Leadership Consulting

To Tattoo or Not to Tattoo? – Starbucks, Ink, & Customer Experience

“Cover your tattoos!” That’s the current policy at Starbucks (and for that matter many other businesses). Partners (the Starbucks term for employees – more on that in my recent book Leading the Starbucks Way) are hired without prejudice for tattoos; they just can’t be visible to customers. Now the company is reconsidering its policy and…

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A Lesson Your Business Could Learn from the Ray Rice Video

I will leave it for others to opine about Ray Rice, his wife, and the NFL. But as a customer experience consultant there are two important business lessons to take from this horrific situation. Assume every customer interaction is being videotaped and appreciate the power of viral video. When I was a kid my dad…

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How Sorry Are You? Keys to Driving Satisfaction While Resolving Customer Issues

In addition to their products and services, I am a fan of Zendesk because they openly share pertinent customer experience information.  Unlike others who report customer experience results, Zendesk’s data is not the byproduct of surveys but instead emerges from customer interactions with over 25,000 businesses in 140 countries.  Here are some high level findings…

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Walk A Mile In Their Shoes – Mapping Your Customers’ Journey

Sometimes we are too close to something – a process, an idea, a product or service – to see it with true, objective clarity and perspective.  This can be especially (and paradoxically) true when a notion is born from our own brains.  We think we know what it looks, smells and feels like to be…

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Forging a Digital Connection of Trust and Relevance

Many business leaders have a love/hate relationship with technology.  On the one hand, technological advances offer great business opportunities.  On the other hand, the infrastructure costs associated with technology shifts and the rapid pace of technological change pose strategic and operational challenges.  Although some business leaders fall in love with technology for technology’s sake leaders…

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Easy Wins

Ahhh, summer – a season of sunshine, valiant efforts to slow one’s life down, and vacation travel.  It’s hard not to notice, however, how our great escape efforts are often marked by so much preparatory and participatory stress. Marketing guru (and a man who was kind enough to endorse my Zappos Experience book) Seth Godin recently posted…

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My First (and possibly my last) Book Review – Hooked on Customers by Bob Thompson

As an author, it seems I am always on deadline with my own manuscripts.  This leaves me little more than the opportunity to write business related correspondence and a weekly blog. Through the years, friends have asked me to provide reviews of their books and I have always apologetically declined.  If I feel strongly about…

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Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy – Loving your Customer and your Message

Here’s an exercise for you. Try to go one day without seeing an advertising message. Ok, how about an hour? Some subtle, others overt, marketers are finding us in as unsuspecting of places as the bottom of golf holes. Every business is talking at customers. But what makes that chatter banal or brilliant? For a…

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Why it’s in your own interest to forget your self-interest

The modern world inundates us with a constant flow of information.  Not wanting to miss anything, our tendency is to scan the clutter for ways to improve our businesses.  Studying best practices, following experts on Twitter, regularly checking in with our favorite bloggers, we ultimately seek to be better and do better by our customers. …

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How to Balance Service Standards with Empowerment

I recently had a conversation with someone who just changed customer-facing jobs. Beyond the dynamics of salary, benefits, and the myriad of other factors that influenced her decision to move on to the next professional opportunity, the way she described her former position stuck with me: “I didn’t like that I couldn’t see customer issues…

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FREE RESOURCES

The Starbucks Experience: Leadership Tips eBook
Elevating Care in Healthcare: Lessons from the UCLA Health System eBook
How to Win Every Customer, Every Time, No Excuses! Article