequent blog posts. I have two bits of good news and then on to this weeks blog… 1) the first draft of my upcoming Starbucks book is done (working title The Starbucks Connection) freeing me up to return to blogging soon 2) a couple of bloggers have…
Connecting People to a Culture of Connection
In an interview recently, I was asked what is the biggest “small detail” business leaders overlook today. How would you answer that question? For what it’s worth, here’s my response: “I think many business leaders fail to teach their staff that true success hinges on emotionally engaging and not merely satisfying customers. Few leaders inspire their…
Gummy Worms and Customer Experience Excellence!
July 15th was National Gummy Worm day and while that might not be the type of information you would expect from this blog, it turns out to have significance in our office. Specifically, National Gummy Worm day served as an opportunity to “surprise and delight” many of our clients and business partners. Additionally, it allowed…
Customer Experience – Understanding Emotional Economics
While working on the new book I am writing about Starbucks, to be released in 2013, I have been digging deeply into research on emotional economics. As you are aware economics is the branch of the social sciences that looks at the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Through much of the history…
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